Column No.6: Real reason why kidnappers still hold Abuja-Kaduna road hostage

In Nigeria these days, particularly in the Northern parts, if you’re a writer or journalist or whatever, shocking stories come at you in a tide. In gushes, or maybe even torrents. And the headlines? You don’t need to work hard to craft them. Even at their most conservatively tamest, they would still scream like the […]

In Nigeria these days, particularly in the Northern parts, if you’re a writer or journalist or whatever, shocking stories come at you in a tide. In gushes, or maybe even torrents. And the headlines? You don’t need to work hard to craft them. Even at their most conservatively tamest, they would still scream like the basest, most ill-conceived click-bait. ‘10 kidnapped on Abuja-Kaduna highway’. ‘Bandits kill 80 in bloody Zamfara attack’. You get the picture, as I also painfully do. But what I don’t get, what I just can’t wrap my head around, is the lukewarm – almost lackadaisical even – approach of the security agencies, or anyone whose job it is to fix the situation, really.

I begin with the Abuja-Kaduna highway (officially known as Abuja-Kano highway) because it’s a route I’m most familiar with, as well as the incredibly unbelievable number of kidnappings that have taken place since the nasty trend kicked off some years ago. I won’t bother with a count, because honestly I’m jaded. And tired. And sad. And angry. You get the picture. And maybe it’s because I’m a survivor of the road that links the Kaduna airport to the train station and I’m alive to tell the tale. Many others were not fortunate, as someone was recently killed on that same route, leaving me to wonder if it’s the exact spot where I was attacked.

Anyway, while I haven’t checked scientifically, the Kaduna-Abuja road is certainly one of the busiest in the nation, or at least these here parts. That securing roughly 200 kilometres of road is proving to be an impossibility to government says a lot about the general feeling from ‘them’ about ‘us’ regular folks. Someone somewhere doesn’t care what happens. Not even a bit. How else would you explain the recent mass kidnappings, and many others in the recent past which preceded the most recent ones? Or the daredevil ones that operate right up to people’s homes in well-populated areas like Mando etc. to cart away people like sheep? Or the grossly under-reported ones on Southern Kaduna? Or even the ones from an ABU lecturer’s home? Why do they still happen? The lack of adequate action in itself is a sort of enablement. Like for instance, the criminals know that even if they carry out their most epic sweeps, they won’t really be dealt with. Not in any real way, anyways.

Another angle is the deplorable state of the road. I’ve written about it before in a major way, such that, like I said earlier, I’ve become jaded. The Kaduna-Abuja road is a federal highway, for God’s sake. Why won’t the Federal Government make haste in fixing that important conduit of socio-economic proportions? Even Governor Nasir el-Rufai at a point, so irked by the happenings on that road, once stopped his convoy, and walked on foot around the area where an incident had unfolded before his motorcade happened upon survivors. A friend of mine who frequented Kaduna at weekends via the train (story for another day, I promise), has cut down drastically after that line of action took a dramatic turn when the evening train broke down in the proverbial middle-of-nowhere, at night. After braving the road for some weeks, he decided to give it a rest this weekend, because, in his words: “The road is so bad that what should be a two-hour journey now takes far more than that, and feels like two years.” And this is a perfectly logical-thinking friend who isn’t given to dramatization.

My friend reminded me of the time, not too long ago, when the Abuja airport was re-routed to Kaduna, and the road was magically fixed overnight. Okay, maybe ‘patched-up’ is more accurate, but you get my drift. As soon as the VIP needs of that endeavour dried up and flights returned to the national capital, the condition of that road worsened, dramatically. The set of people who utilised that arrangement in the past, don’t have to bother now, because of the now-infamous Abuja-Kaduna train. I say ‘infamous’ because of one-too-many breakdowns, leaving passengers exposed to danger of being an all-you-can-eat buffet or ‘serve-yourself’ bonanza for bloodthirsty kidnappers.

Whatever happened to flooding the route with all manner of security operatives, fixing the road, or actually doing the right thing to safeguard the lives of citizens? I can go on, but don’t forget that I’ve declared myself jaded. My aforementioned friend, like myself, is also jaded. He said maybe the story would be different if enough highly-placed Nigerians were directly affected, and that maybe only then would a solution be applied.

I don’t know if that applies to me, as I don’t see how another person suffering would alleviate my pain. But then if you think about it, the worst part of it all is that us ordinary people are the jaded ones, because we are the most-affected. Imagine suffering so much that you almost don’t feel a thing. It is a most tragic thing indeed, and a situation which a right-thinking person with human feelings wouldn’t wish, even for his enemies. At this juncture, I would say it’s safe to conclude that kidnappers and bandits are holding the Abuja-Kaduna road hostage because someone somewhere does not care at all.