Kajuru Castle killings: The short, tragic life of Mathew Oguche

On April 19, 2019, Mathew Danjuma Oguche, 26, and Briton Faye Mooney, lost their lives in an attack on the popular Kajuru Castle by kidnappers. Daily Trust looks into the life of Mathew Oguche and the circumstances around his death. In Dan Oguche’s living room in an Abuja suburb, there were three pictures on the […]

On April 19, 2019, Mathew Danjuma Oguche, 26, and Briton Faye Mooney, lost their lives in an attack on the popular Kajuru Castle by kidnappers. Daily Trust looks into the life of Mathew Oguche and the circumstances around his death.

In Dan Oguche’s living room in an Abuja suburb, there were three pictures on the off-white walls. Two were framed year-book photos of his young sons, David and Abraham, in academic gowns alongside their classmates, resting against the wall between his couch and the TV. The other was a Landmark University calendar hanging off the wall over the door to the bedroom. In it, his son, Mathew Oguche, a graduate of the university, was pictured in the European Parliament in Brussels during a conference on food security.

Mathew Danjuma Oguche, 26, called by his initials MD, had just been buried three days before in his village Adupi-Emeroko, in Olamaboro Local Government Area of Kogi State. It had been a week since he was shot twice in the abdomen by gunmen who attacked the popular tourist resort, Kajuru Castle in Kaduna State. Mathew and his British friend, Faye Mooney, were the two fatalities in the kidnap attempt. Three other people were abducted during the raid and have only been released this week.

“He was an Independence Baby,” Dan Musa Abilewa Oguche, 52, said of his son. “He was born on 1st October, 1993. That date had had manifestations in his life. He always wanted to be an independent person.”

From the age of five, Mr. Oguche started calling his second son ‘Old Man,’ “because his IQ was higher than that of his peers. He would say things that would often surprise me and seemed far wiser than his age.”

Mathew worked with INSO (The International NGO Safety Organisation) and had just renewed his contract for a year, after which, his father said, Mathew had planned to set up his own NGO, Sesame Africa, to help provide food security in rural areas. A graduate of Animal Science, Mathew had won an essay competition on food security, after which he represented Nigeria at the 2017 Youth Agricultural Summit in at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium.

He was already in the process of registering Sesame Africa and had already started field work in some rural communities around Jos.

On his older brother’s phone, there is a video of Mathew caught up in Jos during the Buhari presidential campaign rally, where he had gone to visit the community in which he was establishing his programme. He had called his older brother and informed him of the chaos the campaign train had created.

“Get out of there as soon as you can,” his brother, who does not want to be named, had said.

To beat the traffic and the crowd, Mathew had taken an okada from Mararaban Jama’a to Forest and had recorded himself enjoying the ride. It was a short video which ended with him smiling.

On Friday, April 19, Mathew smiled for the last time.

Kajuru Castle

Easter Friday, Mathew Oguche travelled with 14 others to the tourist resort in Kaduna. The trip was organized by Motley Travels and Logistics, an Abuja-based travel agency. The group travelled by train from Idu, Abuja to Rigasa in Kaduna and was conveyed to Kajuru by a transport company that Motley had been operating with. The man who drove them there, and who was to drive them back, would be kidnapped that night at the castle gate alongside two others. For a week he would remain in detention.

But that afternoon, the group had no inclination of what would happen, as Mr. Mark More, Managing Director of Motley and an eye witness to the attack, said.

“The attack started at around 11:30,” he said in his Abuja office, over a week after the incident. “It lasted for about three hours.”

Before then, Mr. More said, everything had been going according to schedule. The castle could only host 12 guests at a time and two of the guests who happened to be on vacation had left the castle for somewhere else. At 11:30 that Friday night, 10 of the guests were in a group in the castle. Mathew and Faye were in their room.

“When they (the gunmen) came,” Kunle Sadiq, an operations officer at Motley said, “they stormed the gatehouse downhill and took the cook, the driver and one other staff. As they made their way uphill shooting, the armed security we had engaged them.”

“Those policemen were the heroes,” Mr. More chipped in. “They saved the day.”

But they couldn’t save everyone that night. Mathew and Faye made a fatal error when the shooting started. They ran out of their rooms to the staircase, heading down to the castle to rejoin the group. That exposed them to the gunmen who were shooting from outside the castle.

“If they had stayed in their room, they would have been fine,” Mr. More said. “But this is an act of God. It was destined to happen.”

Unable to access the castle, the bandits left with the three persons they had taken at the gate house. The guests remained in hiding, unsure what was happening outside, until the military arrived and secured the premises.

“When we came out from hiding, we thought everyone was fine until the policemen told us that Faye and Mathew had come out of the room and had been shot on the staircase,” he said. Both had died instantly.

‘Take it like a man’

Nearly 24 hours later, by Saturday evening, Mathew’s older brother was in a church camp when he got a call from a panicky friend. She was asking of Mathew.

“I told her I don’t know where he is and I called home and they thought he was in because the car he used was still parked in the compound,” he said sitting on a pile of pouffes in his room in a white T-shirt and black sweat pants.

Picking up the pieces

When the news broke, Mathew’s older brother’s first concern was their mother. So when he heard that a policeman had answered a call put through to Mathew’s number, he called his brother’s phone and an unfamiliar voice answered.

“He told me what happened and said Mathew and a white woman were the unfortunate ones. I asked him what he meant by unfortunate ones, if that meant they were dead and he said yes.

“I told him if anyone else called on this number, he should not take the call because I wanted to be sure what was going on,” he said. “I didn’t want my mum finding out like that.”

The family made arrangements that Sunday and left for Kaduna immediately. At St. Gerard’s hospital, they saw Mathew’s and Faye’s corpses laid out on benches in the morgue.

“He was shot twice below the rib cage,” his brother said. “They said they were running down the stairs when they were shot. How could he have been shot twice if that was the case?” he asked.

For Mr. Oguche, it was tough seeing his son like that. But even that early, he knew he had to be strong for everyone else.

His wife, Anne, walked into the living room and slumped in a chair opposite her husband. Unlike him, it was clear she wasn’t taking the loss well. Sympathizers tried to comfort her, squeezing her arm and offering condolences in Igala. She could only moan in response, her head thrown back against the backrest of the chair. It was heartbreaking seeing a mother grieving like that.

It took the family three days to recover Mathew’s corpse from the police. The police wanted an autopsy but his brother was opposed to it.

The formalities of not getting an autopsy done included getting signatures from officials in Kajuru and for this the family had to pay the police “money for fuel” to travel back to Kajuru to get the signatures.

They had the corpse released to them on Wednesday and made the journey to Adupi Emeroko, their ancestral home, to bury him the next day. Dan Oguche presided over the funeral of his son.

“I told people not to cry. I told them this was destined to happen and nothing we could do now could change that.”

Questions

Beneath Mr. Oguche’s veneer of strength, questions bubbled. In our conversation sometimes they slipped out. Why hadn’t anyone called to explain what happened. He had not heard from Kajuru Castle, where his son breathed his last. Neither had the travel agency called. And why didn’t he know that his son was travelling to Kaduna?

He remembered the last conversation he had with Mathew over the phone.

Not even his brother who knew how close Mathew was to Faye knew that he was travelling to Kaduna. He had last seen him on Thursday, a day before the trip. A day before he died.

On the phone, the manager of Kajuru Castle, who only identified himself as Basil, sounded distraught, well over a week after the incident.

Asked why they hadn’t contacted the family, he said, “We have been running up and down between the police headquarters and the CID so we have been working on contacting the family. Right now, we are facing some kind of trauma. We are trying to fix what needs to be fixed,” he said.

On Facebook, the Castle had posted a statement. It echoed what the police had said, how the attack had happened and been repelled. They were concerned about the three people abducted, two of who are their staff.

“Usually we take in guests one at a time. This group came in via an agency called Motley in Abuja. They picked them at random so they have more information about them than we do. We have been trying to round-up what we have here. We were able to identify the lady as British because she had some complimentary cards on her. We never knew her name. The agency had details of them. So, you will see we are second users of the guests. But we have been gathering information and we have been running helter-skelter. We have two staff that were kidnapped along with the driver who brought them,” Basil said.

When I first visited Motley’s office, they were running a skeletal service. There was one man behind the blue-paneled counter and he explained that was the first time they were opening the office after the attack because they were all traumatized by what happened. He wouldn’t give his name but he informed the manager of the visit.

The manager called later that day and invited me for a meet the next day. That day, for the first time since the incident, he spoke to Mr. Oguche about the death of his son.

“They booked as a couple,” Mr. More said, sitting in his office surrounded by some of his staff, “Optionally they tell us the name of the second person and this time we insisted and she [Faye, who did the booking] put down Mathew Oguche’s name. So, the only details we had were those of Faye Mooney and she only gave her address as Abuja. We didn’t have information about who to contact in case of emergency. It was an oversight and henceforth we have to review the system.”

There were other oversights too. The insurance Motley placed their clients on does not cover deaths.

“It only covers injuries, in case of a fall or something like that,” Mr. More said. “We really didn’t foresee such eventualities so now we are doing a comprehensive revision. We have to insist on contacts for next of kin.”

Even in the Motley office, they echoed Mr. Oguche’s words. This tragedy has been willed. They had taken all precautionary measures before the trip, he insisted.

“We have a statutory approval from Force Headquarters and have armed escorts attached. We went with them from here all the way to Kajuru. The policemen were the heroes, they saved the day,” he said.

“Security is not something we joke with. I personally visited the place twice in the week before the incident. Kajuru Castle is actually safe. It is just unfortunate that this thing happened.”

Lasting Scars

While Motley tries to review its system, at Kajuru Castle, Basil seems at a loss where to start picking up the pieces.

“It has not been easy,” he said, his voice cracking over the line. “Can you imagine having the number one tourist attraction in Nigeria and all the work we have been putting into it, and some group of people attack and we are back to naught.”

Much to his relief, a few days after we spoke, the three people taken from the castle were released by their abductors.

But at the Oguche residence, the door of Mathew’s quarters where he spent most of his time reading, remained padlocked and the car had remained stationary in the compound where he last parked it. No one had tried to move it.

When asked if he would forgive the murderers of his son, Mr Oguche said, “There are two schools always on permanent admission; the school of forgiveness and the school of repentance. For there to be forgiveness, there has to be repentance.”

On Friday, Mercy Corps and INSO organized a service of songs for Mathew and Faye. Mr. Oguche called that morning. He said he had spoken with Mr. More who told him how his son died. In his minds, questions swirled. Some of these questions I could not answer.

In the end he said, “This thing was destined to happen, if not they [Faye and Mathew] were the ones who trained people on what to do in situations like this only for them to rush out and be shot like that.

“It is the will of God. But the government needs to do something because the bodies are piling up,” he said. “The killings are everywhere. Who is going to be next?” At the rate the security situation is deteriorating, it would not take long to find out who will be next. But for Mathew Oguche, the young, ‘brilliant, God-fearing man’ the anxiety is over.  At least his father finds comfort in that.