I t was like a horror movie. At about 11pm last Friday, I received a strange text message from an unknown number, saying that kidnappers had just whisked away some students and staff of the Nigerian Turkish International College, Ogun State.
The sender did not sign off the text, so I called back repeatedly, but without luck. I also called all the hostel supervisors that I knew, none was responding. At that point, I was almost passing out, owing to intense fear, as the fate of my two children, who were also students of the school, could not be ascertained.
If these top cases had truly been cracked and gangs arrested, why then is the rate of occurrence still increasing at an alarming rate? To answer this question, the Police and other security operatives may have to begin their investigations from within
Then, I started receiving calls from relatives in Nigeria and in the Diaspora, who wanted to be sure that my children were safe. But their calls frightened me the more. I immediately started battling with a running stomach, joined at the waist with fear-induced catarrh and severe palpitation.
By the time the phone of one of the female supervisors finally rang at about 2am, I had visited the rest room about eight times. She picked the call at about the same time a supervisor on the boys’ side was also trying to reach me after reading all my text messages.
They tried as much as possible to calm me down, saying that my children were not taken away, but there was no way this story could be confirmed because the children could not speak with me at that time.
Suddenly, I gave myself some strength and decided to start making calls to all the people I knew in the corridors of power. I also woke virtually all the staff of The Point up, at least, those who did not ignore my calls as some undue nocturnal disturbance by a troublesome boss.
Luckily, a few of the government officials and top ranking security operatives that I contacted, in tears, had already been alerted. Those who had not heard about the unfortunate occurrence promised to storm the school first thing in the morning and confront the situation with utmost commitment.
The names of the students and staff, who were involved, were released to me at about 3am. However, the oral playback of the sad scene by some of the staff, who witnessed the attack, first hand, made me tremble. Whether or not my children were involved now became secondary.
The fact that the abduction plan could be successfully executed in that school threw up the million dollar question of the real forces behind the menace of kidnapping in Nigeria.
It also brought to the fore the other question of why the rate seemed to be increasing despite repeated claims of arrests by the country’s security operatives, especially in cases involving newsmakers in the society.
How did we, as a country, get to this point, where parents can no longer sleep with their eyes closed when their wards are in school? Why has Nigeria, regardless of location, become a red zone, where the main daily headlines are around mayhem and terrorism? Why has honest, hard work suddenly become alien in the dictionaries of able-bodied men and women? Who is to blame for the seeming inability of government to tame this monster? And for how long are we going to continue living in fear? While these puzzles may take forever to crack, reflecting on notable kidnappings within the last 10 months, may suggest that there is more to the ostensibly thriving ‘industry’ than meets the eye.
In October, 2016, gunmen stormed Lagos Model College, Igbonla, Epe, at about 7.45am, in broad daylight, bundled away four students, the Vice-Principal and a teacher. This was just some six months after a similar event occurred at Babington Macaulay Junior Seminary School in Ikorodu, Lagos, where three female students were abducted.
There have been other cases like the September 17, 2016 abduction of four landlords in Isheri North, a boundary between Lagos and Ogun states; and the September 29, 2016 kidnap of the wife of the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Margaret Emefiele, along the Benin-Agbor Road, among others.
In practically all of these cases, the Police claimed to have arrested the leaders of the gangs and their members. In some cases, though very rare, they even went as far as reporting the recovery of part of the ransom.
For instance, in the case of Emefiele’s wife, the Police recovered about N14.7 million, out of the total ransom, estimated at about N80 million, according to a report in the October 10, 2016 edition of The Punch.
If these top cases had truly been cracked and gangs arrested, why then is the rate of occurrence still increasing at an alarming rate? To answer this question, the Police and other security operatives may have to begin their investigations from within.
They may need to fumigate their house to get rid of highranking dangerous collaborators, masquerading as friends of citizens. It is sad that kidnapping, which originally started out as Niger Deltans’ unconstructive reaction to the degradation of their environment in the process of oil exploration and exploitation, has now taken a really scary dimension.
Initially, the main targets were foreign nationals working with oil companies, which were forced to pay heavily in exchange for the release of their staff. Those involved in the scourge saw this as a way of getting their own share of the oil wealth.
As authorities knocked their heads together to address the situation, however, the ‘trade’, which became a rather ‘lucrative’ one, scaled boundaries and became a national monster that has degenerated into a social disaster.
Yes, the frightening drift has thrown up the need to be very vigilant. But where greedy friends, family members, domestic staff or school officials have willingly made themselves useful tools for evil plotters, how careful can one really be? Every kidnap case had always left a trail of insider connection.
The NTIC case was not an exception, though the school authorities, and indeed parents, might also have, unwittingly, taken important security standards for granted. It is sad enough listening to sickening tales of adults, who have survived their kidnappers’ den.
Now that men of the underworld have fearlessly resorted to terrorising under-aged children and making them go through horrific experiences in the name of making sinful money, Nigerians must stand together against this menace. Where there is the will, there is always a way.
For now, I want to implore committed and unpolluted security operatives to intensify efforts at bringing back our NTIC daughters and their supervisors, safe and sound. We are all with them in prayers.
