OPINION: Nigeria’s picture-perfect kidnappings

‘EBURU ozu onye ozo, odika ebu osisi kporo nku’ is a common saying in my Igbo nation part of Nigeria. I cannot readily remember the English language equivalent if actually there is one. So l will try a transliteration. It roughly means that when the remains of a total stranger are being conveyed, passersby regard what is inside the coffin as a piece of dry wood. There’s no emotional attachment whatsoever.

The depth and significance of this Igbo adage is lost with the advent of the so-called modernity which includes conveying corpses in well appointed ambulances and making a song and dance of funeral rites. In ancient time which actually is as recent as the 1950s and 1960s, the common mode of bearing corpses was for two strong men to hoist the wooden coffin containing the remains of a relative on their heads from the place of death [hospital or native doctor abode] to the point of burial [home, cemetery or even the evil forest as was the practice in far gone era for those who died from what was then considered abominable deaths].

In that now forgotten season an abomination would include a person who died in the upper floors [upstairs] of his home. He was treated as having committed suicide [hanging oneself on a tree]. Storey buildings were, however, not common. Off course, twins were considered a bad omen for the community and so an abomination. And a child who starts sprouting teeth from the upper gum was a no no. In addition, any woman who died during child birth was a candidate for being tossed into the evil forest. Then the forest used to be a place that stirs fright. It still is in this 21st century. But for a different reason. It has become even more so in Nigeria in the last 20 years.

First, it was the herdsmen armed with military grade weapons, who took over our forests including forest reserves. They visited terror on indigenes and sacked farmers from their lands. But a clear case of terrorism by armed herders was successfully framed and sold to Nigerians by the failed Maj.-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Congress [APC]-regime as herders/farmers clashes. There was no such thing. Armed herders visited terror on farmers with the suspected connivance of officialdom. For whatever reasons, which could include ethnic affinity, the regime corralled Nigerians into a wrong and tragic judgement call and the failure has metastasized into the pandemic of kidnappings we are grappling with today. The media allowed themselves to be used. So the erstwhile terrorists who were conveniently and deliberately mislabeled as herders have become emboldened. Land grabbing and territorial expansion in the name access to grazing routes are no longer enough for them.

Even the appeasement of the Buhari regime to dust up and enforce the colonial era grazing routes law with nationwide application did not satisfy the terrorist-herders. They have now come for our juggler through kidnapping. They started by abducting us from our farms, demanding for ransom and getting paid. We abandoned our farms which has led to acute food shortages and ravaging hunger in the land. The terrorist [kidnappers] took over the highways, mounted roadblocks and plucked us off the roads. They demand for ransom and they get paid. We scaled back on our trips and avoided notorious routes including the Kaduna-Abuja expressway. The kidnappers were not assuaged. We opted to travel by train but the kidnappers blew up the rail tracks, hijacked the train, killed some of us and took the rest of the train passengers away for ransom. The harder we tried to avoid them the angrier they became. To teach us a lesson the kidnappers spread their operations nationwide, covering all routes including village tracks which in my neck of the wood are called ‘appian way’. They left us with virtually no options. Even if you can afford and elect to travel by air, the land distances to and fro the airports remain dark and dangerous spots. Now picking us off the roads, trains and tracks has become dated and infradig. Kidnappers have now elected to come to our residences including homes in gated estates, to smash our fences, to bomb our security doors, to engage our security men in fire-fights, to disable our closed circuit television gadgets, to pick us up like rain-beaten chicken, to ferry us to their abodes in the thick forests, and to use our cell phones or indeed their own mobile phones to contact our families, relations and acquaintances to demand for millions of Naira as ransom. It is as mind-boggling as it is terrifying. Kidnappers are daily sending us a simple message- we run this show.

READ ALSO: OPINION: Branding Ndigbo as terrorists

The pandemic of kidnappings that is wreaking havoc on our country is the inevitable outcome of an insincere regime as symbolized by the eight years of Buhari [2015-2023]. The irony is that under Buhari the regime pretended to be working on combating insecurity. The personal details of Nigerians were routinely and repeatedly captured through bio-metrics and fingerprints. Even prisoners in some other climes have not been so dehumanized. One Isa Pantanmi, an avowed Islamist who was a minister in that Buhari regime claimed that through the banks [bank verification number], the Immigration’s Nigerian Identification Number [NIN], the Immigration’s passport offices and the linking of the collated personal data of Nigerians to our individual telephones, would be a game changer in the war against insecurity and sundry vices. Everything has turned out to be 419, a section of a Nigerian law that spoke to obtaining by false pretext. To underscore the enormity of the frauds perpetrated on Nigerians by successive administrations, the same Pantanmi who espoused and championed the so-called technology-driven war on crime was recently in the forefront of soliciting for money to pay as ransom for his friend’s family members who were seized in their Abuja home by kidnappers. He felt no shame but the irony was not lost on Nigerians. While in that regime and doing no teaching nor research and allegedly not qualified for the position howsoever, he was awarded a specious and bogus professorship on cyber crime and warfare by the Federal University of Technology, Owerri in Imo state. Surely, there are time tested ways to minimize if not eradicate this raging pandemic of kidnappings. The first is that the government needs to urgently work to earn the trust of the people. That won’t come easy for a regime that’s so despised. Without trust little else will work.

A situation where the citizen is loathe to provide information to security agents should be troubling. Stories are rife of how some security agents betrayed informers. British security agents were able to burst the planned crating of second republic transport minister, Alhaji Umaru Dikko, back to Nigeria by the military regime of Buhari in 1984 because of information provided by a citizen. Such relationship between Nigerians and their security agencies barely exists. The will to be the better versions of themselves appear to be absent from members of our security forces. Sometimes the feeling is that they are content just to put up the appearance that they are working. How far have the police maximized the possibilities of the cell phone, including geo-tagging to track kidnappers who use mobile phones to negotiate ransom payments and to direct drop off points? I acknowledge that they can be better equipped and motivated but l am also convinced that they have not sufficiently justified the current levels of motivation and provision of equipment. If you want to know that the police, for instance, can work with speed and precision in cracking a crime, follow the trend whenever criminals kill a police personnel. Within 24-48 hours, the police will arrest the criminals involved.

But l admit that sometimes the police also rope in innocent people. In spite of attempts by kidnappers to industrialize their trade, crime is still a local business. This makes it clear that the behemoth called the Nigerian Police Force [NPF] is not fit for purpose. It is anachronistic for a country that claims it is operating a federal system of government. The NPF should not have existed in the first place but for the distortion introduced in Nigeria by the military incursion into government in 1966. I am for the dissolution of the NPF as it is presently constituted but only as part of the physical and fiscal restructuring of the country. l know there are people who genuinely fear that the state governors or whatever titles the rulers of the sub nationals will bear in a restructured country will abuse the use of the police. But pray, do we not witness such abuses today. It’s on record that an assistant inspector-general of police once participated in the abduction of a sitting state governor and that commissioners of police routinely disobey and disregard the directives of state governors who are supposedly the chief security officers of their states. Police commissioners are beholden to the President of the republic through the inspector-general.

But of all the ideas canvassed so far about combating the raging pandemic of kidnappings, the most ludicrous appears to be that mooted by the regime of the President, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu on the recruitment and deployment of ‘forest guards’. However, the floating of this idea was not a surprise. From inception this regime’s proposals and policies including the so-called petrol subsidy removal, floating of the Naira and students loan scheme, among others, are not informed by deep thoughts nor attended by rigour. Beyond creating another bureaucracy and expenditure head, Tinubu’s ‘forest guards’ will be as useless as they come. But wait. It has been suggested in some quarters that the proposed ‘forest guards’ will be the state-funded and state-armed Presidential militia for the battle for the soul of Nigeria in the 2027 general elections. l don’t believe this but l do not dismiss it either. The proposal evokes the unsettling memory of the military President, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s stillborn national guard- a widely suspected regime perpetuation militia. We fret about the pandemic of kidnappings because we have failed to recognize that majority of us have been kidnap victims for too long. We are hostages to our rulers.

AUTHOR: UGO ONUOHA

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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