Ms Donu Kogbara, a journalist and activist, was recently kidnapped and released. Last week, a very readable account of her two weeks sojourn in the den of her abductors went viral. I happened to have been with one of the people contacted on the day a call came through from the kidnappers. The hush that fell on the room during the brief ‘chat’ was total. As soon as the call was terminated, we all wanted to know what transpired.
But the person was too worried, too distraught to volunteer any useful information. We spent the next 30 minutes worrying about Ms Dogbara and what she must be going through. It is true that many people suffer each time somebody is kidnapped—those outside almost as much as those inside.
I know someone who lost several kilos in the two weeks his wife’s nephew was kidnapped and wondered what would have happened if it was his wife or any of his children. In any case, Donu’s narration touched on the almost irreparable damage her kidnap had done to her mother. Her narration was so well done and her profiling so succinct that I had a mental picture of the personality traits of her abductors.
She had her preferences to the point that she even ‘developed a likeness’ for one or two of them and claimed she could be unwilling to identify them should she be asked to. Such a complex relationship is not uncommon. It probably starts with an understanding of the desperation and other underlying factors that lead people to crime. It then leads to empathy and finally to likeness especially if the abductor shows some softness towards you in trying to meet your basic demands or engages you in small, personal talks.
People have been known to fall in love with their abductors over a period of time. The story of Boko Haram and some of their ‘wives’ is a good illustration. But we must never forget that an act of kidnap or rape is a brutal one. Many people have been killed in the process.
Many have been totally violated physically and emotionally. The society gets increasingly dehumanised and scarred. Lives, many lives, change completely and irreparably. I am sure we all know by now that nobody is immune to kidnap and nowhere is safe. Children have been taken; elders have been taken. Kings have been taken; subjects have been taken.
Military officers have been taken; civilians have been taken. Expatriates have been taken; natives have been taken. And the venues have not made any difference either. People have been abducted in their homes, in their offices, in their places of worship, on the way to work, on the highways, at recreation centres, while visiting and while being visited. All the geo-political zones are susceptible and no settlement is exempted whether highbrow or lowbrow in any zone. Each time, the stakes get higher.
Early this week, the ante was raised when we all woke up to read about the dare devil kidnap of a former Minister in front of the Kaduna residence of the President’s nephew. I don’t know how the President sees the abduction or how his nephew sees it but if security can be so brazenly compromised at the residence of someone who is currently one of the nation’s most powerful individuals then we know, if we needed retelling, that we have a very poor security apparatus in the country and are all at God’s mercy. Our big men need to realise that their gun-totting guards cannot save them when the chips are down.
They might even turn informants just as some of us have realised a long time ago that rather than be our protection, our mai-guards could be our weakest link. Yet kidnapping is a recent phenomenon in the country. It started less than two decades ago with the Niger-Delta militants. (Many negative things seem to have started in this zone including the current destruction of national assets.
I wonder if that, like kidnapping, would spread to other zones too because national assets are everywhere and some can hurt more than the blown pipe-lines.) When the Niger-Delta militants started kidnapping expatriates for money we all looked the other way. After all, we were not ‘Jews.’ Now it’s gone beyond the militants; it’s gone beyond expatriates. We are all at one end of the kidnap stick or the other.
We were fore-warned that this was going to happen but like people who want to self-destruct, we paid no heed. We were warned when 90% of our revenue was being used to feed less than 10% of the populace. We were warned about the increasing level of poverty amidst the so called oil wealth. Glittering private jets increased, yet economic marginalisation and unemployment increased. There were alarm bells when the percentage of our unemployed and unemployable youths rose up to 60%—instead we armed some of them and made them political thugs. Or when multi nationals were leaving because of poor infrastructure.
Even now, we fail to realise that this could lead to a collapse of law and order which could lead to a failed state which could lead to a revolution. Our political leaders play the ostrich and protect themselves through armoured cars and armed personnel while living a lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
Recently, our House of Rep members took possession of 6.3 billion naira worth of cars without a thought to the mood and sensibilities of the country. It matters not to them that basic transportation has collapsed or that the people they are supposed to lead are sleep walking. An outgoing governor who is having problems paying pension has bequeathed a 300-million naira home to himself as a parting gift.
We have to understand what the problem is before we can talk of a solution.
Yes, we have a massive youth unemployment. But it has been caused as much by our decaying infrastructure as by our negative attitude to work and mindless indifference of the leaders. Over the years, we have, as a people, developed a growing distaste for the dignity of labour. We glorify the attainment of wealth more than the process of it. Anybody who has ‘arrived’ is looked upon with envy and treated with respect.
The how is immaterial. With all due respect, asking the richest black woman in the world to come and give a talk on entrepreneurship to our youths—I saw a poster to that effect recently—is a joke.
She is a walking advertisement of the Nigerian factor where your contacts matter more than your skills. Her story is more of a miracle— the kind that Pentecostal pastors love as testimony— than that of industry. Another ‘poster’ is our Senate President who is stupendously rich according to the assets credited to him.
He is one of the names mentioned in the Panama club of the rich. Yet, apart from being his father’s son it’s hard to fathom the source of his wealth.
Yet, he is in the public space as Nigeria’s definition of success.
To get our youths off crime and get them to work and create wealth, our focus must shift from the celebration of wealth to the creation of it.
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