Independence Day kidnapping saga

On the penultimate Thursday, as the nation celebrated Independence Day, 20 prospective corps members were abducted on their way to various NYSC orientation camps in the Southeast. They were travelling from Ibadan, had spent the night in Onitsha, and left early that morning for Owerri. Their bus was intercepted near Umunoha town by kidnappers and taken into the forest, where they endured a sordid week with their captors. Throughout the week, their ordeal captured the country’s attention. Happily, they were released intact after a week of incarceration.

However, how they reclaimed their freedom would remain controversial. While those in the security outfits claim they engineered the release, the parents of the corps members say they raised millions of naira to secure their wards’ freedom. But this is neither here nor there. The claim by our security men of helping release kidnap victims and the counterclaims by the victims that they paid for their freedom have been with us for some time now. What should be worrisome is the fact that the kidnapping spree, which began in the north a few years ago and was left to fester, has now spread to the southern parts of the country, thus becoming a national problem.

More worrisome is the fact that the kidnappers’ cells seem to be targeting corps members as a lucrative source of funds. Over the last one or two years, there have been reports of increasing kidnapping episodes affecting corps members. The last one that came to my attention was the one that occurred in Kogi State, where 15 corps members were kidnapped while on their way to Abuja, returning from their orientation camp in Bayelsa State.

Life must be rather brutish for present-day corps members. As a new graduate preparing for the NYSC, you naturally face all sorts of anxieties. You are filled with anxiety about the orientation camp, the primary assignment and your posting, especially if you are going far away from your home. Your anxieties heighten when you are unsure about your safety. Many distressing stories of the kidnapping of corps members are in the media and must be a source of acute worry for prospective corps members to read.

It is a bewildering scenario for those of us who were in the NYSC pioneering sets. I belong to the 4th set, and when I was setting out from my Maiduguri home in August 1976 for Lagos, where I was posted, my only worry was the distance. Lagos was over 1600 kilometres away, but I could travel by road or rail. By then, the Nigerian Civil War had ended about six years earlier; the country was at peace from one end to the other. One could travel anywhere in this country, at any time of the day or night, without any foreboding. Life was that easy.

During the service year, I lived in Mende village, Maryland, then a suburb of Lagos, and from there I travelled across much of the southern parts of the country, visiting my colleagues. A friend, Bello Abdullahi, served in Ogidi, then a few kilometres outside Onitsha, and another, Tijjani Elmiskeen, was in Owerri. I could leave Lagos at any time of day for Ogidi, and from there we might decide to proceed to Owerri. After a day or two in Owerri, they might also escort me back to Lagos. The roads were poor, particularly in the southeast, where they had yet to be rehabilitated after the civil war. That was the only troubling part of the journeys. There were no other encumbrances, such as fear of kidnappers or armed robbers.

Fast forward to the present day, where fears of kidnapping have made movements such a hassle. In fact, the fear of kidnapping has become so pervasive that one wonders why the government has not come up with any strategy to deal with it. People are left to languish in the hands of kidnappers for so long until their relations can raise the demanded ransoms. In the case of the kidnapping of school children, matters get even more pathetic. School children are directly government wards. Their security is, willy-nilly, the responsibility of the government. It smacks of sheer irresponsibility to knowingly allow school children to be in the kidnappers’ den for so long.

I refer to the Mussi schoolchildren who have been in captivity for nearly five months. The children were captured in two separate incidents, in Mussi on May 15, 2026, and about two months later in Lassa, in the same local government area of Askira-Uba in Borno State. A total of about 80 children are said to be with their kidnappers, the dreaded Boko Haram insurgents. It has been quiet since their capture, with no assurances from the government that they will be returned safely.

The number of victims wasting away in the hands of kidnappers in other parts of the country is said to be in the thousands, and billions of naira are being paid as ransom. It must all be overwhelming. Nevertheless, we plead with the government to come up with strategies on how to deal with this terror of kidnapping. Nothing short of this will do for the safety of our schoolchildren, corps members, and the wider Nigerian population.