LAST Monday, a former Environment minister, Lawrencia Laraba-Mallam, and her husband were kidnapped along the Bwari-Jere road, a section of the Abuja-Kaduna Highway. To carry out the crime, the kidnappers, believed to be herdsmen, halted traffic on both sides of the highway and picked their victims at random. The minister and her husband were not specifically targeted. It had been expected that the deployment of more than 500 policemen in the highway, together with dozens of patrol vehicles and armoured personnel carriers (APCs), should constitute enough deterrence to kidnapping and other crimes on that important road axis. The kidnappers obviously made nonsense of the deployment and patrol methods adopted by the police.
That high-profile abduction along the Abuja-Kaduna Highway came hard on the heels of another notable kidnap case involving Margaret Emefiele, wife of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele. She had been abducted along the Benin-Agbor Road in company with four other people despite being accompanied by police guards, but was rescued barely one day after. She was also a victim of random kidnapping. In both cases, it was not disclosed whether any ransom was paid to bait the kidnappers. Worse, the kidnap, not to say the rescue, could have easily turned dangerously wrong.
As the abduction in 2013 of Kamene Okonjo, a professor and mother of a former Finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, showed, kidnapping whether of high-profile or lowly placed victims is enormously attractive and rewarding and carries far less risk than armed robbery and even burglary. Though the kidnappers were caught, a ransom of about N12m had been paid. As the economy worsens, more kidnapping cases will be recorded, and no part of the country or family will be immune. Last Thursday, another school in Lagos fell victim to kidnapping, with a vice principal, a schoolteacher and students abducted and ferried away through the Epe waterways to unknown hideouts. In September 2015, a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation and Finance minister, Olu Falae, was also kidnapped by Fulani herdsmen. He was released only after ransom was paid. Now, no one argues about the prime positions herdsmen and militants play in kidnapping.
There are, however, arguments for more drastic and harsher punishments for kidnapping. But there are no studies done to establish whether states that have already enacted death penalty and other strong-arm measures against kidnapping enjoy lower incidence of kidnapping. Indeed, some states even bulldoze properties owned by kidnapping suspects before they are properly charged in court or convicted. Yet the crime has continued in one form or the other. Similarly, though armed robbery and sometimes murder carry capital punishment, there is no proof the extreme measure deters the crimes. In some parts of the world where studies have been done, it was established that capital punishment had no salutary effects on capital offences.
It is, therefore, important to avoid hysteria in the battle against kidnapping. If death penalty does not deter armed robbery, it will not deter kidnapping. The ubiquitousness of kidnapping is doubtless worrying and calls for far more intelligent responses than the knee-jerk solutions being advocated by some commentators and politicians. Extra-judicial killings, a variant of the death penalty, did not deter Boko Haram. It will also not deter militancy in the Niger Delta or dissuade pro-Biafra agitators. It may be time to consider whether the country’s security and law enforcement architecture has not become hopelessly antiquated in the face of more daring and sophisticated crimes. The old approach, as evident by the deployment of over 500 policemen to man the Abuja-Kaduna Highway, has become useless and burdensome. It is time to consider revolutionary ways of law enforcement.
One way is to compel the very slothful and outmoded federal government to discard its patrician approach to governance and law enforcement. It is unable to fund and administer the Nigeria Police, and has proved quite inept at rejigging its operational paradigm. Rather than confront these dilemmas, it has engaged in the counter-productive deployment of soldiers to complement the police under the same outmoded and unproductive law enforcement paradigm. This must be truly frustrating to Nigerians who have had to endure cruel and unusual attacks from criminals. The federal government has stood in the way of constitutional reform for sentimental reasons. But if it is to halt the rampant breakdown of law and order in most parts of the country, especially at a time of economic meltdown, it must single out the police institution and urgently sponsor a constitutional amendment to devolve policing to states. The government and country are already overwhelmed by crime. No amount of death penalty will obviate the desperate resort by criminals to kidnapping and other forms of violent and extortionary crimes.
Daring kidnappings become routine
