Enemy in the house

After the media had blown hot, feeding its readers, listeners and viewers with tales of “Fulani herdsmen” holding criminal monopoly in kidnapping, latest discoveries have shown the kidnapping enemy-in-chief is nowhere but indoor.

A news story broke on October 5, speaking of a kidnap attempt gone awry, in the Ajowa, Akunu and Auga Akoko areas of the Akoko North West local government, of Ondo State. The botched crime led to the arrest of seven alleged kidnappers, after their escaped victims spilled the beans on them.

One Alhaji Jamiu Zakariyahu, a local secondary teacher, returning from evening prayers from a neighbouring mosque, was seized and tossed into a kidnap vehicle, around 8 pm on October 2.  He was thereafter marched deep into the bush, where he found other kidnapped victims tied down like rams; and their kidnappers phoning and negotiating ransoms — starting with N10 million but eventually settling for N250, 000, with distraught families.

But then, the virtual impossible happened: some of the kidnapped sprung themselves, made a dash for it and alerted local hunters, who also alerted the security agencies.  By the time the heat cooled, seven kidnap suspects were themselves in legal chains.

But the real news was that the alleged kidnap kingpin, now in police net, was the son of a traditional chief in the area — talk of the enemy in the house!  That shock find moved Rasak Rauf, the police area commander for Ikare, to appeal to the locals to seek synergy with security agencies, to rid the area of kidnappers and other criminals.

Before this shock find and sorry pass, you could imagine how many triumphant local kidnappers had grossed millions in illicit Naira ransom, only to join his co-local folks to rail and gnash their teeth over the evil of “Fulani herdsmen” kidnappers!  Should a voice demur, (s)he would most probably have risked being a pariah — the enemy of the community for bucking the general hysteria!

That way, the bout of kidnapping stretched for much too long, with a hysteria-soaked media, in patriotic anger, busy luring the authorities away from the real culprits, in their maniacal bashing of the Fulani!  It was the dress rehearsal in local xenophobia, before the one that grabbed global attention, from South Africa!

Hardball by no means says there were no Fulani involved in the horrendous South West kidnapping, which took the space by storm and virtually knocked everyone dead.  But could it not have been trite that they couldn’t have mastered the crevices of the local forest and illicit business fort without the collusion and cooperation of local Judases?

This is trite but it bears restating, given the scandal of the emotive disgrace that plagued the kidnapping crisis: let the media report crime as crime, and forget where the criminal comes from.

That way, you get the job done by not creating a future crisis.  Only God knows the future price this polity would pay for this Fulani scapegoating — after all, no people boast a monopoly of wilful hysteria, or even ethnic rascality.

However, to the Federal Government that controls the Police and other security agencies, the lingering cases of free-wheeling kidnapping is absolutely unacceptable.

Now that we know every part of the country has contributed to the kidnap menace, it’s time the central government worked out a solid security net with the local folks.  Now that we are done with media-driven, wilful self-deceit, it’s time to show these criminals that kidnapping doesn’t pay.  We must inflict dire punishment on these criminals.