Tag: Bamigbetan

When the unfortunate news of his kidnap broke recently, not a few of us who are close to him felt it must have been an error of judgement on the part of his captors. This was because Kehinde Bamigbetan, the second-term chairman of Ejigbo Local Council Development Area, ELCDA, has built a reputation over the years of activism, honesty and simplicity. So, to have picked on such a person appeared to be a grave misnomer. It is not that it is right for kidnappers to pick on anybody at all for that matter. Far from it. But it is widely expected that such an individual should have been spared the nasty ordeal he went through.

Anyway, by the second day, his house at an innocuous part of Ejigbo town had become a Mecca for all manners of people –relatives, friends, politicians, journalists, et al. That day, when I got there in the company of Bisi, my darling wife, we ran into a frenetic prayer session being conducted impromptu by Lady Abimbola Fashola, wife of the Lagos State governor. When the prayer session was over, we all sat down quietly, all motionless except for some little hisses here and there.

There was this aura of humility that played around Mrs. Fashola as she sat quietly but occasionally whispering to Fatimah, Bamigbetan’s wife’s ears. She was damn too simple – no earrings, no ‘mascaras’painting, no make-up, no flamboyance of any nature.

As she prayed earlier, I noticed the constant refrain, “May God banish this evil deeds from this our state!” to which the‘congregation’ chorused a loud “Amen!” all the time. Right there, the journalist in me silently took over. I started wondering why God should single out Lagos State for all evil cleansing and not the whole country. But not until the prayers were over, even then I could not easily place the face until she made to leave. It was then I confirmed what had rung through my mind as I sat gazing at her direction. While her entourage sat on the modest sofas in the room, she sat on a plastic chair brought in as ‘reinforcement’ or attachment to accommodate the crowd of people. Such was her simplicity.

After the exit of Mrs. Fashola, we all sat there bemoaning the great calamity that has befallen the nation – the rampant and incessant cases of kidnapping for ransom. Somebody raised the issue of the late Dr. Chidi Nwike, former deputy governor of Anambra State, who was recently murdered by his abductors after three gruelling weeks in their captivity. Even the two couriers who took the N5 million ransom money to the kidnappers were killed along with him. It was such tragic news. I told the gathering there that Jane, Nwike’s wife, was my schoolmate at the famous but now defunct Federal School of Art and Science, Ondo, FSASON. In fact, the old students are meeting this weekend to see the role they can play in the burial of the former national Vice-Chairman of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, South-East zone. People talked so much, so positively about his life and times as if death should have spared him.

In a sober gathering like that, all manners of sad reminders usually come up. So many past cases of kidnapping were raised. Some were mere newspapers’ rehash while others never got mentioned at all in the press even for once. Some were solved through divine intervention while others paid ransom. It was generally put in prayers that God shall manifest his handwork in Bamigbetan’s case. And He did.

The prayers went on non-stop for the six days he was in captivity. Journalists and their various news medium did not help matters. Some wrote out of context. It was lazy and pedestrian journalism at work. Many of the stories were never cross-checked before hitting the headlines. Many were abstract; many obvious fabrications. Many assumptions, innuendos, rumour mongering, fallacies and all that – it was as if some of the journalists were working for the kidnappers. Many reported that he had been released when he was still under torture. It was then I realized the magnitude of professional misjudgement and miscarriage of news going on in our much-cherished profession. That is a matter for another day.

On Sunday morning, six days after he was abducted, newspapers carried the news that he might have regained his freedom. Earlier the previous night, I had seen the news scroll on AIT. I called Fatimah, who said the rumour had been on since Friday. I remember early on Friday morning, when Musibau Sulaiman, sent me a text message from his house in Mushin ‘congratulating’ me for the news of Bamigbetan’s release, which he claimed he picked on “Koko Inu Iwe Iroyin”, a news headlines programme in Yoruba, on a particular radio station. So that Sunday morning, I called his wife’s phone but she did not pick it. Then I asked my wife to call Idowu, Bamigbetan’s younger sister, who was my wife’s kid mate, who confirmed the news. I immediately dashed down.

The whole house was in a joyous mood in contrast to what it was four days earlier when I first visited there. Bamigbetan’s narration was heart rendering. His bloodshot eyes and bruises on his face, nose and all that underscored the intense torture and inhuman treatment meted out to him by his captors. He was brutalised, starved and denied all access to comfort. Thrown on a stack carpet on the night he was captured, the bare carpet was to be his bed, his sitting position all through his ordeal. His hands were tied, so also were his legs.

His captors spoke impeccable English. Some of them claimed they were Engineering graduates from Nigerian universities – I do not know whether kidnapping was part of their Engineering courses while at school. They also claimed that they had paced the streets for more than six years until somebody introduced them to the lucrative but risky business of kidnapping for survival; That their parents and guardians suffered untold hardships to train them, but here they are, they could not even lift a finger to reciprocate the good gesture. How will they be able to set up their own families and train their children when the society has no plans for them? They could not understand why one person could be richer than the whole country when there are many people who cannot get even a single meal a day.

One of them claimed he had gone to Cambodia, one of the poorest Asian countries in the past. That as poor as the people were, their international airport was marvelous unlike the poultry called international airports in Nigeria. That there, the standard of living was better but he fell on the wrong side of the law and was deported. I quickly told myself that that chap is still on the wrong side of life and might be consumed by the law in no distant time.

By the time they knew that Bamigbetan was a local government chairman, they accused him of being part of the rotten system that has pauperized everybody. He defended himself. Trust Korky, as he is fondly called, gave a good lecture to them on his student union days, his social activism, the achievements of his administration as chairman –scholarships, free meals to school pupils etc. Surprisingly, while he was in their dungeon, some of them came to do espionage on the LCDA Secretariat, asked a few questions about him and so on. Everybody they spoke to had one or two good comments about his character and humane nature. That, perhaps, was his saving grace. And of course, there was real divine intervention. God manifested Himself and secured his freedom.

The lesson here is that Nigeria is sitting on a boiling cauldron which might turn over at anytime. And it is not if, but when it turns over, nobody will be spared. Those who have ears let them hear this now and start doing something positive to douse the gathering tempest!