There is a new trend in child kidnapping. And a very dangerous one for that matter! The masterminds take undue advantage of the high poverty rate among the citizenry and the inordinate desire by sundry rent agents for quick commissions without due diligence on the genuineness of their supposed new clients.
Unless urgent and far-reaching sensitization programs including making it absolutely mandatory for rent agents to obtain credible and authentic data of prospective accommodation seekers, the vulnerability of our innocent children will continue to be exploited by these demented souls.
In this devilish business are mostly women, who cash in on the innocence and weaknesses of children to abduct them to satisfy whatever devilish needs they want. Their new tactics is to rent a room accommodation in compounds with many children. As soon as they pack in, they begin to endear themselves to their neighbours with an uncommon but pretended love for children. But that should be secured very quickly before their intentions are exposed.
Once the confidence of the neighbours is secured, they wait for the opportune time to strike by deceiving and luring the children out to buy sweets and biscuits for them. Immediately they get to a safety zone, they zoom off with the children to unknown destinations.
They plan their criminality and execute them with clinical precision within a few days of their packing in before their identity is uncovered. That is the new trend and a very dangerous angle in child kidnapping.
In the last one week, two of such incidents have been witnessed: one in Sango Ota, Ogun State and the other in Umuahia, Abia State. In the Sango Ota incident, a yet-to-be identified woman kidnapped two children aged four years each. One of them is her landlord’s son while the other belonged to a neighbour in the same compound.
The woman who moved into the apartment three days earlier had no known identity as both the rent agent and the landlord did not conduct any profile check before renting the apartment to her. She moved in, surveyed the environment and when it was safe for her evil trade, she quickly made away with the children after luring and enticing them with things they love most.
As I write, neither the woman nor the innocent children have been seen with their parents left to bear the burden of that calamity.
If the Sango Ota incident was not enough to drive home the gravity of the emerging challenge, that of Umuahia illustrates very poignantly the imperative in quickly tackling this new trend before it gets out of hand. Three tenants had four of their children taken away by a new neighbour who just packed in three days earlier.
The women said in separate interviews that the woman whose identity remains unknown, packed into the building on December 15, with another woman purportedly his sister. When they were packing in, they were only seen with a camp gas, a six-inch small foam, a mat and a little bag purportedly containing clothes.
Within the first two days of their arrival, they began to endear themselves to the hearts of their neighbours as women who love children by playing with them, buying them gifts and sending them on errands. They also cooked food and gave to the children who would playfully enter their room. That was the profile they displayed apparently waiting for the opportune time to strike.
So it was till the day of their planned escape with the children. The accomplice was first sighted moving out with a sack bag with clothes. When asked where she was going, she claimed she wanted to buy something at the city centre. But she had told another tenant separately that she was going to give her sister the clothes she bought for her.
The tenants did not suspect anything. When she left, the main one came out pretending to be playing with the children who rallied round her demanding sweets and biscuits. The mother of one of the children who witnessed that final encounter thought it was the usual show of love for the children and left shortly to fetch water.
Unknown to her; that was to be the last scene in the script written and acted out by the two demented souls in the last three days of their packing into that room. It was all a decoy to get at the heart of the children and their parents before their evil deed.
She was to discover on return that four of the children had vamoosed into the thin air with no sign of traces of them available. Frantic searches for the whereabouts of the four children yielded no positive results.
And when the landlord called the phone number supplied by the rogue tenant, it was switched off. The plight of the women was compounded by their discovery that the landlord did not conduct proper profile check on that tenant. He apparently relied on the supposition that the phone was enough to trace her.
Such has been the sad fate of these parents. Elsewhere, child kidnapping and abuse have been on the upward scale. A woman who pretended to be organizing lessons for children eloped with five kids in Port Harcourt in circumstances the police blamed their parents for carelessness. And in Borno State around the same period, another woman also made away with three children. It has been a tale of sorrow and awe as children after children disappear in the hands of these evil women.
Hardly a day passes by without reports of children abducted from homes or schools with some abandoned on dangerous routes. Our children have become endangered species as all manner of evil men and women pry on their vulnerability to satisfy vaulting devilish desires.
But as parents and guardians are getting more aware of the evil designs of these women child kidnappers, it would appear they are now finding new ways of continuing with their nefarious activities. Renting cheap accommodation in densely populated neighbourhoods largely lived by the poor have become their soft targets.
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Such vicinities are usually characterized by overcrowding, inadequate room ventilation and absence of modern amenities. In that squalid environment, children live and grow up freely sharing whatever they can get from neighbours. Invariably, the children do not get to be properly monitored or even restrained from accepting gifts including food items from their neighbours.
It is for similar considerations that rent agents and landlords do not take the pains to profile those who come before them as accommodation seekers. But they got it all wrong as the result has turned out disastrous. The criminal-minded women are now exploiting the looseness of such environments as fertile grounds for child kidnappers. And they have been succeeding.
But the situation can be quickly put under check if those renting out accommodation take little pains to do background checks on prospective accommodation seekers. It says much about us as a people that someone will just saunter into a rent agent’s office pay for an apartment without seriously being profiled including asked to produce a guarantor.
That cannot happen in saner climes. There is hardly any job you can secure today without serious profiling including credible guarantors. If those hiring labour require all that, there is no reason someone renting an accommodation where he or she will live with others should not be put to serious security checks.
The lives of other tenants are put at serious risk when new tenants are admitted without serious profiling. It is high time the government took serious interest in the activities of rent agents and landlords that fuel the spate of child kidnapping witnessed recently.
All these point inexorably to the degenerate level of moral decay in our society. We appear to have lost our senses of decency and humanity. Ours have become a haven of crime and criminality. Everything hitherto held sacred has been so desecrated as to give the wrong impression that evil ways pay. Imagine women who are supposed to be mothers enmeshed in the business of kidnapping other peoples’ children for sale or money rituals through desperate and devious guises!
Our leaders share much of the blame for the bad examples the show. The damage has been so much. It will require ethical revolution to return the country to the path of moral rectitude and sanity. But is that going to happen so soon?
