The unsung, kidnapped kids of Lagos

Even if we sell all we have in the world, we cannot raise that kind of money.” When a parent has to say this in response to the demand made by kidnappers of his kid, he has reached the very end of hope. The world has never been completely safe for any generation. What makes a difference is the way we respond to security challenges and how we cushion the effects on the victims. We saw the weekend car and stabbing terrorism in London. Seven died. We saw the earlier Manchester attacks. We saw how the British government and security officials and the public rose for the victims and their relations. From Lagos to Abuja, to other corners of the country, we, in solidarity with humanity, joined the British Prime Minister and her people to mourn the dead. But what have we done with our own domestic tragedies. Six secondary school students were kidnapped in Lagos about two weeks ago. There were the announcement, the shock and the promise to rescue them. And then, no one in power seems interested again. There has not been a cough from Abuja. Even the media appears to be moving on to other matters.

When kidnappers went for eight students and two staff members of the Nigeria Turkish International School, Isheri, Ogun State, on January 13, 2017, we were inundated with daily briefings on efforts at rescuing them. Governors and governments competed for media space updating the nation on efforts being made to get them off the hook of their abductors. Have you seen the same with this case? No. The other time when lions picked on children of the powerful as dinner, the general cry was that these carnivores were going to render the town desolate. Now that the same lions are devouring the children of the weak and the poor, what are we hearing? Silence. When persons who are supposed to talk in empathy are stone silent, then there is a class problem. That is my reading of the inexplicable silence that has followed the kidnap of these six students of Lagos State Model College, Igbonla, Epe.

Abuja is silent. It is a Lagos problem. Is that how it should be? Every life should matter. And we see how caring nations and their leaders react to emergencies. Six promising students have been with marauders for more than 10 days and the nation sleeps and wakes daily pretending it is normal. If the system feels that engaging the media would impede their rescue efforts, would it be negative too to quietly update parents of the kids on the rescue efforts? One of the distraught parents told a national newspaper on Saturday: “The school management is not telling us anything. The Lagos State government does not seem to care about how desperate we are currently and the police also are keeping quiet. This is very hard for us.” Not saying anything and not doing anything are not the same. The security forces and the government may, in fact, be silently sweating, labouring hard to bring home these kids safely. But the parents need information too to be alive to receive their kids. That was done for the parents of the very elite Nigeria Turkish International School earlier in the year. In that particular case, even security agencies revved up their rivalries in the public space, stealing credits from each other on who did what to get the kidnapped freed. So, why the present silence? Could the difference between the two cases be the status of the schools and of the parents of the kids? You guess the social status of the parents when you read that particular parent throwing up his hands in utter helplessness at the news that the kidnappers may have reduced the ransom to N100 million: “Even if we sell all we have in the world, we cannot raise that kind of money,” he was quoted as lamenting..

What message are we passing across with our do-nothing body language? If you are not of the power elite and you want to live, then make sure you are directly connected with them. If you manage to get the powerful to listen to your song, the drumbeats will receive immediate acknowledgment. That is the message. And I have an example. You know whether a tragedy becomes a real issue is for the elite to decide. They measure how much of attention is given to what event. One of such is the Chibok girls issue. Some 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Chibok in April 2014. The media reported it as just an addition and a continuation of the tragedy of the North East of Nigeria. Life continued. A week after (23 April, 2014) an Abuja-based lawyer, Ibrahim M. Abdullahi, created a Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls to draw global attention to the abduction. That attention did not come until he got the wisdom to drag a former minister, a former World Bank Vice President into the matter with a mention. Within two weeks of that wisdom, the story changed. The message had generated 3.3 million tweets and had reached 440 million people worldwide. Mrs Michele Obama, with her famous placard, was one of them. The rest may be history but the lessons must never be lost. Only a dog backed by humans kills monkeys.

Life is so unfair. The Igbonla school is a 30-year-old government college. We know the class of people whose children patronise government schools, no matter how grand. A rat that has only one path cannot live long. You remember kidnappers had raided that school before? In October last year, gunmen suspected to be militants stormed that school abducting six persons, including the school’s Vice Principal, a teacher and four students right in their assembly hall. Those ones were freed after very traumatic days in captivity. Now, after that 2016 experience, what proactive steps were taken to prevent a repeat? We moved on. Parents and students and teachers were left to wish and pray against a repeat of the experience. Now it has happened again. Only the one with no immediate alternative would send his ward back to that place after the first experience. But the rat with only one road to its daily living won’t mind the dangers. He has no viable choice. The alternative is as grim as death.

Nigeria is in a state of nature. Life is brutish here. It is nasty. It is short. Control Risks’ Response, a reputable research outfit on kidnap-for-ransom, noted in a recent report that “Since the beginning of the year, Nigeria has been the site of 56 percent of all kidnaps recorded in Africa, ahead of established hotspots like Libya, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of Congo. When compared only to Sub-Saharan African countries, Nigeria ranks even higher as a percentage of total kidnaps recorded on the continent.” It is that bad. Schools which are supposed to be safe houses are now gravely endangered – especially in that corridor of Lagos and Ogun states. The trauma of a forceful seizure of a child is as killing as the unravelling of the parents. The state owes every citizen a duty of care to safeguard him from harm in all forms. In this case, those kids should not spend a day more in captivity. The state owes a duty to its citizens to suppress the wicked and give the lawful at least a reason to live. But the state has been derelict in saving schools and children from attacks in these notorious places. It has been derelict too in comforting families of victims. Kidnappers are holding some innocent souls somewhere and the state is behaving unfazed by the misery of the victims and their parents. The state must be seen, firmly doing what Immanuel Kant called a “coercion of coercion, a hindering of hindrances to freedom.” It also needs to be more human by pointing at the light at the end of the present dark tunnel.