AS fear grows in Nigeria over rising insecurity, aggravated by banditry, kidnapping, insurgency, militancy, and other social ills, The ICIR’s Marcus Fatunmole and Bamas Victoria report tales of citizens who were kidnapped and held hostage, including those who were released after paying huge sums as ransoms.

“My daughter gets frightened whenever she sees a policeman or hears loud banging.”

“She was three when I was kidnapped,” Uzoma tells the ICIR.

“She says ‘police came to pick my daddy,’ but I keep on correcting her that they were not police but bad people.”

Uzoma, like several victims of abduction, lives with constant reminder of the sordid ordeal long after it has happened.

He says he constantly has to tell his now five-year-old daughter that not all armed men are ‘bad people.’ He explains that whenever she sees an armed policeman, she still insists that they want to ‘take my daddy.’

A black Christmas
Two days to the Christmas of 2019, Uzoma was abducted in his house in the presence of his family – a wife and three children, the youngest, a month-old infant.

He recalls that he was in his room with his daughter when he started hearing loud noises.

“At first I thought it was knockouts,” he says. But as the sound continued, he decided to check.

He went to the kitchen door, but several things happened simultaneously in few seconds.

First, he made an eye contact with an armed person. Secondly, there was a realisation that the sounds were gunshots, that he was being robbed and needed to secure the door and get his family to safety.

“I could hear gunshots fired at the door and later what appeared to be a dagger being used to hack the kitchen door,” he says.

A few minutes later, there was loud banging on the bedroom door where Uzoma and his family were hiding. Meanwhile, he had contacted the neighbourhood vigilante who also said they could hear the gunshots.

“I don’t blame them, what do you expect them to do against such firepower?”

“The vigilante were proactive, but these people overpowered them. They had Dane guns, but the abductors had AK-47, so you cannot compare them.”

The abductors had two extra magazines each, Uzoma explains.

Uzoma says he opted to call the vigilantes first instead of the police because they were closer.

The banging was now on his bedroom door. He took his family into the bathroom. They gained access and their next port of call was the bathroom door. The sound was getting louder and his son was crying, which made his wife open the door.

He saw several armed men in the room. One of them was going round taking all the valuables he could find, including money, clothes, bedsheets, and towels. The armed men also had his wife’s phones.

“I told them to take everything, and they could have our cars too,” Uzoma says. But the only response he got was “Muje, let’s go” from one of the armed men who handed him a dashiki shirt.

That was when he realised that this could be an abduction.

He was taken outside where he was made to sit down on the ground alongside three other men. One of the men was bleeding from a machete cut which he sustained while trying to escape.

Uzoma says he counted 15 abductors with nine of them armed with guns.

“It is incredible. They even had bags containing bullets,” Uzoma says, still in disbelief.

The long trek and the many Abuja mountains
Abuja is filled with hiking clubs. At weekend members hike numerous hills, rocks, and mountains. But for Uzoma, his hiking that day was not for pleasure.

The abductors had a tracker called ‘Smallie’ who knew the route. “I am not sure that boy is up to 20, he wasn’t carrying a gun,” Uzoma recalls.

“I think he is a younger brother to the leader,” he explains.

“They had cooking utensils; they even had a solar panel used to charge their phones and a translator,” he says.

The translator, a Tiv man, went by the alias ‘Abiola.’

Abiola was the only non-Fulani among the kidnappers.

Uzoma says when the trek began, the abductors were 15 with nine guns, but when they got to their first stop, their number decreased to 13. Two persons had left; one with a gun and another without.

He says that they came across a herd of cows at one point and an elderly man appeared. The leader of the abductors walked quickly towards the man and knelt. He spoke in a language Uzoma suspected to be Fulfulde and the elderly man responded as if he was giving them direction.

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/untold-stories-of-victims-kidnapped-by-nigerias-gunmen/