By Debbie Olujobi
It’s a big party, a rich man’s father is being buried somewhere in the eastern part of Nigeria, no expense is spared and all are invited. Someone invites a student from one of the universities nearby and she turns up with a retinue of 20 others who want to eat for free and possibly get some take-away packs to take back to school. Nothing unusual, students even in my days never had enough and if good food was going for free they were bound to turn up invited or otherwise.

The institutions of Higher learning worldwide is a leveller for all classes of students; even if you had enough you still wanted to join your friends in activism, social and cultural adventures or even escapades; you are a student after all!! The most responsible adult alive will be a liar if they denied ever doing something irresponsible back on campus. Those days were like a rehearsal for real life and foolishly most students never comprehend the danger involved in most of their shenanigans!!

The students in question had left their school in a bus and most of them did not have enough to get back or even enough airtime to make a call. It wasn’t the first time they would do such; somehow they would make it back and most of them did. All but one of them found out the hard way that life is not often as carefree as it looks. She had chosen to ride back with a friend’s brother back.

Everything was on course for them to make the journey back very early till the friend is sent off on an errand and is not seen till late. Thinking she was still getting a free ride she gets into the car of a man she knows well with the proviso that he stops by his house to get money for petrol and then take her back to school. They get to his house and he goes in but doesn’t come out. After waiting for over  two hours she went after him and when she knocks for what seems like another 30 minutes, she then turns the handle of the door that is not locked.

The next couple of hours will have a ripple effect that will shape our young student’s life and it should be a lesson in many ways for other young people. What she finds in is a perfect set up, her friend’s brother is on a seat, watching television and he tells her to take a seat while he strolls to the door and locks it. Without even raising his voice, he asks her to make herself comfortable as he is too tired to drive.

It is at this point that her predicament becomes obvious. Armed only with a carrier bag stuffed full of souvenirs and food, she does not even have enough airtime to make a call for help, zero physical cash and she starts begging her former friend-turned-captor. As she recalls it, her first thought was that she was to be used for ritual purposes but her captor had a more personal and gratifying goal in mind; rape. Most people think rape is often violent and bloody, but statistics show that most rapes are carried out by friends and acquaintances that use the threat of harm to get their way as effectively as if they inflicted the harm.

The reality of the situation was what her captor made very evident. No one knew she was with him, he lived in a sprawling compound with other bachelors; her raising an alarm would simply invite his neighbours to partake in an ordeal that could last a month if he so decided.

He calmly leads her to a box filled with arms and says killing her was an option that would be quite easy as her body could be dumped in the nearby bushes without ever being traced back to him. She recollects being paralysed with fear as her ordeal begins, more worried about being killed or having his neighbours join in than the actual act to move.

In the morning, she was surprised to receive an apology; he had discovered himself violating an innocent and tried to persuade her to consider a relationship. Listening to her account, I was amazed at the change of events but she did the smart thing and agreed to a relationship, while planning her escape. Later on, he took her to the market to buy stuff for the house and it was there she made her escape… the story doesn’t end there; what was a personal nightmare has been blown to enormous proportions and may even play out in a court of law.

While I can’t finish the story this week, I can sound an alarm; I can beg all parents to make sure their wards always have airtime on their phones to call for help whenever they are in trouble. Many students have disappeared only to be found dead later and even when some of them insist on being irresponsible they need to take precautions to protect themselves. The second warning is for the young ones; don’t ever go off with anyone without letting your friends or family know who you are with and where you are going; we live in dangerous times and youth is not an immunity from evil…
To be continued