By Rotimi Fassan

ON  Sunday July 11 we were reminded once more of how precarious life has become in Nigeria when four journalists, including Wahab Oba, the Lagos chair of the Nigerian Union of Journalists and their driver, fell into the hands of kidnappers in Abia State.

The menace of kidnappers that started like a one-off child’s play has assumed a virulence that now threatens to change for the worse the way we now live in Nigeria. Kidnapping for money-making and other ritual purposes had long been with us.

But it was then mainly directed at children. The current form of kidnapping in exchange for ransoms worthy of a monarch’s head has its roots in the Niger Delta where so-called militants employed it as publicity stunt against oil multinationals to call attention to the plight of their region. Soon it would become the inadvertent source of easy money for many of the militants.

This was when it attracted the attention of other criminally-minded persons outside the oil-rich South-South, specifically in the South East where kidnapping was from the beginning seen as yet another business opportunity. It was not based on any form of revolt against the state nor was it connected to any form of ideological mooring beyond the grossly pecuniary.

It was in short a sort of fad, albeit of a criminal kind, that was taken up by persons with cognitive abilities that were no better than apes. It shall be recalled that when the fire set off by this kind of criminality started raging, it became a subject of this column. Then some readers who couldn’t see beyond their nose saw it as an attempt to stereotype Nigerians of Eastern origin as persons who would do just about anything in order to make money.

Then was this columnist advised by this group of readers to mind other matters of crime, including armed robbery in the West, as if robbery was something peculiar to the West. Or as if, indeed, the piece was directed at stigmatising Easterners. Of course, kidnapping is beginning to take the form of a national crime that is gradually spreading to other parts of Nigeria, but the East still constitutes its locus of operation.

The chickens might have come home to roost as it is becoming apparent, at least from comments credited to security agencies this past week, that kidnapping is now a well-organised crime that has the blessings of authority figures, including local rulers in the East. It informed, some reports had it, the meeting between the IG and community leaders in the East last week. Easterners who have achieved some form of success can no longer go home to share their success story with their kith and kin. Or simply visit home on holiday.

Supposed friends and relations now snare one another as was the pathetic case recounted not too long ago by Okey Ndibe in his column in The Sun. This concerned the young son of a man who was tricked into the hands of kidnappers by someone well-known to him and his family. There are similar tales of woe being retailed all over about how communities in the East have become dens of kidnappers, turning their rage on the same communities in which they live. And the worst is not yet upon us, which makes the matter all the more frightening. For to whom can we turn to when those who should be helping us to fend off danger have become the main source of such danger to society?

Right now, there is nothing for it but that Nigeria should brace up to confront and eliminate kidnapping before it brings the country to that point where countries such as Colombia and Italy found themselves when they fell under the ministration of drug lords and the mafia who proceeded to carve the countries up into diverse areas of crime influence. This is what we must do, recognise kidnapping for the serious crime that it is and go all out to smoke out the kidnappers, potential and confirmed, from their criminal hideouts.

This means equipping the police with modern gadgets of crime prevention and control. It also means there should be a standard way to respond to the demands of kidnappers, much in the same way that Western countries respond to the demands of hijackers and pirates,  rather than the haphazard manner things are being done right now. Should ransom be paid or not? Kidnapping should not be allowed to be seen as a rewarding business.

The Police and victims of kidnappings most times want it believed that no ransom was paid to effect their release. But such claims seem, in the light of the increasing wave of kidnappings, to be as true as saying that threats of dismissal of police officers from the Police or their prosecution by the Police hierarchy have stopped Police personnel from taking bribes while on duty.

No, the security agencies need to be more proactive in their style of crime control than is presently the case where the Inspector General, Ogbonna Onovo, relocates his office to every state where kidnappers, as are other criminals, seem to have the upper hand in their confrontation with the Police. How many states does he hope to visit that way and how much does he hope to do or achieve in this manner?

Nor does it make sense for the President to order the IG each time a hideous crime is committed to fish out perpetrators of the crime as if the criminals are in the Police Force. Well who knows? The Yoruba people say only a thief knows the trail of a thief. So the President may know the Police know something the rest of us don’t know. Yet that would not change the fact that this, too, is at best a reactive approach, a post-mortem rather than the prognosis that should invite our best crime-fighting strategies.

Enough of the fire fighting measures that might have spawn the helplessness that apparently made the Senate President, David Mark, call for a state of emergency in the East; Nigerian security agencies should devise a standard and coordinated approach in their fight against kidnapping and kidnappers.  That is the way to reassure Nigerians, especially Easterners, that they have not been abandoned to criminals who routinely abduct them in exchange for huge ransoms.