IMMINENT KIDNAPPING & DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE IN NIGERIA
By Stanley Kene Onah
Perhaps insecurity — especially of the kidnapping variant — will be the ultimate push factor that vaporizes the remaining professionals and middle class from Nigeria. From all anecdotal indications, this outcome appears inexorable. The epidemic is spreading rapidly to every nook and cranny of the country. Hardly does a day pass without news of someone being whisked away.
Our security architecture seems to have no abiding answer to this burgeoning menace. Despite what appears to be the best efforts of our security outfits, the abductors often have a field day. Each successful operation emboldens them further. They rake in millions — part of which is invested in more weapons and sophisticated scrambling gadgets that render them untraceable. The rest is lavished on luxurious living, fueling envy among potential recruits.
In a single expedition, these criminals sometimes earn more than an academic professor could in a lifetime. Once they taste such honey, few ever repent of it. For many, it becomes a sport — a career even.
It is simplistic, if not outrightly naïve, to ascribe this scourge merely to youth unemployment. While idleness may predispose one to vice, kidnapping has evolved beyond opportunistic crime into a viable, organized enterprise. If unemployment were the chief cause, one would expect these young men to quit after their first successful operation. But they don’t — they persist until fate or fire catches up with them.
Kidnapping has become one of the fastest routes to instant wealth in Nigeria today. Expect the “industry” to grow and multiply. Syndicates may soon have satellite branches across the country, if they don’t already. In a few years, they could constitute a disturbing fraction of the country’s middle class.
The current atmosphere of insecurity will certainly drive sane minds away from the country. The odds of being kidnapped are rising exponentially. It is only a matter of time before professionals of every discipline encounter them. You don’t need to be a prophet of doom to see this — it is simple logic and inference.
The kidnapping epidemic will likely worsen before it wanes. Government’s occasional reactionary braggadocio offers little reassurance. They seem patently helpless, for reasons we can all discern.
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A profound moral degeneration now defines much of our society. Many of those who loudly condemn kidnappers would not hesitate to join them if opportunity presented itself. National security cannot succeed without the active cooperation of the citizenry. Every Nigerian must see himself as an informal, non-uniformed security agent. But how can this work amid such moral depravity and civic apathy?
Some of these criminals are known to supposedly respectable members of society, yet no one dares make a deterring disclosure. In some cases, security agents are part of the syndicates. How do you resolve such a hydra-headed challenge? Without transformative reorientation and value reconstruction, the nation must brace up to live with this pernicious evil for a long time.
We are unlikely to pray ourselves out of this quagmire. Those who can will increasingly vacate Nigeria for safer climes. For some, it will be temporary; for others, permanent. Nigeria’s middle class may vanish before our eyes. The health sector, already bleeding from brain drain, will lose even more. Expect a massive exodus — first from current hotspots, and eventually from the entire nation.
Unless there is an unlikely dramatic reversal, continued residence in Nigeria will soon be seen by many as insensitive, foolish, or even suicidal. The ordeal of a kidnap victim is an experience no one would wish upon his worst enemy. Patriotism alone will not keep people here when their lives hang in the balance.
The upper class can afford private security and may go largely unscathed. The lower class has little to fear, as kidnappers rarely target low-yield ventures. But the middle class — the teachers, doctors, lecturers, entrepreneurs — are trapped in between. They remain the most vulnerable.
Kidnapping-induced demographic and socioeconomic dislocation now looms ominously over Nigeria. Government alone cannot stop it. Sustainable security will require moral rebirth, civic education, and the revival of community intelligence networks. Citizenship education should begin at the foundational level to reorient the values of our growing population.
For now, men and women of goodwill must rise to help government as it totters through this invasive national security challenge.
Sad. Frightening. Yet, profoundly true.
*Dr Stanley Kene Onah, a medical practitioner and public affairs analyst, wrote in from Nnewi
