I never saw it coming, it was like a dream when I got the call in faraway America that my father had been kidnapped from our country home in Orlu, Imo State. The day was July 20, 2022. The kidnappers came to our house, picked him up and wanted to drive him away in his Toyota but the car did not start, so they blindfolded him and put him in their jeep and drove off.
It was afternoon in Nigeria when I got a call from my cousin, who asked me if what he was seeing in our extended family WhatsApp group was true. I screamed Jesus and dropped my phone. I picked up the phone and went to the WhatsApp group where family members were interceding for my father with prayers; I started to cry.
It dawned on me that kidnapping had taken a sharp turn from the days when extremely rich people were kidnapped; when it only happened in the Niger Delta. It is close to home now. You are a target if you have family members that can contribute your ransom. You could be kidnapped while on your way to buy food in the market or on the bus, travelling to the next town.
My father studied educational psychology at a university in Italy in the 70s, came back and became a principal of a school and voluntarily retired afterwards. He owned a large palm plantation. He is a Knight of St. Mulumba and the glassed bookshelf in his room was full of catholic books, educational books, canon law and devotionals. He kept our primary school report cards and exciting old documents on that same shelf. He drank tea and skimmed milk each morning and would not go a day without them, since I knew him as my father. He is a good man, whose three other siblings were late. His high blood pressure was regularly controlled and he would not go a day without his eyedrops. He did not find anyone’s trouble and trouble did not find him. He was a man of the people; people trooped into our house with joy when he was around.
I grew up in Orlu with my three other siblings. Orlu was not what it has become now—a den of insecurity or a war zone. The closest thing we heard about Orlu was that the Biafran war ended there in 1970. But since 2021, there have been numerous reports of gross insecurity in Orlu; these have impacted schools, businesses, transportation and nightlife. People are swallowed by sit-at-homes and no one stayed out of their homes after 6pm. Gruesome killings, human rights abuses and kidnappings have ravaged the small town since the beginning of 2022.
In our family group call on the Easter of 2022, my mother narrated how Orlu has been the home of unknown gunmen, dropping bullets in the air in the middle of the night as though bullets were water. My uncle’s house was burnt down this March by unknown persons. The large library in his house, full of books, was gone; his lifetime documents, all gone. Everything in the house went into ashes. He is a former ambassador of Nigeria to the USA; an academician who has dedicated his life and expertise to studying politics and international affairs. My mother’s friend’s car was stolen, with coolers of rice and chicken in the boot of the car. She had prepared the meals for an event, parked her car at the front of the event, stepped in and came out and did not see the car again. People did not come back home for Christmas because they feared they would be kidnapped and the bandits would call for ransoms that could buy a hundred plots of land in Abuja or on Lagos Island.
The day my father was kidnapped and driven about 30 minutes away from our hometown. That morning in my room it felt as though the world was ending. I came to the realisation that America was too far away from home. I felt useless, powerless. I tried to get into the shower, tried to sit on the floor and tried to stand; when I stood, I was looking through the window. Though my window faced nothing but a car park and mountains, I just looked; crying, thinking: Will my father survive this terror at his age? A terror that he has never imagined himself. Family relatives started prayer vigils; my mother was at home alone with our house help, saying the rosary. My mother’s fear was that my father’s health was under acute supervision at the time. His doctor had told him to pause his drugs for one week to study a certain part of his body.
On the first day of the kidnap, my mother, when we spoke on the phone, was relaxed, full of confidence that the ordeal would be over soon but this changed by the next day when the bandits were yet to call with ransom demands. The kidnappers later used my father’s WhatsApp to text, they said they only wanted to speak to my younger brother; then a voice note came via the same channel and we heard my father’s voice, trembling; in the background, we heard loud gospel music blaring, you would think he was at a party. He told us he was scared for his health. He said we should not involve the police or any security agency.
“You must have heard that these people are holding me; please tell your mum, tell everyone, find money and bring to these people. They are good people, they have assured me that all they want is money, my health condition was good yesterday but I can’t explain it now, and I don’t know what it will be by tomorrow, ” My father’s said, mixing English and Igbo languages.
My brother was good with the negotiations. With the support and guidance of concerned friends and relatives, whose panic has increased, he responded to the bandits with his own 1-minute voice message; he pleaded, he asked that they reduce the amount demanded as ransom. The kidnappers gave us a seven-day ultimatum to meet their demands and issued some threats against us.
They also complained in their voice notes—with clear and confident voices—that my father was stressing them, that they travelled out of state to look for his drugs. They complained that all he wanted to eat was rice and stew. That was some assurance to us that he was eating because his best meal was plain rice and stew. My father had said he wouldn’t take the drugs except he checked his blood pressure. There was no blood pressure monitor in that den, so they went to town and purchased one. My brother forwarded each voice note and each chat to me, but they worsened my situation.
I placed my phone in the “do not disturb” mode because each message or each call from home traumatised me. I woke up every day, ready to hear something new, and I did not know what that new thing would be. I stayed awake to hear from my family in Nigeria before I could force myself to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. I left my door open all day because I needed to feel better; because I needed to know that I was not the only one in my apartment. I needed to hear my housemates’ footsteps as they walked along the corridors. I rejected calls and declined chats because they made me uncomfortable; I only called each time I hear a voice note or see a message.
It was heart-breaking that someone was abducted and driven in a vehicle for over 30 minutes, blindfolded, with no checkpoints on the road and no security on the road. It was obvious that security outfits in Orlu were also scared of their lives and their patrol have become limited and restricted. This boils down to how the state has failed in securing its people and communities, allowing catastrophe to take over, chasing more people away from their homes.
My father was released on the seventh day after we have paid a ransom. My uncle and my brother’s friend carried the bag of money to meet them at a junction. He was not released the same day. He was thrown out in the dark, on a lonely road, his legs chained, his clothes, a dead fabric; without a phone, he waited till morning when he got an okada rider that brought him home. He relocated from Orlu the same day.
When I spoke to him the following day, he said he couldn’t sleep in our hometown anymore because everyone he saw was looking like a kidnapper. I knew he was never going to forget that experience. The voice of those bandits would never leave his head.
