If you were never kidnapped, raped or had anyone very close to you kidnapped, raped or killed, that is when you most likely will be accusing people who talk about it of raising unnecessary alarm.
Let’s assume that you are a small farmer in one remote village in Katsina state struggling to feed your family. One day criminals came and picked you and took you to one of their camps whose locations are well known to Government.
Kidnap the Trending Business in our Socity
They asked your family to pay a ransom of something in the region of N20m. After days of negotiations it came down to N1.5m but your family could only raise N900K after selling your farm produce and receiving donations from friends and relations.
After begging your kidnappers, they agreed to release you only for them to kidnap another person from a nearby village the next day. Will you say I m raising unnecessary alarm because I am talking about you?
Of course you are not the one because you can read this. So it doesn’t matter. May be I m lying just because I m against the Government for my personal reasons. But why not go and find out yourself?
Now imagine that you are living in that rural area whose people are living in such an uncertainty of not knowing who and in which village the next victim will be. Will you say I m raising an unnecessary alarm or talking too much?
Thank God. Those things are almost history. We no longer have bandits coming in large numbers to attack communities like they did before the peace accord.
What we now have are very few cases, too small in number for anybody to accuse the Government of not playing its role of providing security to the people.
For example, unlike before, the number of kidnap and rape cases in the past one month in Jibia LGA is less than 20 and these problems are all over the country. Buhari cannot be everywhere. Is that the way you are thinking? May God save us from that kind of thinking.
As for us, we shall, by God’s will, continue to pray and speak to authorities because our people are at the receiving end. That is the only thing we can do as ordinary citizens.
By Abdussamad Umar Jibia
