Nothing gave 31 -year old Yussuf Hameed Ola who was born in Lagos any premonition that his day on that Tuesday morning in 2022 would become a nightmare of immense proportions. It all started around 8 am when he, a lover of nature and serenity, sat under a tree at Birnin Gwarri, a village in Birnin Gwari Local Government Area which lies on the road to Kaduna City in Kaduna State.
On the tree, two birds were chirping, probably a preliminary to mating to produce one of their kind in order not to suffer extinction.
Ola was lost in thought on the birds on that tree and the leaves waving to the gentle breeze when a car stopped in a screech of tyres, dust and dry leaves. The doors flung open as three figures whose appearance gave them away as less than pious human beings came out.
One of them who wore a black pair of jeans trousers pulled off one corner of his zebra T-shirt to expose the handle of a pistol. Nobody preached to Ola. to obey implicitly all commands issued by the assailants. Although nervous, Ola cooperated. Who would not be gentle and do the bidding of such trigger-happy criminals? The circumstance called for quick obedience!
The men shooed the victim like a sheep with its tail between its hindquarters into the car. While one of them drove, the two others sandwiched him in the middle in the back seat, with one of them pointing a gun at his rib cage. Ola’s heart was pumping blood like an injector or carburettor that had gone haywire.
“One of them handed me a cigarette made of Indian hemp”, Ola said, during the interview after he managed to escape.
“He instructed me to smoke it because we were going on a trip that day and I hadn’t done so before. When I refused, he slapped me and told me that I wouldn’t be able to work without smoking. I took the cigarette and started smoking it.”
Since that was his first experience with hemp smoking, the man couldn’t understand himself anymore. His head was making a wild gyration. He started seeing how stars, the moon and the entire galaxy were in a whirligig! “My eyes were seeing double,” he lamented.
This victim narrated further: “The man yelled at me as I began to cry. I said I don’t understand my health again. He took me to their leader’s place. All of them started laughing at me, they said with the small smoke that you took you are acting like a compound idiot.”
Before getting to their leader’s place, the victim said his captors asked him to look down at the carpet- a ploy to make sure he does not master the geography of the area which could lead to revealing the secret place. It is usually a strategy that an owner of a dog or cat adopts when selling it to a buyer. Such pets are blindfolded so that they cannot trace their way back to the home of the original owner.
The vehicle stopped in front of a big gate which clanged open. They drove in. The captors and the victims moved inside an expensive sitting room of a yet-to-be-completed building.
“I was made to sit on the floor, with my hands tied to my back. I looked like a ram being taken for slaughter! Secretly in my heart, I prayed that I would survive this Golgotha,” Ola narrated mournfully.
Suddenly, the big boss came from one side of the house. He had a beard. He had a turban on his head. When he spoke, his mouth revealed a gap which gave him a piratical appearance.
“Yes, well done. Well done.” The criminal boss saluted the kidnappers.
“The master told someone to give me milk and food which gave me a little bit of balance, from my giddy state. Around evening they left me alone and my abductors went on another trip. When they returned, they had abducted another guy who happened to be my friend, Sulaimon Azeez Alade.
I slept the deep sleep of a drunk too much to the extent that I didn’t know anything till I woke up in the afternoon.”
At this point, decided to adopt what is called the Stockholm syndrome, “a proposed condition or theory that tries to explain why hostages sometimes develop a psychological bond with their captors.
Generally, they are threatening the victims to join them. Failure to comply a victim would be killed. They are also using them as slaves to wash their clothes.
Ola revealed further: “The master again asked one of his men to untie me. I thanked him and lamented about the situation of things in the country – joblessness, inflation, and others. My Stockholm syndrome approach seemed to be working. I even helped them to kill a lizard that strayed inside the house. They started having confidence in me.
“Their master told me to go and bring something inside. That was where I saw where they kept our phones which they collected. I took my phone and I put it in my pocket. I went to the small bush where we used it as a toilet. I pulled down my pair of trousers and bent down as if I wanted to shit. I opened my phone to text my people at home but there was no network and it was painful. I wore my trousers and started thinking of every means of escape.”
The confidence building that the victim adopted was working. One day, the master sent him to fetch water for them thinking that he would not abscond.
In the victim’s words: “I got to the river. I looked around and saw no one in there. I thought immediately that this was the opportunity to escape. That was how I entered the bush and started running for like 30 minutes. I was totally weak.
I sat down. After five minutes I heard serious gunshots. I stood again and continued running till I didn’t hear the gunshots again.”
Watching many action movies in the past helped him. He started walking zig-zag in case his abductors might shoot or want to cross him. On the second day, he entered a well-kept cassava farm. He checked around and saw a road and followed it when he ran into a farmer coming.
“I explained myself to the man who said the environment was very dangerous. He took me to their village and gave me food and water. He told me to pull off my clothes and he gave me a Muslim woman’s cloth (hijab) to wear to disguise. He took me to a road to link the expressway where I could get a bus to our village. The man said I should not mention their village to the bus owner in case they later got me because they would kill me and him and burn the village down.”
He continued: “The good Samaritan stopped a car for me and paid the driver, the man advised me that my life was in danger and that on getting home, I should plan to leave the county because the criminals have connections in all states.”
They were not bluffing! These desperados who came in as Boko Haram, bandits and kidnappers had threatened the whole nation before, saying they were going to finish up Nigeria.
Ola explained further: “I got to where there was a network. I called my mother to explain what happened. She didn’t pick up her call. I kept wondering what happened and what condition would she be in. I called one of our neighbours in the street. She told me bandits attacked our village and our house was burnt down! I asked about my mother the neighbour said she didn’t know her condition that everywhere had been scattered and that I should run for my life.”
That was how Ola started begging for money to travel back to Lagos. On getting there, he met a guy and explained himself to him. He graciously accommodated Ola and told him that the best option for his life was to leave the country because they might be thinking Ola would expose their secret.
“That is why I planned to come here.”
Later Ola got a call from Sulaimon Azeez Aade, his friend who was kidnapped with him on the phone. According to Ola, ” I heard someone threatening me that I am going to be killed if I did not come back to them. I ended the call and blocked the number but I’m seriously scared. Some minutes later, I got another call from a strange number. I didn’t want to pick but I was thinking of my mother be she was the one. On the line, a man was threatening me again that my number was going to be tracked.”
The man on the phone added that they ” have people working for them in every state of Nigeria.”
It was not an empty boast at all. Ola and everyone knew that fact because the desperados had equipment they were using in the bush -like guns, laptop computers, satellites, bombs etc.
As Ola put it further: “That is why I decided to leave the country and I know my life will be safe in any country like America, because those people might have a connection in different countries but they can’t try that nonsense here in America.’