FW: REVEALED! How Nigerian Kidnappers Operate
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"But anyway, one my childhood friends is a Mobile Police Officer. Great guy, phd in something. I gave him my theory; he fortified it with details including names of guys deported from overseas who were killed in kidnapping raids. One of them was deported from a Texas City --he was in it with his father, his mom, his sister and other brothers. All of them, except the sister who was the cook for the victims, were wiped out in one raid.
Then the father of my friend, the mobile police guy, was kidnapped. I told him to fight it out and he said no, that he was going to pay the ransom. I was surprised. I ran home and we dealt with the situation. We worked with the negotiator for the kidnappers and paid the money. I asked why he chooses that route. He said he couldn't risk losing his dad in the process. Could be the overarching reason families keep the Police at bay after a kidnapping.
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"I have been looking into this kidnapping thing for some time and it is a very complex industry. It has scouts, snatchers, prison wardens, cooks, community mollifiers, and even little children as lookouts. The kingpin who finances the whole thing is in most cases someone that would pass as a fine gentleman of the community. Most of them live in Abuja, where they buy up properties with money obtained from the sordid crime.
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"But our governments did not have the foresight to make plans to reduce the chances of kidnapping putting down roots in Nigeria. It is here now and exacerbated by high unemployment and lawlessness."
I have a few thoughts in response to the Kidnapping essay from the Elombah.com link. The essay shows that kidnapping, as an underground industry, like drug trafficking; human trafficking and oil bunkering, at the large structural level, interacts with several factors, one of which is whether other profitable business opportunities are open, available and accessible to young impatient go getting Nigerian people in a wicked age of accessible gun - ones that could engage their creativity, innovation, energy, drive, hope and dreams. Whether there are opportunities that could engage their faculties in the life long process of dreaming dreams, catching up to dreams, fulfilling dreams, meeting whatever they need and what they want and feel they are entitled to in a country like Nigeria.
The thing with all big money making illicit businesses is that others not only try to break into them, probably taking theirs away from territories already dominated by certain kingpins and dons, but those who are in it look for vulnerable people to recruit into the business. Now, a whole host of factors continue to produce such vulnerable recruit candidates in many part of Nigeria. Also, with guns in the hands of young impressionable people, they feel perhaps for the first time in their lives what empowerment could be, however negative one feels this kind of empowerment is. I imagine that it is heady and the risk of it, the danger and the dare of it, according to psychologists, quite apart from the possibility or reality of the heist they make, is a powerful psychological reinforcement for the continuation of the business among a certain age group and other people who are predisposed to violence and may be crime. These are intoxicating businesses; deadly to everybody involved in it.
If thoughtful counter programs are not devised by the various levels of governments – programs that must go beyond knee jack reactions to incidents of kidnapping, there's a likelihood it will spread (many other category of people want to break into the business); if it is a territorial business as I think the above essay implies it is, then it is likely that new entrants might want to move further away from direct control of the big guys. Hence, not only do we face a likelihood of it assuming an epidemic but also a pandemic character, especially, as unlike oil bunkering, the raw materials involved in the production process are fairly widespread. Can you imagine that kids are already involved in the business, (as lookouts, according to this essay) meaning that they are been trained to value the business and be skilled in it and to be psychologically inured to whatever evil accompanies this kind of horrid business right from very tender age!
The author mentions the fact that there has been a lack of foresight on the part of our governments. Now foresight requires that you have an abiding interest in the future, in creating better prospect for a prosperous, more efficient, more civil and productive future. Many in our governments have claimed that they have the interest of Nigeria at heart, striving to prove how detribalized they are and how with their lives they have defended the unity of Nigeria and continue to insist that Nigeria cannot and will not be allowed to break into pieces. Unfortunately, their more prosaic, day to day programatic actions belie this supposition. They seem to be concerned with grabbing whatever is available now with no regard for the future. Their actions and inactions seem to be directed towards insuring their individual present, as if they secretly harbour the belief that the country may break up at any time.
It's possible that something may precipitate a reformation within this set of people and within these increasingly injurious governing contraptions that we keep fashioning over us. More likely, though, I believe that the change that the country needs may be of a more revolutionary nature – new people, new thinking, a drastic new constitution and reconsitutioning of structures and systems – all directed towards progressive and humane outcomes. It is not enough, its more than clear now I believe, to require that a bad system reform itself. A bad system must be faced with the possibility that it could be replaced with a better one, so that it either is forced to reform, or is indeed suffers replacement.
There is a new generation of Nigerians out there and their percentage is higher than the combination of all the old hands; they are also daring; they relate more to the future and have more to lose if the future is mortgaged today; they are rearing to assert their young, go getting energies. They are waiting to be organized, to be intimated of and thoroughly familiarized with the power within their demographic grip, and introduced to the possibilities that their coming into their own as an organized revolutionary political force entail. We get these people from all across the country and they can easily consign to the archives the largest among all the chop I chop organizations that are currently holding the country to ransom.
Right now, the problem we have to deal with is two fold: (a) corrupted and inefficient political leadership at all governing levels that is incapable of demonstrating any foresight, a leadership that we have been begging to reform itself without any major success and (b) weak, uncoordinated, disorganized and uncreative leadership among the truly nationalist elements that has to come into his own as a force with a duty to promote a civil, productive, and democratic vision for the country and with a duty to work towards ensuring that the vision is programmatically translated into reality – a vision that goes beyond the now.
From: "elombah daniel" <elsdaniel@yahoo.com>
To: "USAAfrica Dialogue" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, 15 December, 2012 9:16:27 AM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fw: REVEALED! How Nigerian Kidnappers Operate
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