A study of reported cases of Kidnap-for-ransom in the media reveals that the crime has become perhaps the biggest security threat in Nigeria.
Tears dropped down the cheeks of Catherine Ukpekpi as she narrated her family’s ordeal. It was April and her husband, Ben, the leader of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) in Cross River State, had been kidnapped four weeks earlier. It was the second time in 16 months that he had been kidnapped.
Mrs Ukpekpi said the circumstances of both incidents were identical. Just as in December 2019, he was again abducted at the front of their house in Calabar, and by people she suspected were the same.
“Two days later they opened communication and said we should pay N150 million before they release my husband. I asked them N150,000 or N150 million? They said ‘madam N150 million! We abducted your husband for money. Pay us N150 million, not a kobo less. He is the NLC chairman’”.
Mr Ukpekpi told PREMIUM TIMES that the kidnappers occasionally allowed his family to speak with him to show he is not dead.
A month before Mr Ukpekpi was kidnapped, some 750 kilometres away in the Southwestern region of Nigeria, Ayodeji Odetunde, a final year student at the country’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, was kidnapped at his father’s poultry farm.
He was released three days later after his father paid a ransom of N12 million. The kidnappers originally demanded N100 million.
When PREMIUM TIMES visited the family in April, Ayodeji was still receiving treatment for hallucination and shock.
His elder brother, Olumide Odetunde, narrated Ayodeji’s ordeal in the hands of his kidnappers.
“They walked from Apete to around Iseyin. But they were only walking at night because of their weapons. My brother couldn’t distinguish whether they were Hausas or Fulanis but the workers that saw them recognised them and my parents actually saw them when they went to give them the money,” he said.
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