By Umar Haruna Tami
The people of Funtua Local Government Area of Katsina State had, on Friday morning, staged a protest to express their anger over continuous kidnappings in the town and the sorrounding villages which happen almost everyday.
The protest followed the kidnapping of eleven people on Thursday night, among which include women, a girl and a child. However, Police used tear gas to disperse the protesters shortly after the protest started.
Kidnapping has become endemic in the outskirts of Funtua town making it hardly a week to pass by without a news or two about either a kidnap attempt or a successful kidnap of residents.
Last Thursday night, around ten o’clock, kidnappers came to Sabuwar Abuja and kidnapped some men, women, children and shot one person who refused to open the door of his house.
At the beginning, when the kidnappers came to the victims’ houses they knocked on the doors and threatened to kill the victims if they refuse open. This forced many surrender and open the door.
But these days, the first thing they do after knocking a victim’s door is to use digger and axe to break it. If that doesn’t work, they break the house wall and enter the house through the hole and fetch the people.
When the people understood the new strategy the kidnappers use, they opted to fleeing their homes in the evening and move to their relatives’ houses in the town where they can sleep safely and come back to their homes in the morning.
Men and women from villages also come to the town in the evening to find shelter. Among these fleeing women, the kidnappers met some, in the recent incident, lately on their way to the city and kidnapped them.
None is spared in this barbarism the kidnappers are perpetrating against the people of Funtua including women, girls and children. In June, a kidnappers’ informant was arrested in the same area where Thursday’s incident occurred.
The victim confessed that his role in the crime is that of nforming kidnappers on the whereabouts of their potential victims. He also also confessed to murdering his neighbor who recognized him in one of the kidnapping operations he participated. In that operation, it was that same neighbor they attempted to kidnap.
His wife also recognized the informant, but he didn’t realize that. They kidnapped the neighbor’s wife, demanded ten million ransom and after her release, she blew the whistle and the informant was arrested by DSS.
The bottled anger the residents expressed during the protest over these incessant kidnappings has to do with the fact that Sabuwar Abuja, where the cases of kidnapping become rampant, has over two thousand houses.
And in all these houses, many people in the inner part of the town have relatives who, when kidnapped, those people have to contribute their own money to pay ransom for the release of their kidnapped relatives.
Although the protest was short-lived, people are waiting to see the outcome of their expressed anger. The residents and relatives of the people in the areas where kidnapping becomes the order of the day, may not afford to continue paying ransom and living in poverty and, at the same time, be captives in their homes.
Therefore, the government should, as a matter of urgency, look for ways to safeguard the lives of its people and, at the same time, pay attention to the influx of internally displaced persons from surrounding towns and villages, who are now populating all the nooks and crannies and the suburbs of Funtua City.
Umar Haruna Tami wrote from Funtua and can be reached via;
umartami1996@gmail.com
