In Nigeria, the poor are damned

ON Tuesday last week, while returning to Abuja from Kano, a member of the House of Representatives, Honourable Garba Durbunde, was kidnapped by gunmen. As soon as his colleagues got to know of this, they pulled all the strings they knew and secured his release less than 24 hours after his abduction. Durbunde stayed the night of Tuesday with his abductors, but was in the warm embrace of his family by Wednesday night.

In September last year, Mrs Margaret Emefiele, wife of the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, was abducted along the Benin-Agbor Road. Immediately this got to the hearing of the authorities, the Inspector-General of Police Special Monitoring and Intelligence Team was dispatched to the area and in record time, the release of the CBN governor’s wife was secured.

But unfortunately the same spirited sprint with which the ruling class rescues its members who got caught in the net of kidnappers has not been replicated in the cases of those considered to be outside the circle of the powerful. For about 11 days now, two principals and six students of Lagos State Model College, Igbo Nla in Epe, Lagos State, have been in the custody of kidnappers, yet only promises have been made by the police and government, nothing concrete has been achieved. No Inspector-General of Police Special Monitoring and Intelligence Team has been dispatched; no air surveillance has been carried out to rescue these people. The type of swiftness witnessed in the cases of both Mrs Emefiele and Honourable Durbunde is patently lacking in this particular situation. If there was any doubt about the non-importance of the average Nigerian, this case has completely erased it. While the thought of an honourable member of the National Assembly or the wife of the apex bank governor spending nights in the custody of kidnappers is repugnant to the authorities, they believe that having school children and their teachers kept perpetually by abductors will not cause much damage to the system. Therefore, while the whole machinery of the state was deployed to ensure the rescue of the important ones who fell prey to kidnappers, the concerned authorities are not as keen to ensure early release of the less important Nigerians...