This article was extracted from my book, "Abduction Chronicles". To buy the book, go to https://bit.ly/2WhPVlS to order
I read somewhere that no human being will do anything and not have a reason for his or her actions. What we term as unreasonable or unjustifiable does not look as such in the eyes of the perpetrator. Even the madman has a reason for what he says and does. The armed robber is justified by his own logic of the appropriateness or at least the necessity of his crimes. The prostitute will give you reasons why she had to resort to selling her body. Everyone who does anything will give you a perfectly logical answer, or what they think is a perfectly coherent explanation, for what they have done or are doing.
However, society is upheld by norms and rules and when people act outside of that rule, then such acts become an exception. Unfortunately, when there are many people acting out the exception, it is no longer called an exception, rather it becomes the norm.
As I had said earlier, the people who commit crime have reasons for their actions, and they can give a logical explanation why that was either the best or the only course of action at that time. During my period of captivity, I had the chance of meditating on this phenomenon, and below is my submission.
There are broadly three categories of people in Nigeria today as I see it. I have classified them into the usurpers, the victims, and the victimised. The usurpers are the rulers, the politicians, the people in power, the bosses of establishments, the bourgeoisie; the blue blood etc. Then there are the victims. The first class of people in this group of victims are those people who feel that they should have been amongst the usurpers, so when they find themselves outside of the corridors of power, they start to claim that they are victims. The second class of people in the victims’ category comprise of those who feel entitled to getting more than everyone else because of the circumstances of and/or the geography of their birth. They are either the son of the soil, or the minorities, or the least of any grouping of people.
Then we have the category of people I refer to as the victimised. This class includes pretty much the rest of us who are at the receiving end of the misrule and the usurpation of the usurper group. The victimised are any class of people, rich or poor, educated or not, who have had to suffer the consequences of the actions and the arguments of the first two groups.
I agree that this is in a sense a very broad categorisation, but it mostly works for the purpose of this discourse. I grew up in a generation that just missed out on everything. We missed out on free school meals, scholarships, free education, free this and free that. In essence, we missed out on the best years of Nigeria. We missed out on a time when there was hardly any power cut; when graduates come out of school with a job, a car and a house waiting for them; when all you needed for a free or subsidised plane ticket is your NYSC or even university ID card; a time when the railways were working; when the industries were working; when there was a hope and a future for the country. Our parents and uncles will tell us, with smacking lips, how nice those days were. They were catered for in the University by the system: they didn’t pay fees; they didn’t wash their clothes; they were never in a room with 23 others students (in a room designed for four). They had all the goodies of Nigeria and left nothing; so when we came, they told us we were late.
The politicians across all the republics we have had in this country are the usurpers, followed by the military. The politicians inherited a good country at independence, but with their greed and avarice, they destroyed it. They plundered the economy of the nation, lived large; destroyed our colonial legacies, changed names of streets and institutions from their colonial names to their own gaudy names. They mismanaged the economy, fought themselves, polarised the country, and sowed seeds of discord amongst people who had lived together in peace for decades before then. With all these going on, the soldiers who were looking on with envy from their barracks’ windows could no longer contain their greed. They overthrew the politicians and started enjoying these goodies for themselves. Power play, nepotism, ethnic and religious sentiments came in, and after a fratricidal civil war that raged on for three and half years, we no longer had a country. We have been staggering from one form of governance to another since then, from military rule to democracy, back to the military and now again in a democracy. We were at first looking for the magic wand that will fix the country, and when we got tired of looking for that magic wand, we started to look for a saviour; someone to take the pains away and in one moment, restore Nigeria back to its old glory.
While all these were going on, our institutions got debased; our infrastructure became first epileptic, then archaic, then it collapsed. Our universities went from being ivory towers to houses of ignominies. Students were spending more time at home than in school. Their teachers and lecturers fought a war they could never win, with the world’s most uneducated leaders – the soldiers who were ruling us first from the nuzzle of their legal guns – and then from the nuzzles of their illegal guns which were now wielded by the garrisons of untrained criminals they had unwittingly raised through the numerous backward and disruptive policies enacted during their reign of insensitivity.
Between 1983 and 1999, the rape of Nigeria which had started from about 1963 became entrenched and was taken to the next level. Politicians of the second republic lived large, with one of them famously bottling an eponymous champagne brand (a champagne that bore his own name as its label!). With oil money awash, they didn’t have any problems with money. Midway through the life of that republic, the petrodollar economy ran into troubles, but the politicians could not be bothered. They continued building houses, marrying wives, ferrying entire families abroad to live and school. They started to borrow money to fund these opulent lifestyles, and surely in no time, we were up to our necks in debts to the London club, the Paris club, and to all kinds of clubs. The politicians had blown away our collective wealth and exchanged our prosperity for a time of extreme hardship.
With the economy in shambles, the military returned again in 1983 with a now familiar Muhamadu Buhari being the hatchet man who took over power back then. His reign was short-lived, and when he was bloodlessly removed, just about halfway past his second year in power, by the evil genius, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB), Nigerians were ecstatic. As usual, Nigerians apparently believed that life during the civilian administrations was more preferred by most Nigerians than the regimental life imposed by the Buhari/Idiagbon junta. This was to become the typical reaction to all future changes of government.
Their joy was to be short-lived as things only got worse during the subsequent 14 years of 3 successive military regimes starting from IBB to Abacha and terminating with Gen Abdusalam Abubakar who handed over power to politicians (this time a mix of very rich and bored retired generals and their old-time political accomplices). Nigeria was dying! General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida said in a perplexed tone during one of the many press interviews he gave that he does not understand why the economy of Nigeria had not yet collapsed. This was around 1991 or 1992. They had stolen money and gotten tired of stealing, yet Nigeria, wounded but refusing to die, staggered on.
The academia and the proletariat in general at first stood aside, trying to be the voice of reason and a model of professionalism amidst a free for all scramble for the wealth of our motherland that was being perpetrated by the military and their political appointees. After a while, with Structural Adjustment Programme impoverishing proud professionals and technocrats, and several strikes and industrial actions that yielded nothing apart from the massive brain drain of our academic and professional communities (with the rest turning to farming if they didn’t want to travel out), these groups too have had it. Having been pushed to the wall, they promptly abandoned all of their honest gaits and joined the scramble.
One could say that they were even worse than their progenitors in crime. One Vice-Chancellor in one of the then new generation universities in the south-west was quoted as threatening that his colleagues in the university senate cannot remove him, that he was ready for them with the most potent charms available!
To say that Nigeria had and still has potential is an understatement. There are yet untapped natural resources that if another country had just a tiny part of, they would be sorted for life. Yet we have them in abundance; gold, platinum, bitumen, coal, tin, bauxite, name it. Added to this is a seemingly unending arable land suitable for all types of crops and for all kinds of seasons. We have a population that can sustain itself eating and selling what it produces. Yet, with all these advantages, Nigeria is like a typical black man dressed as a king but sharing a bed with poverty; going around the world with a begging bowl, when wealth practically grows at his backyard. By the way, the illustrious Nigerian Poet, Dike Chukwumerije, first used these lines, but I am sure he won’t mind me reusing them here.
Decades of rot within the system dominated by these usurpers have naturally given rise to a parallel group of people who I call the agitators. They are the people who felt unfairly treated, and they either made their unhappiness felt by shouting the loudest or by rising up in arms against the nation. Trusting our group of usurpers, they would never want their feathers rustled, so every time a new group of agitators rise up, they will block their mouth with some of the wealth. Once the wealth gets into the hand of the leaders of those agitations, the agitation dies off. Then the cycle starts all over again.
There is, however, another set of agitators who will not shout. They just become a law unto themselves, starting a campaign of robbing Peter and Paul to pay themselves. An example can be a man who did not go to school, or who went to school at the instance of communal efforts, graduates without any employment for several years, and as a result, he begins a victim’s campaign. People in the victim category who become deviant in their behaviour rationalise the reasons for their criminality or aberrant behaviours. They justify their own illegalities by blaming the system, the government, everything and everyone else but themselves for the choices they have made. They forget that the system that was unfair to them, and the leaders that trampled on their privileges did not do it to them alone.
Other people suffered the same fate but decided to not fight back with criminality and illegality, choosing instead to rise up above the oppression to create something meaningful for themselves from the crumbs scattered around by the usurpers. This latter group continually try to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones; always seeing a silver lining in every cloud; they are the people I refer to as the victimised.
The victimised manage to survive in every situation by sheer willpower and adaptability. They escape the blackouts by generating their own electricity; they survive the lack of potable water supply by digging their own wells or boreholes if they can afford it, or by buying water from the ubiquitous Hausa water bearers called ‘abokis’ scattered around most urban neighbourhoods. The victimised survived the decay in government schools by paying through their noses for a private school education for their children, sometimes sending them abroad to the west, or to neighbouring Ghana for university education.
If they cannot afford overseas education, they either return them back to the rot of the public universities or try to muscle additional funds to get into the several private universities that now dot the Nigerian educational landscape.
The victimised survived the lack of medical care by making do with private hospitals owned by the same administrators of the public health institutions that have been turned into slaughter slabs or mere prescription rooms. They survive all kinds of debasement by their leaders, rising up each time like the Phoenix, stronger every time.
The victimised are the trampling ground for the people in the usurpers and the victims categories. The usurpers take money belonging to the victimised by pen robbery; the victims take it by armed robbery and other vices. The victimised are at the mercy of the law, at the mercy of their governors and their political office holders. They are at the mercy of their union leaders who use them as pawns in the power game, using them to get into the usurpers group before abandoning them and their ideologies; at the mercy of the ‘agberos’, the touts in the bus parks; at the mercy of the tax man; and at the mercy of the criminals – the men of the underworld who attack them in their homes and on the road day and night!
The usurpers have protections against the ‘victims’, but the victimised have no protection against anything or anybody. Working class people are impoverished every day by the people who rule them. They cart away their wealth and leave crumbs for them. When the common wealth of the country began to diminish, the rulers started raising IGR (internally generated revenue) campaigns to further deprive the working class of their already depleted, hard earned money. They tax their salaries, their water, their food, their houses, everything! They promise them that their taxes will work for them, but it never does. It only works for those who made the hollow promises to them in the first place.
Then, disappointed and bruised, the victimised withdraw into their little flats and duplexes; homes owned by the usurpers who also continue to increase their rents, taking it beyond the reach of what the man earning a minimum wage can ever afford. The victimised goes off to live at the edge of the cities, in mosquito invested shacks, like those found in the Marokos, the Makokos, the Ajegunles, and their likes dotted all around the cities of Nigeria. Unfortunately, no sooner do they get there and settle before they are displaced again from these new abodes. As new playing ground for the usurpers is needed from time to time, they take the land of the defenceless people legally acquiring it most of the time citing the decree 6 of 1978, infamously called the land use act.
As at the time of our independence as a nation, the victimised could be found mostly in the lower class and the middle class of the society. Shortly afterwards, just as the economic noose started to tighten around our necks, there was a further separation of the middle class into upper-middle class and the lower-middle class categories. The upper-middle class are the more highly paid civil servants; the proletariat that keeps the wheels turning, doing the bidding of their paymasters. They wear shinning suits, drive shinning cars, live in shining houses, all of these things acquired by debt. They are not poor, but they are also not rich. They are the bank workers, the oil company workers, the telecoms company executives, the manufacturing company executives, the stockbrokers, etc.
By and large, people in this class have now become a target for everyone else. When the victims are looking for targets, they dare not go after the usurpers, because the usurpers have used money to buy protection; most of them have also used the state’s apparatus to guarantee their invincibility. What does the victim do? He goes after the victimised middle-class oil worker or the bank executive. He goes after them to get his own ‘share’ of the loot not knowing most of the victimised have worked really hard to get their own bread.
Initially, we didn’t have the victims group, as there were only the usurpers and the victimised. But when anyone from the group of the victimised take the negative and illegal path to seek redress, he joins the victims group. The graduate armed robber was amongst the victimised until he took up the gun. The hardworking government officer was part of the victimised until he began pen robbery. The Union official was in the victimised category until he forged an alliance with the ruling class and started to ride a SUV and live well above his legal means. Essentially, he has used the misery of his colleagues as a bargaining chip with the usurpers. Unknowingly, having joined the so-called ‘privileged’ group, he has also turned into a target for the armed robbers looking for people to harass daily.
When a nation is in the grip of poverty and unemployment, the lines between evil and good; between legality and illegality; and between what is moral and immoral becomes very blurry. People are at their wits’ end; they are at their tipping point, and they can either tip to one side or the other. No one can and should justify illegality. But those who become deviant to the system often look at the ruling class and how they have usurped their authority and their influence to amass wealth at every other person’s expense. They reckon that if the ruling class can break the rules, then they, the poor also reserves the right to do the same.
Therefore, an unending cycle of misery continues for the victimised. The usurpers take what should be for the victimised, and the victims take whatever he has left, sometimes including his dignity, his hope and sadly even his life. When he or his abused children gets tired of what is being served them, they also join the victims, and start to demand a remedy for themselves in the land.
In all of these, I have found something fascinating. Even though more people are leaving the victimised group either to death or to ‘promotion’ into the ranks of the victims, ultimately, the number of people in the victimised group continues to increase. Why is this so? More people are impoverished daily, faster than those who are able to climb out of the group, and that is what continues to swell the number.
The people who kidnapped me were victimised by the government, the supreme usurpers, and by their own leaders, who are accomplices to the government. Either they were directly victimised when they didn’t have parents who could afford to send them to school, or they were indirectly victimised when the government took their oil-bearing lands and gave them abject poverty, almost total neglect, the dearth of social amenities, and an environmental wasteland of epic proportion in return. They became victimised when their own leaders took their derivation money and used it to plant big, brazen mansions in Abuja, Lagos, London, New York, Atlanta, Dubai, Johannesburg, etc.
Either way, they were robbed; robbed of their childhood dreams and aspirations. They were robbed of their prime which was mostly spent working as labourers to the deflowerers of their land. Until one day, they decided they will stop being victimised and will demand their own rights, or obtain their entitlements by hook or crook. They could not fight the usurpers, but it was not for lack of trying. The foot soldiers quickly found out that we are all living on an ‘animal farm’. Their leaders were ultimately brought into the wealthy circles of the usurpers, and they abandoned the struggle. They may have reckoned that it was far more pleasurable to live in an air-conditioned mansion in Maitama than to live a crude existence in the Niger Delta creeks.
Since fighting the government that owes them so much but pays them so little had become known as criminality, they abandoned that course and turned against people in the group of the victimised, where they themselves have sojourned for so long. They blindly began to see in the oil worker, the bank worker or the company executive who rides an official car and lives in an official mansion a justifiable target for their anger. They assumed everyone who drives a new car or lives in a big house must have stolen their wealth!
So they took me because they could not kidnap the governor or his wife, or his kids, or his officials. They abducted me because they could not get to Aso Rock; because I was always a sitting duck, a beacon of light that gave them hope before, but which they now prefer to see as their quick ticket out of poverty!
On my first full day in captivity, I had some time to speak with the guys, and they mostly complained about the system, and how things are tough for them. They complained about the inequality in the land and the dearth of opportunities for them through which they can also have a future. They complained of what a wasteland their ancestral homes have become, and what a hopeless lot the youths have now been turned into with the full participation of the politicians and sometimes also through their own cooperation. They talk of mates killed in endless fights over the proceeds of bunkering; over attempts at rigging elections for their debased and deluded leaders; over political and communal clashes that directly determine who rules their region, and – essentially who gains control of their wealth. They say they have been dealt a harsh hand by fate, but now they want to change it. Sadly, they have chosen to change it the only way they have come to know how which is through violence.
I told them that we are both in the victimised group. I am not a bourgeoisie; I am a proletariat. Like them, I have been disadvantaged by the same people who have also disadvantaged them. I am not enjoying anything from the government, the same government that has impoverished them. The only thing I had that those who have taken to the negative path to seek redress didn’t have is God, the opportunities He brought my way, and a conviction for doing good to all people; the conviction to rise above whatever hand was dealt me, by fate or by my government.
The WAEC guy actually told me that he was doing this job of kidnapping because he has no other way. He never knew his parents, and as far back as he remembers he has always been on the street. At the end of the day, it was a question of survival. He had to survive, and he reckoned that if there is no legal way to survival, then he will make his own way anyhow. I perceive that they have no issues with me, I was just a meal ticket. They basically saw me as someone who will deliver the cash they need to advance on the ladder of life.
He told me that he still wants to go to school, and I think he said he wanted to be a lawyer or something. It is funny though that even though he wants to be a lawyer, yet he did not stop to consider the legality or morality of the choices he is making towards the achievement of the goal he has set. He doesn’t see it as a question of morality, instead he sees it as a question of survival.
I told them that we are both in the victimised group, but not being able to get to the usurpers, they have resorted to attacking those of us who are trying to keep the community going. I told them that they are angry at the wrong set of people and that their actions are going to put them in the exact same position that they found me, a well to do man in the land of poverty. Eventually, we will all become targets, victimised by those who are supposed to lead us and attacked by those who have had the same misfortune like we have, bearing the heavy yoke of an irresponsible leadership. I can only hope they understand all the things I told them!
Folarin Philip Banigbe
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This article is an extract from my book, Abduction Chronicles, written in the wake of my horrific abduction from my home in Port Harcourt, South South Nigeria in 2016.
This particular chapter was a result of my reflection about the complexities in the economic caste system of Nigeria, and the actors in that caste.
I encourage you to please spare some time to read the entire book.
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