Nigeria has been blighted by abductions for years, the major ones carried by the terror group Boko Haram. In mid-April 2014, Boko Haram shot into international headlines with the kidnapping of 276 female students aged 16 to 18 from a school in the town of Chibok in Borno State .
The kidnappings kicked off a global campaign, with a record number of the world’s activists waving placards and wearing t-shirts proclaiming #BringBackOurGirls.
While Boko Haram abducted on a grand scale, it didn’t pioneer the outrage in Nigeria. For years, kidnappings for ransom had been the tool for all manner of extortionists and other criminals in Nigeria, only that they were doing it at the retail level.
Now, it has exploded into, as someone remarked, the fastest growing sector of the economy. On Sunday gunmen in Zaria, a town in the northwest Nigerian state of Kaduna, abducted at least 140 schoolchildren . At least eight people were also abducted at a tuberculosis and leprosy centre in the area. Two nurses and a 12-month-old child were among those swept up.
The next day 150 students went missing after armed men raided a boarding school in Kaduna state. It was the 10th mass kidnapping at an educational establishment since December in northwest Nigeria.
Over that period, more than 1,000 students have been abducted, with nine of them killed.
A journalist reported that falling crude prices in the oil-dependent economy, and the ravages of Covid-19, have combined to turn an already bad economic situation into a nightmare. People have now become a leading commodity. Kidnappers are not asking for the millions of dollars you see in the movies.
The poor people are paying a few thousand shillings, and even chicken, to have their dear ones released. The outlook for the future is gloomy, with several commentators saying Nigeria’s kidnap crisis will only get worse for the foreseeable future with an economy in the doldrums, and a corrupt incompetent state unable to deal with it as a security issue either.
Nigeria’s kidnaps are a deformity produced by poverty and inequality, and represent one of many challenges that governments and societies in Africa today have to confront. At the state level, however, they were not set up to deal with these problems, and our elections aren’t made to produce politicians who can easily find solutions to the crises.
The story about African states’ primary tools of governance being violence, repression, and corruption is an old one. Protestors demanding democracy? Shoot them, and jail their leaders. University students clamouring for better food? Shut the place down. Pesky opposition politicians and trade unionists, who won’t shut up and you can’t imprison them because it is too risky? Well, buy them off.
At the relatively more enlightened level, in recent years building stuff (roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, markets) have proved popular where good old-fashioned shooting and prison are untenable.
Service delivery protests
However, the kinds of protests, demands on governments, and problems that have now emerged can’t be dealt with in these ways. Take service delivery protests that we see in Kenya, South Africa, and are now more common on the continent than traditional protests. Unlike demonstrations for democracy, they often cut across parties. If a government shoots down fellows protesting lack of water or the terrible state of a road to their side of town, half the people it will kill could be its supporters who voted for it. It can’t pay the ransoms for all kidnapped citizens, either.
In many African cities, the pollution of water sources has become a mega health peril. Nairobi River is filled with vaccines owing to the dumping of raw sewage into it. A study published in 2019 found that the river’s antibiotic levels were 100 times the safe level.
The study worried that with millions of people ingesting worrying levels of antibiotic-laden water without their knowledge, it was exacerbating the problem of resistance to common diseases. You can’t build your way out of that problem, or shoot it.
With all the second-hand electronics Africa imports, e-waste has become a deadly source of pollution. In some West African countries that are not hilly, the biggest hills are e-waste, with eye-popping piles of dead computers, TV, fridges, phones, reaching for the sky. The garbage trucks run by corrupt municipal governments and waste cartels are impotent in the face of these e-waste mountains.
Our electoral politics is heavily biased towards leaders who promise to bring stuff that can be built and seen like roads, railways, dams, and electricity poles. When politicians offer health programmes it is usually immunisations (funded by international organisations and UNICEF), or hospital buildings. But these won’t help in the fight against cancer.
Political systems will have to put massive amounts of investments in things like medical research, disease surveillance, recycling e-waste, and new social safety systems, to get out of these problems. The problem for politicians is that those are things you can’t photograph and put on the president’s re-election posters or Facebook page.
Doesn’t matter, though. If they don’t change, many will be jobless soon.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans. @cobbo3
