It’s impossible to fully capture the challenges we’ve gone through, because you can’t pray for even your enemy to be kidnapped by bandits. There was a day I was working on my farm, and my son went to fetch water at the riverside. He saw bandits far away coming and he ran and hid somewhere. He could not come back to where I was.
Suddenly, they met me on the farm. I ran but I wasn’t lucky to escape and they abducted me. Instantly, they tore my shirt and tied my hands behind my back. I was asked to be on the bike and we went deep into the forest; they waited for some minutes and later kept moving with me until we reached the destination where I was detained. They tied me with chains from my neck to my hands and my legs.
I met some people already there. There was one stubborn boy among them who kept beating and insulting us. I spent the first week there and they didn’t give us food to eat. They even only gave us water every two days. There was a time they left. I don’t know where they went, but during that period, we spent five days without drinking water, and it led to the death of four children in the camp.
After some days, one of them felt pity and sometimes gave me water and food to eat. He didn’t do it with his colleagues’ consent.
I was there for up to three weeks to a month before my ransom was delivered. My family paid 3.5 million naira as agreed. But after they received the money, they also demanded a Honda motorcycle before my release.
My family came back home and kept negotiating with them on the phone. We sold all we had and there was nowhere to get more money for the motorcycle. Later, they agreed to collect an additional one million naira instead of the motorcycle, which was raised through begging and pleading from neighbours and other community members.
The one million was delivered to them, but still they detained me for an additional two weeks, and those two weeks were the worst period of my life. Every day I received over 60 lashes of cane, no food, no water. I suffered a lot to the extent that after my release, I couldn’t urinate until a catheter was placed on me for urination. The worst situation was seeing a small boy whose father you are older than torturing, insulting, and beating you.
After my return, I have a family, but I don’t have anything to feed them. I lost everything: my cattle, my house, my farms, and every means of livelihood. It is just because I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I would rather die than be in the kind of situation I am now in. Life is becoming difficult every day. My relatives have almost exhausted all they had on the matter, too.
With all the insecurity challenges, I can’t leave my community because I don’t know where to go and why I will even run. I don’t have anything and I am doing nothing, so what should I run for? I’d rather choose to die here than run to another location. As I already said, I’ll even choose death over anything now. Wallahi, if bandits can come now, I will not move or go anywhere; I will be here no matter what happens to me.
I am struggling with injuries inside my body, and I have nothing to eat at home. Every day, I must go out looking for what to eat.
As I’m speaking to you now, I don’t know where one of my sons went. Since the insurgency, he left home; I don’t know his whereabouts, not even a phone call to know whether he is alive or dead. There was a day when bandits attacked our community and over sixty people were killed. Some even mistakenly fell into the river and holes, where they died. Many got fractured bones. It was even after a few days that we got some corpses from inside the holes.
The only thing I haven’t witnessed in my life is my own death, which I am waiting and ready for. Death is easier for me than the current situation. I would say Alhamdulillah if I died now.
The time they asked for a Honda motorcycle for my release after paying 3.5 million, the motorcycle was worth 2.5 million and we didn’t even have one million to give them. My family went from house to house begging until they raised the amount. Wallahi, if I knew how life was going to be after my return, I would have asked them not to pay the ransom and allow me to die there. That would have been a better option for me. Look at my leg; I still have an injury in it and it’s because of the chain they used to tie me.
As narrated by: Ishamu Usman – 47 (Anka, Zamfara).
This snippet is published as part of the series, What We Lost to the Bandits.
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