There was a night when bandits invaded our community around 3 am. They killed, I think, three people and abducted some of us and rustled many cattle, including my own. They took us to their enclave. At first, they didn’t beat us, but they demanded ransom. While negotiating, that’s when they started beating us to trigger fear and empathy for us.
Initially, they demanded 5 million for my release, but after negotiating, they agreed to collect two million. Even the two million, we didn’t have it because they had rustled all my cattle and other livestock. There were only a few livestock left with us. But with family and friends’ interventions, we raised the amount and took it to them for my release. They released me with no injuries, but I am malnourished because they hardly gave me food to eat and the condition of the place was very poor. The same place I was sleeping in was the same place we urinated. Sometimes they allowed us to leave the place to ease ourselves; sometimes they asked us to do everything there because they tied our legs.
After spending 35 days, I returned home and after my 11 days of return, we decided to leave the community and go back to Anka metropolis.
While in Anka, one day, I visited Bena Market. While coming back, we were attacked on the road and taken to another bandit camp. That is where I testified to the reality of life, because the kind of torture I encountered there was totally different. It was during the rainy season and rainfall beat me outside. We slept under trees in their camp. Every day there was a different wahala. I was in the camp with my colleagues and more than five other people we met there.
I spent another ten days there before they even started discussing the issue of ransom. They demanded four million naira or two motorcycles, and my family kept discussing it with them. Luckily enough, on my 19th day in their camp, late in the night, the bandits guarding us slept and with God’s intervention, three of us managed to sneak and run.
We were running in the middle of the night, not even knowing where we were going. Around 5 a.m., we found ourselves at a mining site. We met miners from our neighbourhood working there; unknown to us, they were working for bandits.
We went straight to them seeking their help, and they offered us water to drink. They told us that the bandits forced them to work for them at the location. They asked us to impersonate miners and be in the holes to continue working with them because even if we left, we would meet another bandit along the road.
We had no option but to join them and keep working as miners for the bandit. After a few minutes, the bandit guarding them came and started insulting us that we were not working hard enough to get them gold and that they would shoot us if we joked. I was very scared then, but the luckiest thing is that they didn’t identify us as there were many people there.
We kept working, very tired and hungry, until late in the evening when the bandits’ boss arrived. He asked us to give them all the gold mined and gave us very little to share. During that period, my prayer was to leave the place, not to get any gold.
After offering us what he decided to give us, he asked his boys to escort us because other bandits on the road could come across us and seize it all or ask us to work for them again.
We returned home late around 9 pm in the night with lots of stress and hunger. When I got home, my family was crying, telling me that they were being threatened to give them the money before tomorrow morning; if not, they would kill me and that they had not told them I’d escaped. It was indeed a terrible experience for me.
As narrated by: Alhaji Shuaibu – 40 (Rafin Gero, Anka, Zamfara).
This snippet is published as part of the series, What We Lost to the Bandits.
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