Chat With Terror Hostage

What do you tell a lamb that just managed to escape from a lion’s den? I thought the best thing to do was listen and try to come to terms with the eerie story as narrated by the lucky exhostage. That was the situation in the Moroccan city of Casablanca as a cocktail preceding a night of banters and great cuisine afforded me the privilege of meeting a former hostage of the dreaded Al Shabaab terrorist group operating in Somalia around the border areas with Kenya.

The handsome young man looked dapper and reserved but with a friendly mien. We were just engaging in small talk when he said, “I know your country. Nigeria, big country. Have you been to Kenya before?”

I told him I had been to his country several times. I told him the few cities I had visited. As soon as I said I had been to Mombassa some six years ago, he gave me another look and asked if I was aware of the security threat around that area. I answered in the affirmative. “Of course, the whole world knows about the terror of Al Shabaab”, I said.

“What do you know of Al Shabaab?” he asked. I answered that I had read about the Salafist jihadist fundamentalist group that calls itself the Harakat al-Shabaab alMujahideen or Mujahideen Youth Movement, based in Somalia. The group affiliated itself with Al-Qaeda in 2012, claiming to be waging jihad against “enemies of Islam”. Since Nigeria is also grappling with Boko Haram terrorism, I told the young man that, “Al Shabaab is your own Boko Haram”.

“You are looking at one of their former captives”, he said. I stopped dead in my tracks. A former hostage? Waoh! I settled down beside him and nudged him to tell me his story. Because I didn’t have his permission to disclose his name, we shall just call him Abu.

One of Abu’s relations had caught the fever of Islamic extremism and family members were becoming worried for him. When the fellow tried and failed to convince Abu about the doctrines of Al Shabaab, he gave his name to the terrorist group and personally led their commanders to the place where Abu was kidnapped and taken to the jungle base of the terrorists. A call for ransom went out. Abu thought the world had ended for him. There are so many stories in the public space about the horrors Al Shabaab victims are made to go through before being decapitated or put to some form of slower, more horrendous death.

Abu was given a phone to speak to his people to find the demanded ransom by all means, otherwise they would not even find his body at the end of the day. Luckily for Abu, those who wanted him alive far outnumbered the few terrorists who wanted him dead. The ransom was paid and he was eventually released.

I tried to wrap my head around his revelation that it was his cousin who set him up for abduction. He said outsiders like us would never understand the fact that terrorists are not ghosts but members of people’s families. In an extended family of 200, for instance, there may be just one boy whose mind has been poisoned by the terrorists’ campaign and he would do anything to show his commanders that he was loyal to the cause.

He said he had tried to force his cousin to stay in school, learn a trade, take a job, do something meaningful with his life, but the misled jihadist would have none of it. Now Abu is part of a government effort to capture the youths before the terrorists imprison their minds.

“The most straightforward answer to the terrorist scourge is to keep the youths meaningfully engaged”, he said. “You must build skill acquisition centres on a massive scale and arrange access to credit for the poorest of the poor, even if it is farming they want to do. If they see a future, if they can sense that their lives have value, no terrorist can recruit them as they have been doing. In Africa, poverty is a real issue and is used as a weapon by the terrorists to spread their poisonous ideology”.

Well, some thoughts there for the Nigerian government.

Abu has a postgraduate degree, a responsible job in the public service and is now happily married. When I asked him how he feels looking back at captivity, he smiled: “Allah knows why it happened. My life is in His hands. I attribute my freedom to His faithfulness”.

MOCKING ANTI-CORRUPTION WAR

Joe Igbokwe, APC Publicity Secretary in Lagos, is angry; very angry. See his reaction to Dino Melaye’s book launch:

“… It seems to me that these characters came together to put funny words on paper together in a book form and put Dino Melaye’s name as an Author to give it an identity but the purpose is to reduce President Buhari’s war on corruption to a joke. The purpose of that gathering of the corrupt was to malign and defame the present war of corruption because they have not succeeded so far with many other methods they have adopted to stop it. Sure, corruption must fight for itself and Dino’s comic show was one form of that fightback.”