Now We Can

Now We Can’t Even Buy Yam!

Bala Muhammad

From Allah we come and to Him we shall return! Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilaihi Raji’un! That is the recommended Muslim phrase in the face of any calamity, such as what happened on Sunday March 2, when my car was snatched in broad daylight by armed robbers.

My car had stopped at 12 NOON (yes, 12 noon) a little after Tafa on Abuja to Kaduna Expressway, just to buy yam. Is it wrong to buy yam? With hindsight, it is apparently now a miscalculation to stop and buy yam on the road, at noon. Even though Nigerians love yam. And the poor yam sellers need the business. And the nation needs the jobs so created.

Most likely, the armed robbers were trailing my car, an ash-coloured KIA CERATO with registration number KANO AA 723 WRA. Noticing that all attention was on the haggling of the price of yam, the robbers had stealthily approached and had suddenly shoved guns at the sides of my driver and of my brother. When the crowd noticed what was happening, the armed robbers screamed that all should lie prostrate on the ground, much as the nation lies prostrate. Some of the women yam sellers started screaming in abject fear, relative to their abject poverty. So the robbers shot seven times into the air, apparently one shot per each of the nation’s 7-Point Agenda. Helter-skelter, pandemonium, chaos.

The robbers bundled my driver and my brother into the car at gunpoint, while another robber took the wheel and headed Kaduna-ward. They were shouting: ‘Where is the security?’ ‘We are going to kill you!’ while continuously beating my people on the head and body with the butts of guns. The robbers were told there was no security on the car, yet the robbers continued to beat the heavens out of them. When they realised that there was really no electronic security on the car, such as that would shut off the fuel supply, they made their way into a nearby bush, gave my people more thorough beating, took everything they had on them – caps, wristwatches, money, handsets, slippers, glasses, everything – beat them some more, and pushed them out of the car. They ordered them not to look back, or they would be shot. They did not, could not.

The robbers drove back onto the road. Eyewitnesses report that they drove on the wrong side of the road for several kilometres. It is said they were even accosted by a Police patrol, but they apparently explained themselves. They continued to drive on that same one-way until they reached a u-turn. They then took the way back to Abuja; glaringly passing by the yam-point they had a few minutes earlier attacked act at gun-point. Everyone saw them drive by at top speed. But alhamdu lillah no life was lost, and there was no major injury. Except for the trauma, the shock, the absolute disbelief that such a thing could be perpetrated at 12 noon on a major highway by robbers who did not even care to don masks! By the Rule of Law! By Lawlessness!

Several months ago, I had lamented on these pages how my South African medical doctor friend, Dr. Fakroodin, once stated that in his country, the innocent live behind bars and the criminals, who should be the ones behind bars, roam free. That was in 2001 when I was at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban. During those days, South Africa’s major commercial centre, Johannesburg, used to be referred to as the world’s crime capital. Behavioural scientists had always rationalised South Africa’s raging crime rate as backlash from black Africans who had been so short-changed during the apartheid years.

When I left South Africa and returned home fully, I realised that if that country was the frying pan as far as insecurity is concerned, my own country is the fire. In no time, I had learnt how enhance personal security. I started out with seven padlocks on my main gate, which doubles as both a garage and entry door. To be able to enter my garage and park my car, I would need to struggle with a bunch of keys so heavy and cumbersome no pocket could easily carry them. The locks and the keys are numbered for ‘ease of reference’, and it has become quite a task going through the same mundane motion every evening and morning.

In almost every bedroom in Nigeria today, there are layers upon layers of steel bars and wire grids of all kinds, all assembled in the vain hope that we sleep and wake up alive the next morning. This state of siege which Nigeria’s insecurity has landed us in is enough to conclude that we all now live in maximum security prisons in our own homes. Not that these safeguards are of any use when the men of the underworld come a-visiting (and may ALLAH perish them!) Nigerian armed robbers have become so sophisticated as to have precision equipment with which they easily cut through heavy steel and all types of barricades to gain access to people’s lives and property. Most Nigerians know that all the safeguards we employ are there just for the emotional reassurance. For most Nigerians, there is this foreboding dread that it is just a matter of time before it comes to their turn to pay their ‘dues’ in this most horrible of all injustices: armed robbery. No one sleeps with any assurance of safety and security in this country, except for the very few who occupy the haloed spaces called State or Government Houses.

A lighted environment is a securer environment. But to make matters worse, due to inadequate electricity, Nigeria is the darkest country on earth (both figuratively and literally). Since there is no light, most people just go to bed as a perfunctory requirement of the human body, not to relax or sleep, but just to wait for tomorrow. Most people now sleep only after returning from the dawn, or subh, prayer, when it is light, Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilaihi Raji’un!

The Yam-Point Gun-Point Tafa robbery of Sunday March 6 at noon was not the first in this writer’s experience. In 2000, fresh from another sojourn overseas, I was a victim of highway robbery on the same Abuja-Kaduna road. The ‘operation’ occurred at dusk, when it was still light, not too far from the Kaduna-end tollgate. My then driver, David of the Convoy, was so traumatised that I had to act driver for several days afterward. It was then that I learnt from David the Christian equivalent of our Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilaihi Raji’un! He had been chanting ‘By the blood of Jesus’!

Back then in 2000, I had the next morning after the robbery gone to see the then Kaduna State Commissioner of Police to lodge a complaint. When I explained to him what happened and where, his reaction was more shocking than the robbery itself. After he himself described the contours of the road and the surrounding bushes to ensure he had got the correct venue, to which I concurred, the CoP had said: “Shegu! A daidai nan suke wannan aika-aika” (Bastards! That’s where they perpetrate their dastardly acts). He even knew the place, which meant it was preventable.

That spot just before the Kaduna-end tollgate on the Abuja to Kaduna Expressway had been notorious for several years. Since my own traumatic experience, robberies have occurred in the exact same place: a senior military officer was killed there; two Kano politicians (both incidentally former presidential candidates) were attacked there at different times; so was a journalist friend; so was an academic friend; so was so was so was…Yet for several years, the Police did not deem it fit or proper to establish a permanent station or outpost at that place. One wonders whether one will ever be safe in this country. Insecurity and electricity are our two greatest failures as a nation. When one is not safe in his or her own home or road, what success can any government claim? First experience in 2000 and now another in 2008, a period of two terms which have not been enough to address the two most important ingredients of development: security and electricity.

But by far the most traumatic of all crimes is to be robbed and have your wife or daughter violated by these ugly, despicable vermin called armed robbers. Perhaps in anticipation of this traumatic experience, Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be peace) had said that whoever dies defending his (and his family’s) honour would be admitted by ALLAH directly to heaven. Armed robbers belong in the opposite abode: hell. For the robber-violator, the punishment should be two-fold: castration, then death! A former Nigerian justice minister had once suggested that a violator should be made to forfeit the tool which he used to perpetrate his crime. Aye, seconded!

I remember one such traumatic news item I had had to edit while a radio producer at the BBC in the late 1990s. One of our correspondents had filed in a report of an armed robbery incident from a Northern city. Part of the report was an actuality; the voice of one of the arrested armed robbers confessing to the robbery and also, Inna Lillahi Wa Inna Ilaihi Raji’un, confessing to violating the woman of the house. A colleague and I insisted that that portion of the interview be excised. We reasoned that, since the interview with the State Police Commissioner had mentioned the identity of the house, it would amount to double jeopardy for the family to allow the robber’s violation-confession onto the airwaves. That could kill the victim, we argued. But other colleagues reasoned that, as ‘news is sacred’ in the Western sense, any excision would be self-censorship, and that the world should be allowed to hear the tragedy called armed robbery. Back and forth went the argument until finally our side won, and that particular portion was discarded.

All that now fades into history as the trauma of Sunday March 2 hits home. In the broad daylight of 12 noon. At Tafa, the most crowded of all roadside towns on the Abuja to Kaduna Expressway. At a yam point. At gun point. We had dutifully reported to the police (and I must remember here to thank the Kano Police PRO Baba Mohammed, my one-time student at Bayero University Kano, who is taking the matter personally and coordinating the search for my car with his colleagues in other states. Baba is the reason why one could notice I have been so mild on the Police in the foregoing paragraphs).

Irony of ironies! Just last Saturday, a Kano-based societal reorientation agency had convened a Public Forum (called Zauren Shawara in Hausa) to discuss, you guessed it, INSECURITY! The Zaure was chaired by a one-time AIG now District Head of Albasu in Kano State Alhaji Bashir Albasu. Papers were presented by the Kano Police Commissioner (represented by his PRO Baba), the Kano Hisba Commander-General, and an academician. I was host of the event, and had ranted and raved at the nation’s insecurity. I didn’t know they could hear me so far away at Tafa!

As at the time of filing this report, evening of Thursday March 6^th 2008, there has been no report of the sighting of my car, the ash-coloured KIA CERATO with registration number KANO AA 723 WRA. Many sympathisers are already urging me to ‘Just Let Go’, and count this experience among the reasons ‘Why My Life Expectancy Is So Low’. Some wicked ones even suggest that ‘Tomato Faces’ need a dose of reality! Fie!

My KIA! My Ash-Coloured KIA. Ash! Remnant of fire. Hellfire. For the armed robbers. Allah Ya isa!