00:00For most people, kidnapping is top in the pecking order of topical issues that will continue to be debated for
00:06a very long time to come.
00:08And for every Nigerian who combine hard work with vast facility full of common sense, what they require every day
00:15is adequate security.
00:16And the one bad thing about kidnapping now is that it creates a rupture in the heart of the kidnap,
00:21and for those who are expecting them to return back home, it is that bad.
00:24What is your thought on this?
00:25It is very bad. I mean, you're looking at the situation, something that started from political militancy, people trying to
00:32fight for what they felt was their right.
00:35In a country where they felt there was a lot of injustice, and from that, it met me first into
00:41what we now have today, criminal gangs, everybody trying to become a kidnapper, making so much money out of it.
00:49That's just it, because you have a weak system, you have poor governance, you have poverty, you have security services
00:56that are not up to scratch, that are not intelligent enough, that do not know the importance of intelligence gathering
01:01when you're trying to solve things like this.
01:04And when you have that kind of situation in a country where the system is not that professional, things like
01:12kidnapping, other forms of criminality will always hold sway.
01:16I mean, there's hardly a family out there that has not experienced, either directly or indirectly, some form of kidnapping
01:23or abduction.
01:25You hear about it every day, in everywhere. You open the newspaper, as you see it, you read the news,
01:30you watch television, you hear it, you see it, you listen to the radio, you hear it.
01:34But I think, for me, I stand to be corrected. The day Evans was prosecuted, he was caught, you know,
01:41he was caught by the police, and he was laid bare to the whole world to see.
01:46I told someone, I said, look, it's going to cause a problem for us in this country, because people are
01:50going to see this as a very lucrative business to start taping it.
01:53And exactly how I predicted it, and it's happening.
01:57It is true, but like you said, you stand to be corrected, and I'd like to say it must have
02:01been happening even before Evans.
02:02Look at those guys in the Niger Delta. They were abducting foreigners, expatriates.
02:08Yes, the plan initially was to get the government to listen to that.
02:14But then, when they started getting this money, little by little, some of the people started seeing it, like, wow,
02:19there's a lot of money in this thing.
02:22And that was the thing. When they realized that kidnapping pays, that is where the problem started.
02:28And Evans is like the personification of it.
02:30Of it, exactly. He made so much money.
02:33He made so much money, and the policemen who saw these things, they advertised the amount of money this guy
02:39made.
02:39And people just said, look, there's no point robbing at gunpoint.
02:42They just keep innapping the victims.
02:44And where you have a weak system in place, like we said earlier, where the police does not depend on
02:50intelligence,
02:51where governance is bad, where poverty reigns supreme, people will always look for a way out.
02:58You have to think of your tummy.
03:00And now, we've seen wives state-manage their own kidnapping, go see children, do that to their parents.
03:08Exactly.
03:09It is that bad.
03:09That is scary.
03:10It is that bad.
03:11Like, imagine you and that, we're talking here right now, in this beautiful place, and then someone now comes in.
03:16We've arranged for that person to kidnap us, and then he kidnaps us, and they will now tell our organization
03:21that they have to pay like a million dollars or something to get us free.
03:26That's not going to be good at all.
03:27So what do you think is the way for?
03:29How do we get out of this mess?
03:30It's a big mess.
03:32It is a big mess.
03:33It is not, it doesn't have a simple solution.
03:36It doesn't.
03:37But one way of doing it is for the states to become stronger, for state institutions to become stronger.
03:44If state institutions become stronger, they punish criminals deservedly for what they want, for what they've done.
03:51I'm not talking about a case where you sentence someone to death for abducting someone, and then you leave someone
03:57who has stolen the commonwealth,
04:00who have looted billions from the country, and you just give that person a slap on the wrist, and send
04:05that person to jail for a year or six months,
04:08which can be revoked the next day by the president.
04:11If you do not punish everyone uniformly, if you do not punish the right taker, if you do not punish
04:18the corrupt politician,
04:20if you do not punish the policeman who murders an innocent man on the street,
04:25if you do not punish the kidnapper who abducts an innocent child, a woman,
04:30if you continue to forgive so-called bandits and terrorists, and give them amnesty,
04:36if you continue to do that, it's not going to solve any problem in Nigeria.
04:42That's all that we have for you today on our topic.
04:44We'll be looking forward to hear from you.
04:46Just reach out to all our social media handles, and let us know what you think about this topic.
04:50Thank you very much.
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