them to be. When their children were finally released last Wednesday after Sheikh Ahmad Gumi and ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo intervened, the police led them to be received by the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai. It is not clear why they dignified the governor with the honour of receiving the 27 students that remained in captivity after 10 had earlier been released and two had escaped.
Tongue-tied and obviously unsure what to say or how he should calibrate his enthusiasm in order not to betray his disinterest in the whole saga, the governor, according to Samuel Aruwan, the state’s Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, “charged them to view their ordeal as a motivator to put the past behind and work hard towards a happier and successful future ahead.” Whether the audience made any sense of the governor’s suggestion is unknown.
No one is ever going to make sense of the ‘motivator’ suggestion. Not only was it inappropriate, it was also even hard to place or interpret in the context of the gruelling deprivation the students suffered at the hands of their abductors while the governor theorised about the usefulness of negotiation as a tool for resolving abduction, and the inapplicability of ransom.
Thankfully, Mallam el-Rufai did not say anything about his earlier abominable threat to prosecute anyone negotiating with kidnappers, be they intermediaries or parents. Weeks ago, when the abduction threatened to be prolonged, and seeing that the government was too impotent to do anything but theorise, grieving parents swore to defy the governor as well as dared to be prosecuted for negotiating with the abductors.
There were indications by those close to the negotiations that additional ransom was paid, some N15m, and that a prisoner exchange also took place. Judging from the harrowing looks on the faces of the released students, their parents and the rest of the country must have heaved a great sigh of relief that the students were finally free. So much for the Kaduna policy.
EndracisminEngland