When the powerful are threatened, the state responds with full force. When ordinary Nigerians suffer, the government prevaricates. The kidnapping of children in Ogbomosho makes the double standard impossible to ignore.
On a quiet evening in April 2003, a heavily armed gang ambushed a convoy in rural Ogun State. In the chaos, five people were killed, including two young children. The intended target was narrowly spared only by a last-minute change of vehicles. Her name was Dr. Iyabo Obasanjo. Her father was the President of Nigeria.
What happened next was breathtaking in its speed and decisiveness. President Olusegun Obasanjo did not convene a committee. He did not dispatch a spokesman to express “deep concern.” He closed Nigeria’s borders with the Benin Republic overnight, strangling the smaller nation’s economy, and delivered a blunt ultimatum to its president: hand over the cartel kingpin, or the borders stay shut. Within weeks, the criminal godfather Hammani Tidjani, a man who had operated with near-total impunity for years, was arrested, extradited without ceremony, and imprisoned for life. The cross-border kidnapping and carjacking industry that had terrorized southwestern Nigeria for a generation collapsed almost immediately.
