Today, in a savage turning of tables, former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai languishes in the detention of the ICPC. While many see his travails as political, there are many more who see only just desserts. After all, as Kaduna State Governor, he ruled his state with an iron fist, making sure that his opponents knew who was in charge.
It was during this time that Abubakar Idris, also known as Dadiyata, was abducted from his home in Kaduna State. The father of two, who was a lecturer at the Federal University Dutsin-Ma, was a fierce critic of the Kaduna State Governor and the APC until his abduction.
On August 1, 2019, Dadiyata vanished without a trace. More than six years down the line, he is yet to be found. He is presumed to have died, the uncertainty as to his whereabouts etching another name into Nigeria’s register of the missing dead.
Politics is a rampaging, ransacking little beast. It has a painfully uncanny ability to upturn and overturn things and bring to light that which others would rather keep in the dark. In the course of Nigeria’s current political upheavals, some key political players have let slip that Dadiyata was abducted and killed by some Nigerian police officers.
A petition In that respect has prompted an order for investigation from the IGP. The thing is that nobody really trusts investigations by the Nigerian police anymore. There is a gaping trust deficit that ensures that the police are perceived as only solvingcases in cases in which the government takes an active interest.
When people disappear in Nigeria, where do they go to? What effort does the state put into finding people who have disappeared, or is the Nigerian state now responsible for forced disappearances?
Has the Nigerian state become a police state where people disappear and nothing happens? This is indeed a frightening prospect.
The seriousness of every state and, indeed, its single-mindedness is measured in the value attached to the lives and welfare of citizens. Going by this metric, it is safe to say that the Nigerian state attaches zero value to the lives of its citizens.
Insecurity remains rampant all over the country. Nigeria’s security agencies are also becoming less and less inclined to transparency in the way and manner they engage Nigerians, especially when it has to do with arrests and detention.
The most damning Indictment of the Nigerian state is in its reluctance and/or inability to account for those killed or disappeared right under its nose. This is a grave failure of state responsibility because without proper accountability, atrocities committed against Nigerians will only continue to increase.
The anxiety with whichh Dadiyata’s wife and two daughters continue to wait for their father can only be imagined. Nigerians are also waiting for closure more than seven years later.
A country on the brink of disappearing into oblivion is one where those who muster the courage to exercise their right to free speech can be made to disappear without consequences. With each step Nigeria takes away from accounting for its citizens, it takes one step closer to the precipice.
Ike Willie-Nwobu is a policy practitioner and social thinker. He can be reached at Ikewilly9@gmail.com.
