In Kidnappers’ Den, In My Head, I Cast The Headline Of My Story If I Didn’t Make It Out —Oladeinde, Former Sunday Sun Editor

In Kidnappers’ Den, In My Head, I Cast The Headline Of My Story If I Didn’t Make It Out —Oladeinde, Former Sunday Sun Editor

Veteran media practitioner and former editor of Sunday Sun, Abdul Fatah Oladeinde, tells SAHEED SALAWU more about his experience at the hands of kidnappers and the aftermath of the ordeal.

Your investment in the farm should be in the millions. How do you intend to recoup your money if you abandon the farm?

First and foremost, the most important thing is life, safety, security, before we talk about recouping investment. One can only recoup investment if one is alive and I am sure that if anything had happened to me, my immediate family would have been discouraged from going further with the farming venture. So, for now, my mind is not even on going back to the farm because it is safety first. It is only if one is alive that one can think of making money. If one is gone, that is the end. And I am not even sure that at the stage which the farm is now, if anything happens, my children will now see that as a priority for them. So, life is the most important.

The other challenge that I have that will not make me think of going to the farm too soon is that apart the physical injury that I sustained, they slapped me in a way that I had never been slapped. And up till now, I have whooshing sound in my left ear. I complained to the doctors, they said that after a while, it would stop; that if it doesn’t stop, I may have to see a specialist. But I have been reading on my own about sounds like that in the ear. What I am reading about, I just hope that mine will not be that bad. I have that to contend with such that I find it difficult to sleep. And when I sleep, I wake up too soon. Usually I sleep around 10.00 p.m. and wake up 1.00 a.m. I can’t sleep again.

So, I can’t be in that situation and be thinking about getting back my investment. My life and then my health, too, which I am taking care of, are important. The whooshing in my ear has not stopped. That is a challenge. So, going back to the farm is not a priority for me now. I thank God for keeping me alive. I look up to the Almighty to heal me because of what I have gone through.

Those who attacked you were Fulani. Can you guess their ages?

I cannot sincerely say that the people who attacked me were Fulani because I don’t understand Fulani language. But I know that they were not Yoruba and the language that they spoke, if it is Fulani, I didn’t understand. There are so many northern languages that people speak around. Then they did not speak Hausa because if they did speak Hausa, I would have been able to pick words that I would understand. But they were young guys. They must be in their 20’s. There was a particular one who looked older but that person,too, could not be up to 40 years. But the other two must be in their 20’s.

Did you at any point think of snatching the gun from the one that was holding it?

Ah! Snatching? No! The day that they came and met me on the farm, I could have run. The thought just came immediately that: ‘Don run. If you run, they will shoot you’. It it were to be, maybe, only cutlass that they had, maybe I would have made an attempt. It was the gun that kept me with them till the time that my mind told me ‘okay, you can go now’. I couldn’t have snatched the gun. The best thing was to do what I did. God just put them to sleep and I slipped away. It would have been very risky, very dangerous trying to snatch the gun from them. Anything could have happened. Personally, I don’t like the sight of gun.

When I went to serve in the north, there was a guy that I met who was encouraging me to come and do this their short service thing to get into the military. I said no; that I hate gun. It is not that I am timid but people who know me know that I don’t like violence. Even knife, I am always very careful with such things. So, I couldn’t have snatched gun from anybody o.

Even in peace time, if I see a policeman, or any person, carrying gun, and I have to walk past that person, I am always very careful: ‘will there be accidental discharge?’ So, me that I am afraid of accidental discharge will now go and snatch gun!

As a devout Muslim, how did you manage to observe the daily prayers while you with them? Did they pray, too?

They did not pray. And the first two days, I couldn’t pray because I was tied. When they stopped doing that, I told them that I was a Muslim and ‘whatever is the case, I am here. I have to fulfill my relationship with Allah’. Then I began to do dry ablution and pray in their presence. But they didn’t show any signs that what I was doing made any sense to them. I did pray even in that condition. In addition to observing my solat, I was doing adhkar (praising Allah and glorifying Him internally in your heart and orally with your tongue); I was praying for God’s intervention and, Alhamdulillah, at the end of the day, Allah did show His grace.

The greatest lesson I learned from my experience is that we are just helpless as human beings. Whatever you think you are, it is only when you have your freedom that you can call yourself somebody. If people who do not even have the kind of strength that you have hold you somewhere like they held me, there is nothing you can do. It is only if Allah says that you will get out of it that you will. My experience is bringing me closer to Allah. While I was there, I was praying to Allah; that I had not done enough to qualify for Jannah (Paradise); that he should please spare my life so that I would go and do more worship and good deeds that would see me to Al-Jannah.

I was also thinking about what people would be saying about me as a journalist if it got out that I didn’t make it out. I was thinking about how people would now be writing stories and casting headlines. I was even casting headlines myself. When I thought about that, I quickly said a’uzu billahi (I seek refuge in Allah) to take my mind off that. It is terrible. I don’t wish that what I went through would happen to anybody. The government, Nigerians, we just have to do something to stop this madness. Before anything else in this country, we need security. Without security, there is nothing.

How did you communicate with those people who took you? Did they speak English?

No, they didn’t speak any good English. The words they were using were just ‘move’, ‘shut up’, ‘keep quiet’. I was the one doing most of the talking. They were not talking to me except when they wanted me to talk to my wife. If they got pissed off with what I was saying, they would say, ‘no talk’, ‘keep quiet’. For somebody to hold somebody like that, the person must be wicked. So, you can’t expect somebody who is wicked to be having conversation with you. What I felt all through was that those guys held me in preparation for something that I didn’t know; either they were waiting for information or they were waiting for some other people either to do something or to move me. That was what I felt most of the time. They were talking among themselves but they were not talking to me.

You trekked eight hours after escaping from them. Where did you get the strength?

I can only say it is God. When you are thinking about survival or when you were involved in the kind of situation that I was, there was nothing else that you could have done. I am used to trekking. I learned from the locals after I came out that an old man was taken along with his driver the way I was taken. It was when they were taking him away, trekking, that the man died. I even learned that he had not been buried. So, it was God that made that possible. By the time I got to where my people came to take me, I was almost exhausted. Exhaustion is not even the accurate word.