1,000 Abducted Nigerians: Families Beg as Kidnappers Go Silent – The Pain of Not Knowing
By: Abudu Olalekan
It’s worse than a ransom demand.
At least when the phone rings, you know they’re still breathing.
Across Kwara, Borno, Niger, Southern Kaduna and Zamfara, more than a thousand people – mostly women, kids, pregnant mothers – are simply… gone. No calls. No proof-of-life videos. No negotiations. Just silence that’s louder than gunfire.
In Woro village, Kwara State, 176 people were taken in one night back in February. Fifty-something days later, not a single kidnapper has reached out. The only thing the families have is that awful five-minute video the terrorists posted – barefoot women and children sitting in the dust, looking thin and scared, while a voice brags they’ve all been “converted to Islam.”
Abubakar Umar has multiple relatives in that group. When I spoke to him, his voice kept cracking.
“We’re not sleeping. Every morning you wake up and the first thing you feel is fear. If they’d just call, even to ask for money we don’t have, at least we’d know the children are alive. But nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s like they fell off the face of the earth.”
Ajike Ajiboye has two family members among the 176. She laughed bitterly when she said it:
“We’re actually praying for the kidnappers to call us. Imagine that. Begging God that criminals will pick up the phone. Because right now this waiting is worse than mourning. When someone dies, you cry, you bury them, you start to heal. Here you can’t even start grieving because you don’t know if you should.”
In Borno, over 300 people taken from Ngoshe on March 4 are still missing. A few women have trickled back – barefoot, without their phones, saying almost nothing. One man told me, “They come back one by one, like ghosts. No explanation. We don’t ask too many questions because we’re terrified the terrorists are still watching.”
In Niger State it’s even more brutal. Some captives have been in the bush for over a year. One family paid N40 million for the SUBEB chairman and they still won’t release him – they want the full N100 million-plus. His sister Sofiyat cried on the phone: “We’ve begged, we’ve borrowed, we’ve sold everything. The government people he worked for? They’ve gone quiet. Ten months and we don’t even know if he’s alive. At this point I just want to see his body so we can bury him properly and try to live again.”
Southern Kaduna is the same story on repeat. Nine people snatched from Ungwan Tama in January. The bandits asked for N10 million. The family has been able to talk to them sometimes, but the kidnappers control every word.
“They make our people say we’ve abandoned them,” Daniel Samaila told me, voice shaking with anger. “They force them to beg on the phone while we’re here selling land, borrowing at 100% interest, doing anything we can.”
In Zamfara, 597 people kidnapped just between January and April this year. One father, Alhaji Samaila, is still waiting for a call about his daughter taken three weeks ago. Nothing. Another guy, Mohammed Ilyasu, got one call when they took his brother Sani – they let Sani say he was okay, then the line went dead and the number no longer connects.
Everywhere you turn, the story is the same: the phones have stopped ringing.
Security people keep saying “operations are ongoing” and “we’re on their trail.” But out in these villages, that sounds like a cruel joke. Mothers are raising grandchildren whose parents vanished. Kids have stopped going to school because there’s no money and no hope. Whole communities are being hollowed out.
One community leader in Kaduna put it perfectly:
“We now have a generation of children growing up without mothers and fathers – not because they died, but because they’re lost somewhere in the bush. And even if they come back one day, they won’t be the same people.”
That’s the real tragedy here.
It’ s not just the people in captivity who are being destroyed.
It’s everyone left behind, stuck in this endless, merciless silence.
