Kidnapping’ll stop when victims call abductors’ bluff, refuse to pay ransom -Buhari’s spokesman

Anthony Iwuoma

The Presidency has said kidnapping thrives in the country because families of victims pay ransoms.

Speaking on Politics Today, a current affairs programme on Channels Television,  on Monday, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, posited that the evil of kidnapping would keep worsening for as long as people are eager to pay ransoms to secure the release of their loved ones from captivity.

He said: On the kidnappers and all of that, the President, even in his Sallah message, the appeal he was making to fellow citizens was ‘expose them, tell the security agencies where they are.’ Sometimes, you also can sympathise with family members in that highly emotive situation. The first priority for many of them is to get that family back home. And they are willing to pay (ransoms) and they have been paying.”

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“These payments, whether anybody likes it or not, will continue to fuel terrorism. We have to learn from the experiences in other lands that when you pay, you are fuelling terrorism; you are fuelling the hijack and kidnap of fellow citizens, and it will go on and on until when people call their bluff.”

Kidnapping for ransom has assumed an alarming state in Nigeria, as virtually all parts of the country have become hotbeds of this nefarious activity, especially by bandits and terrorists in the North.