Jesusegun Alagbe
Saturday, July 23, 2016, was one day
that will always give 18-year-old Praise Adelakin nightmares. That day, a
journey from Ile-Ife, Osun State, to Ibadan, Oyo State, that was
supposed to take her about two hours only, almost turned out to be a
journey of no return.
A 300 Level Law student of Obafemi
Awolowo University, Praise had gone to the school in the morning of that
day to check whether her things were still intact in her hostel before
resumption after some weeks of strike by lecturers in the institution.
Around 4pm, when she ensured she had put
everything in place, she left for the Mayfair Motor Park in the town to
board a bus going to Ibadan, where her family resides.
All things being equal, she should have
been back in Ibadan by around 6pm on the same day, but by 12 midnight of
the following day, she found herself in Ilorin, Kwara State.
Narrating the incident to our
correspondent in Ibadan on Tuesday, she said, “We’ve been on strike for
some weeks. Meanwhile, freshers had resumed three weeks before the
strike, but due to the action, they were also sent back home. On July
23, I decided to go to school to check if my things were still intact
and probably whether they had allocated my space (at Moremi Hall) to
someone else. I got there and saw that my things had been scattered; my
mattress had also been taken away with my buckets and other things, so I
had to go round the rooms to gather them together. When I did that, I
put them in my locker and locked them up.
“When I finished all that, I decided to
return home and that was around 4pm. I had arrived in school by 11am. So
I went to the Mayfair Motor Park in Ife to get a bus back to Ibadan.
It’s a popular motor park in the town because it’s a public one. When I
got there, there were only two passengers in the bus and the driver was
hanging around somewhere. All the same, I entered the bus to wait until
we had enough passengers to take off. As of 7pm, we were only nine in
the 18-seater white Mazda bus. It was getting dark, so everyone started
complaining. We begged the driver to take off and told him that while on
the way, it was possible he would get more passengers. He agreed and we
took off.”
Praise and other passengers were happy
the driver heeded their pleas. Nothing in the driver’s appearance or the
look of the bus suggested anything sinister. After all, they boarded
the bus in a motor park, Praise thought.
The journey proceeded normally until the
driver swerved off the major road. He told them it was a short-cut to
Ibadan. But the path turned out to be a ‘long-cut.’
She continued, “There is a university
outside Ife town called Oduduwa University. A few minutes drive past it,
our driver said he wanted to pass through a short-cut. He said because
it was weekend, there was traffic in front. So he took us through the
route. When we turned to pass through the so-called short-cut, we saw a
bus in front of us and there was another bus behind us. It was a bushy
path, but we were not so afraid because of the other two buses which
were also taking the route. We thought it was a route which would take
us to Ibadan faster.
“As we were going through the path, we
got to a junction where we saw that the bus which was in front of us was
already parked. The passengers had disembarked. As we got there, we
were also flagged down by a group of about five men; our driver stopped
and he himself ordered us to get down. Everyone was shocked and we
wondered what was happening, but nobody talked. We were all just
looking. The bus behind us was also stopped and all of us passengers in
the three buses were up to 40. They asked us to lie face down. At that
point, I became afraid as I knew something was wrong. As I lay down, I
quickly sent a message on my phone to my dad, reading, ‘Dad, I am held
hostage and I don’t even know where we are. I think I am in danger.
Please pray for me.’ I could use my phone to send the message because
when they ordered us to lie down, the men went for a meeting at a nearby
bush, together with our driver. My dad called me back after a few
minutes, but I couldn’t pick it. The phone rang out. When they heard
that my phone rang, they came back and collected my phone and others’.
After collecting our phones, they went back to their meeting.
“After a while, they returned and
surprisingly, they asked the passengers in my driver’s bus to get back
in. They instructed our driver to go and ‘dismiss’ us off. I was afraid.
I thought ‘dismissing us’ meant ‘killing us.’ Our driver looked
disappointed, so he shouted at us to get in; he was now holding a gun.
Everybody kept quiet. Then he drove away inside the bush till it was
really dark. When it was around 10pm, he started dropping us one by one.
He would drive for about 10 minutes, drop a passenger and give him or
her their phone and bag, then drive for another 10 minutes, drop another
passenger, and on and on like that. He would spread the phones out and
ask the person to pick their phone. It finally got to my turn and I
think I was the sixth passenger to be dropped, I can’t remember full
well because at that point, I had become so confused.”
When Praise got out of the bus, it was
then that it dawned on her that she was in another world, in the middle
of a forest and the screech of insects. By then, tt was around 11pm.
“He stopped me at a T-junction and gave
me my phones, but they were already dead, so I couldn’t contact anyone.
When he dropped me, he told me I was at Share (Kwara State). I didn’t
know where Share was then. It was very dark, around 11pm. The village
was quiet. Anywhere I turned to, it was forest all around me. I got to
know later that Share was very close to Niger State. It’s a border town
between Kwara and Niger states,” she said.
Suddenly, in the midst of the the forest and darkness, she heard the sound of a motorcycle coming towards her direction.
She continued, “I flagged down the rider
and he stopped. I asked him, ‘I was told this is Share. Please, where
is the nearest town or somewhere where I can get help from?’ The man
simply said, ‘Ilorin.’ I know Ilorin quite well because my grandparents
stay there, I once schooled there and my aunt still lives there. I got
on the motorcycle and he took me from the jungle to Ilorin. When he
dropped me, I could recognise the area and found out that the place was
actually close to my aunt’s house, around Basin area.
“I asked him how much I should pay him.
He just nodded his head and zoomed off. He didn’t utter a word or ask
for money. Meanwhile, I was lucky my phone came up again, so I quickly
called my dad that I was in Ilorin and that I was near my aunt’s place.
He quickly notified my aunt that I was coming.
“I was dumbfounded. From where the
motorcyclist dropped me, I trekked to my aunt’s house for some minutes
and when I got to the door, around 12 am on Sunday, I knocked. She was a
bit scared because she was expecting no one. She asked who was
knocking. I replied, ‘It’s me, Praise.’ She retorted, ‘Which Praise?’ I
said, ‘Praise Adelakin.’ She asked again, ‘Praise Adelakin from where?’
We often talk and so she recognised my voice. She then said someone
should open the gate for me. She just didn’t know what to do when she
saw me in the middle of the night.”
In the morning of that Sunday, Praise’s
parents came for her in Ilorin to take her back home. But up till now,
she has yet to recover from the incident.
She said, “I wouldn’t know what happened
to the other passengers in the two other buses. I’m still trying to get
over it because I’m still scared of boarding buses right now. I used to
enter any bus as long as I see people inside it, but my experience has
taught me to be more conscious. I am still amazed. It was not the first
time I would board a bus from the park, and it is even a public park. It
wasn’t a lift.
“My parents came over to Ilorin to pick
me up on Sunday to return to Ibadan. They said they immediately started
praying for me when I sent them the message. They also told me they went
to the police station in Ibadan and contacted another one in Ife to
report the incident, but the police said they couldn’t do anything about
it.
“The police said they should go to MTN
office to track my phone to know where I was. MTN said they needed a
police report, which the police couldn’t give because they didn’t know
about the incident. Everything was complicated. They said they had to
resort to prayers throughout the night. I just thank God I am still
alive to tell this story. I don’t know what would have happened to the
passengers in the two other buses. I will be back to school this weekend
as the strike has been called off.”
Could she describe the driver, his conversation with his fellow suspected ritualists and the area they were taken to?
Praise said, “I didn’t hear their
conversation because they really went far away, but they could still
monitor us. They talked in low tones. I can’t really describe the area
but I know it’s a few minutes’ drive after passing the Oduduwa
University that he branched into the bush.
“Our driver was wearing an ankara
dress that day; he has an average height and dark-complexioned. Except
one old man, almost all other passengers were students. I suspect that
the drivers of the other two buses too belong to the gang because they
all held the meeting together.”
Praise’s father, Timothy Adelakin, who
is a pastor, said when he received his daughter’s message that she was
in danger that day, his heart jumped out.
He said, “I just thank God for how He
acted in the situation. When she was about leaving Ife that day, she
called to say she was returning home and I thought she should be home
two hours later. We were attending a prayer meeting in the church; we
were rounding off when her message came in that I should pray for her.
She said they were held hostage and she didn’t know where they were.
“When I got her text, I told the church
members what had happened. I called other pastor colleagues to pray for
us. We prayed again till 11pm. Around midnight, her aunt called me and
said, ‘Speak to Praise.’ The next voice I heard was hers. I was filled
with joy.
“I would like the authorities to
investigate this incident because it is surprising that a driver from a
public park could do this. They must have been doing it before. Praise
told me the passengers of their bus and the two other buses were mostly
students, so I am worried what would have happened to her colleagues. I
have already instructed her never to board private cars and she doesn’t
do it. But with something like this happening in a public park, it is
worrisome.”
Meanwhile, Saturday PUNCH learned that the Mayfair motor park closes by 4pm and vehicles no longer load passengers from the park after this time.
The Chairman of the National Union of
Road Transport Workers, Ife 1 Branch, Mr. Gbadegesin Asiyanbi, when
visited at the park, said Praise could not have boarded the bus from
inside the park at the time she got there.
Asiyanbi said activities at the park
close by 4pm, after which any driver is allowed to pick passengers on
the road irrespective of where they come from.
He said, “There are no kidnappers in our
motor park. I have never heard of anything like that. There is no way
such thing can happen, we know ourselves, our members are true drivers.
“We lower our flag by 4pm and as you can see for yourself now (around 5:30pm when Saturday PUNCH
visited on Thursday), there are no vehicles on queue, so anybody who
boarded a vehicle between 6pm and 7pm here and is claiming they boarded
it from our park is either ignorant or telling lies.”
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