THE IBADAN HOUSE OF HORROR UNCOVERED

RECENTLY, a rather gory but certainly not unusual discovery was made in Ibadan at the Soka, Idi Mangoro area of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.

Fifteen chained people suspected to have been kidnapped and at different stages of gradual but imminent death, were discovered in a property reportedly abandoned by a privately owned factory. Some of the kidnapped victims were in the throes of imminent death and, according to media reports, one of these victims even included a 72 year old woman from Edo State who allegedly had been in the captors’ den since 2008!

Evidences of murder-the ritualistic kind-abounded in the scene, with the helpless victims awaiting their turn. A woman who was rescued and had just had a baby alleged that her baby had been taken away from her. The other victims had emaciated so much that in both prostrate and supine forms, they wore their skins on their bones as they had been starved comprehensively of any form of nourishment! Even demented fellows on the prowl looked comelier.

According to media reports, a recently captured commercial motorcycle rider who still had access to a phone blew the lid off the felons’ game. He had sent text messages to his family members, telling them of his experiences and describing the place where he had been captured. On that tip-off, his family members had stormed the place only to discover human existence in a worse state of nature than Thomas Hobbes, the political theorist and philosopher who described such a life as nasty, brutish and short, could have imagined.

With a similar precedent in the notorious Okija shrine in Anambra State several years ago, only naive Nigerians affecting amnesia would have found the gory discovery shocking or incredible. In fact, the only reasonable response deriving from the discovery could only be a question: How many of these horrifying dungeons are replicated all over the country? If the perpetrators of the Okija shrine are yet to be brought to book, should Nigerians expect any significantly different treatment for the current outrage?

On a daily basis, people routinely get lost or are murdered without any concerned discomfiture from the establishment or the security agencies.

Any society which condones “baby factories” or tacitly permits  the existence of fake youth corps orientation camps, illegal universities and unregistered hospitals ordinarily should expect such absurdity where human lives are “nasty, brutish and short” as famously described by Hobbes.

In Nigeria, it is common to see human corpses on the road at different stages of decomposition. Victims of hit-and-run road accidents are routinely left to decompose steadily without any effort to evacuate the corpses and the citizens have learnt to live with both the offensive sight and odour.

The Nigerian people indubitably are too benumbed to recognise the Soka scene as a repulsive absurdity from which they need to be rescued before their collective psyche is ruptured beyond redemption.

Obviously, the Ibadan house of horror is the result of the failure of security and intelligence. The police are allegedly complicit as a rescued victim revealed that the police occasionally visited this house but rather than rescue them, they had chosen to look the other way for a consideration.

The residents of the area have also been too complacent to have watched the operations for such a long time without making any formal report.

Any community is secure only to the extent of its members’ vigilance. It is necessary for different communities to take the idea of community policing more seriously, especially as the state has consistently demonstrated both unwillingness and ineptitude in the performance of its statutory duty of protecting lives and property.

The truth is that there are many such places as the Ibadan house of horror in the country with various manifestations in matters of detail where human lives are threatened, abused, sold and eventually exterminated on the whim of felons who profit from the sale of human parts and ritual killings. As we have observed in previous comments, these outrage and infamy thrive and flourish because the state has refused to demonstrate enough will and courage to prosecute the criminals behind these odious atrocities which impugn the country’s claim to the membership of the human society.

 Could it be that thorough investigation and prosecution have remained impossible because the affluent and prominent members of the society are the patrons of such evil houses for whatever reasons? We are persuaded that the demolition of the building should be suspended for forensic analysis. There is also the possibility of endangering the lives of those who may still be trapped if, as widely speculated, there is actually an underground in the building.

The rescued victims must have been making useful statements to the police which should help in tracking down the felons behind this evil. They should be comprehensively debriefed  and there is a desperate need to make stringent laws against such criminalities as kidnapping, terrorism and the sale of human parts and enforce compliance among the people for the country to retain a genuine claim to the membership of the human race

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EDITORIA