Share
John had been working in the delta for 14 years when the kidnappings started. He saw the reports in early 2006 of expatriates being taken from offshore oil rigs by a group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND. MEND pledged to cripple the Nigerian economy, and kidnapping foreign oil workers was one pillar of its strategy. Still, John didn’t think too much of it. He had been through years of military dictatorship and grown accustomed to the threat of armed robberies and the occasional sight of a body lying in the street. He went out to bars and restaurants and, as was his routine, to Goodfellas on Sunday nights. Until Aug. 13, 2006, MEND had never tried anything so brazen as abducting foreigners from the middle of the city. But everything John thought he knew about Nigeria was about to change. Port Harcourt was the center of a new industry: kidnapping for ransom.
Few sectors have endured the economic downturn of recent years better than kidnapping. Confidence in big banks and stock markets might be shaky, but the crudest form of trade — abducting and bartering people — seems alive and well. Gregory Bangs, the kidnap-and-ransom manager for Chubb Group, an American insurance company, said that patterns of kidnapping around the world are “almost inverse” to that of the global economy. “In a recessionary environment, the kidnapping rate goes up,” he told me. More companies are requesting kidnapping and ransom insurance — Bangs reported a 15 to 20 percent jump at Chubb over the past three years — than ever before. But why? What makes kidnapping and ransom, or K.& R., such a growth industry?
In April, speaking at a security conference in the Nigerian capital Abuja, Mike Okiro, then the inspector general of the national police, shared a revealing fact. He estimated that the total amount of ransoms paid in Nigeria between 2006 and 2008 exceeded $100 million. Over the same period, Nigeria emerged as one of the world’s kidnapping hot spots. And Nigeria shows no sign of relinquishing that dubious distinction; according to the minister of police affairs, there were more reported cases over the first seven months of 2009 than in all of 2008.
Join over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
Related posts:
New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy
New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful
How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert