By Daniel Nwankwo
Sometimes, I watch broiler chickens and wonder if they know their fate.
From the day they hatch, their lives appear to have been written already. They are carefully housed, vaccinated, medicated, protected from disease, fed with precision and nurtured with uncommon attention. Yet, all that care is not necessarily for their benefit. It is an investment towards an already determined end.
Whether for Christmas, Sallah, a wedding, the arrival of an important guest, or simply tomorrow’s dinner, the knife eventually finds its way to their neck.
Their preservation is not freedom. It is preparation.
Also Read Nigeria’s 19-Year Kidnapping Crisis Demands New Security Doctrine – SMEF President
I often wonder whether the average Nigerian feels a similar helplessness in the face of the growing kidnapping industry.
Every week, another headline announces another abduction. Families begin the familiar ritual of tears and negotiations. Ransoms are reportedly demanded. Security agencies mobilise. Soldiers, police officers, local vigilantes and other operatives are deployed. Sometimes they return with victims. Sometimes they return with casualties of their own. Sometimes victims regain freedom after agonising weeks. Sometimes they never do.
Then another kidnapping happens.
The cycle begins again.
The troubling question is not whether our security agencies are working. Many officers have paid the ultimate price defending communities. Many operations succeed without publicity, and many personnel continue to risk their lives under extremely difficult conditions. That sacrifice deserves recognition.
Yet, the deeper question is this: Why does the cycle remain so stubbornly unbroken?
The Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto described a pattern he called the “circulation of elites,” in which systems change actors but preserve patterns. It raises an uncomfortable thought: Have we become accustomed to managing kidnapping rather than decisively dismantling the structures that sustain it?
There is another concept in public policy known as path dependence. It suggests that when a society repeatedly follows the same responses to recurring problems without fundamentally changing the underlying conditions, the pattern gradually becomes self-perpetuating. Every new incident follows an almost predictable script.
Announcement.
Condemnation.
Deployment.
Negotiation.
Relief for some.
Grief for others.
Silence.
Then another announcement.
This predictability is what we might call the normalisation of the abnormal. When repeated crises become ordinary, society adjusts its expectations downward. What once would have shocked a nation becomes another item on the evening news. This, indeed, is the greatest tragedy.
What troubles many Nigerians is not simply that kidnappings occur. Crime exists in every society. What unsettles us is that so many incidents appear to end without the public gaining a clear understanding of how the perpetrators were dismantled, prosecuted or prevented from striking again.
The public often hears the first broadcast. Rarely do we hear the final chapter.
Naturally, this creates questions.
Citizens begin to wonder whether the nation is merely responding to kidnappings rather than defeating them. They ask whether intelligence gathering is improving fast enough, whether prosecutions are achieving deterrence, and whether the nation is learning from each tragedy. These questions do not automatically imply conspiracy; they reflect the frustration of people who long to see the cycle broken.
Ironically, even the owner of chickens builds a secure pen and goes looking whenever one strays.
Shouldn’t citizens expect at least that level of determination from the institutions established to protect them?
No nation can flourish when its people begin to feel like livestock waiting for their turn in an endless sequence of fear. The first responsibility of government is not merely to respond after citizens disappear. It is to build a system where disappearance becomes increasingly rare.
Until kidnappers genuinely fear the certainty of arrest, prosecution and justice more than citizens fear travelling on our roads, the cycle will continue to reproduce itself.
The philosophy of the chicken is that its future has already been settled. The philosophy of a democratic nation should be the exact opposite.
A citizen’s destiny must never be to live in anticipation of becoming the next headline.
Daniel Nwankwo anipr, mpmc manupa, is the Deputy Director Protocol, Federal University Lokoja
