Praise Adelakin
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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