Saturday the 23rd of July 2016 was a 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.’
“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 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, we 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 we 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.”
[Source: Metro Plus]
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