“They Put a Gun to My Head”: A Father’s Account of Being Seized With His Son

Kwara State – Umaru Muazu was not thinking about danger. He was thinking, as he had on countless ordinary days before, about the walk home with his son. That walk never finished. Armed men appeared, as he would later describe it, from nowhere.

“The men came from nowhere and put a gun to my head,” Muazu said, recounting the moment four kidnappers seized him and his son, dragging them into captivity that would last for weeks in the forests bordering Kwara State.

Muazu and his son were among nine victims eventually rescued in a joint security operation in Kwara, part of a wave of kidnap for ransom cases that have continued to affect rural communities bordering Kogi, Ekiti and Niger states despite sustained military operations against armed groups in the area.

The rescue came weeks after President Bola Tinubu approved the establishment of a new Nigerian Army battalion in Omu Aran, Irepodun Local Government Area, specifically intended to strengthen operations against banditry, kidnapping and other violent crimes troubling the state.

For Muazu, the policy announcements and troop deployments that followed his ordeal are, in a sense, beside the point. What mattered was simpler and more immediate: a gun to his head, his son beside him, and weeks of uncertainty about whether either of them would make it home.

Authorities say joint security operations, including bush combing exercises and intelligence led patrols, are continuing across the vulnerable communities where Muazu and his son were taken, part of a sustained effort to dismantle the networks responsible for a string of similar abductions this year.

Muazu’s account, brief but direct, adds to a growing body of survivor testimony from Kwara’s forest bordering communities, each one describing a version of the same reality: ordinary people, ordinary days, and an armed threat that can appear with no warning at all.

He and his son are now home, among the fortunate ones whose captivity ended in rescue rather than tragedy. But for a community still living beside the same forests that hid his captors, Muazu’s account is a reminder that the threat that took him has not gone away simply because he came home.