When Peace Went Missing

Have you ever been afraid and it feels like the world is about to end?

It is a bomb.

A loud noise here and there.

Confusion.

Catastrophe.

Disaster.

Pandemonium.

That is how fear feels—even when nothing explodes.

In Ekiti, fear did not arrive with sirens.

It arrived quietly, the day a man went to his farm and did not return.

At first, no one panicked.

Farming takes time.

Work delays men.

But as the sun lowered and the road remained empty, fear took its first breath.

The Farm

He had worked for hours under the sun, bending into soil he had known all his life.

This was not a wealthy man.

He lived in an old apartment.

He struggled daily to feed his family.

When he finally paused, he noticed the silence.

Then he realized they were surrounded.

Armed men stepped out of the bush—not rushing, not shouting.

Calm.

Certain.

That was the first theft:

not his freedom, but his sense of time.

They forced him to walk into the forest.

At first, his body obeyed.

Legs moving.

Breath steady.

By the second day, walking became confusion.

Hunger dissolved hours into each other.

Direction lost meaning.

By the third day, walking was no longer movement.

It was punishment.

A lesson in helplessness.

This was how fear entered his body.

The Call

When the kidnappers finally called his family, they asked for ₦5 million.

I know his daughter.

I visited their home after the call.

The walls were bare—not only from poverty, but from having nothing left to remove.

The room smelled of sweat and waiting.

Five million naira was not a number they could negotiate with.

It was larger than their entire life.

His wife did not scream.

She sat still, staring at the floor, calculating love.

His daughter cried without sound.

That was when fear changed shape.

It was no longer in the forest.

It was in that room.

And it stayed.

When One Story Became a Pattern

After that, I began to hear the same story—

not repeated, but expanded.

A corps member boarded a car to Akure.

A forty-five-minute journey.

Evening time.

He boarded from the motor park.

He followed the rules.

No one heard from him.

Later, we learned the road ended in the forest, and every passenger was taken into the bush.

By then, “walking for days” no longer meant distance to me.

It meant erasure.

Each step stripping certainty.

Each night teaching obedience.

Fear was learning efficiency.

It was not just my community.

Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics reported a staggering number of abduction cases — estimating over 2.2 million kidnappings between May 2023 and April 2024 — and new research shows the crisis did not ease in the next year. According to geopolitical analysts, between July 2024 and June 2025 at least 4,722 people were abducted nationwide, with nearly ₦2.6 billion paid in ransom and hundreds killed in the process.

Most victims were taken from rural areas like ours, where protection arrives late — if at all. Families paid whatever they could — selling land, borrowing money, surrendering futures — and yet, in many cases, the violence continued.

Kidnapping here was not ideological.

It was business.

The numbers confirmed what we already knew:

this was no longer isolated fear — it was organized disappearance.

Work as Risk

Then there was the man who owned trucks.

He sold sand for a living.

Honest work.

Predictable routes.

He traveled to a nearby town for business.

He was kidnapped.

At that point, fear completed its journey.

It was no longer tied to a place.

Not the farm.

Not the road.

It attached itself to movement itself.

To leave home was to negotiate with disappearance.

What Peace Means to Me Now

Peace used to be quiet.

Now, quiet is suspicious.

Emotionally, peace means the ability to wait without imagining the worst.

Practically, peace means movement without fear.

Peace is answering a phone call without rehearsing bad news.

Peace is a forty-five-minute journey that remains forty-five minutes.

My moments of peace are brief now—

early mornings before messages arrive,

voices of neighbors before silence settles.

Peace has become temporary.

The Turning Point

The turning point was not a single kidnapping.

It was realizing how easily we adapted.

Roads empty earlier now.

Farms abandoned.

Travel postponed.

Fear did not break us suddenly.

It trained us.

That is when I understood:

peace does not disappear—it is negotiated away, one adjustment at a time.

That realization changed me.

I call loved ones repeatedly until they arrive.

I hesitate before traveling.

I measure distance in risk.

Fear has moved inside me.

Women Carrying the Weight

Women experience this loss differently.

The farmer’s wife became a negotiator overnight.

His daughter learned adult fear too early.

Women sell land.

Borrow money.

Hold families together while fear sleeps beside them.

Across the country, women watch schools and churches emptied by abduction, children and worshippers taken from spaces meant to be safe.

Yet women resist.

They organize prayers.

Community warnings.

Quiet leadership.

Even when peace is gone, women manufacture survival.

What the World Must Understand

Peace is not the absence of gunfire.

Peace is the presence of safety.

Kidnapping is not random—it is patterned.

It thrives where poverty meets neglect.

We need security that reaches farms and rural roads.

We need support that continues after release.

We need to listen to local voices—especially women—before fear hardens into normalcy.

Peace cannot be restored by speeches alone.

It must be protected where ordinary life happens.

Returning to the Farm

Sometimes, I think of that farm.

The soil is still there.

The sun still rises.

But something essential is missing.

Peace is the freedom to work and return home.

Peace is ordinary life uninterrupted.

Until that returns,

peace remains missing.

And we are all still walking—

not forward,

but carefully.