Lagos — A rather novel but nefarious line of business is flowering in the land. It is in the emergence of kidnapping as a cottage industry of sorts and the elevation of the kidnapper/gunman as a new object of national attention, an anti-hero that often leaves a heavy cloud of trauma and even blood in his trail.

In recent months, we have seen an epidemic of kidnappings for ransom grow into a veritable business model. The victims have been as wide ranging as the geographical spread of the scourge. A roll call of states in the direct line of fire: Abia, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Delta, Imo, Lagos, Oyo, Ekiti and the Federal Capital Territory. An estimated 30 per cent of the 36 states in the federation are directly threatened by kidnapping. Most of the rest are under collateral threat as they serve either as holding grounds or safe havens for gangs in the frontline states.

In the nearly 40 years since the end of the Nigerian Civil War, the armed robber had taken position in our collective psychology and language as the ubiquitous symbol of the darker side of our national life. Now comes the kidnapper. The kidnapper is fast displacing the armed robber on the scale of topicality and social impact. This is coming so soon after the reign of the fraudster as a national icon, the kings of advance free fraud (419) lately eulogized in the popular lyrics of Olu Maintain's "Yahoo Ze", an anthem of the times to which many a governor have gleefully danced to in public. But 419 has become increasingly unattractive following commendable public enlightenment and a clampdown on cyber crimes by the relevant agencies. The risk to reward ratio in kidnapping when compared to armed robbery or 419 is tilted somewhat in favour of kidnapping. The outlay may be more: hostages have to be fed, transported and kept alive so that they can make the critical phone call that would bring in the ransom.

For a society that has recently been celebrating 10 years of formal democracy, the rise of kidnapping and allied terrorist undertakings represents a grave threat. In most parts of the country, people are no longer free to go about their legitimate social and economic businesses. Women are kidnapped on their way to market or from church. Men are trailed by kidnappers to their very homes or waylaid on the high way. In one particular incident, in Abia State, a 103-year-old woman receiving medical infusion was kidnapped along with her infusion bottle and related gear and the ransom? A whopping N100 million was being demanded from the woman's retiree son living in far away Lagos. From Lagos to Abia, Rivers to Abuja or Delta to Bayelsa, the story is an unbroken tale of a society virtually living under the terror of assorted gunmen and the blackmail casual gangsters.

Whether or not your immediate vicinity has been engulfed by this cruel epidemic, we are all victims in the end. Kidnapping strikes at the very root of democratic culture. Individual freedom is the most fundamental virtue and attraction of democracy. Of all the so called dividends of democracy, freedom remains the least costly for the political establishment in terms of pressure on resources. Even if you misrule a people, just leave them alone to go about their business. When fear reigns and armed gangs stalk the land, freedom is abridged and even the lowest citizens are ruled by fear. The sovereign that cannot guarantee people their freedom from physical harm undermines its very legitimacy. Very elementary.

At a more frightening level, there is a clear and present danger that gun totting terrorists might be pressed into greater service in the run up to the 2011 elections. Elections in these parts, as indeed everywhere in the world, cost money. Politicians source funds from all imaginable corners to build up a war chest for their campaigns. Kidnappers might in fact find politicians more attractive targets for their trade. Or, much more frightening, we may find unscrupulous politicians enlisting the services of kidnapping gangs to get their opponents out of the way until primaries or elections are over.

The problem on hand has a political origin. Thugs of all descriptions have remained a recurrent feature of our contests for political supremacy. Politicians recruit gangs of young men to press their advantages. In the recent past, they went the extra mile, in some parts of the country, of arming these gangs who have now returned to hound the rest of us. There is a sense in which we can sustain the argument that kidnapping has both a political origin and also consequences. At virtually all levels of government, the level of attention to job creation and the multiplication of opportunities is scandalously scanty. All over the country, vast armies of qualified and semi qualified and able bodied youngsters are roaming both urban streets and rural neighbourhoods. While states and the Federal Government compete for supremacy in landscape decoration and other easy populist projects, their statistics on job creation are almost nonexistent.

The situation is not helped by the onset of a national culture of garish ostentation among politically exposed persons. Virtual mendicants of yesteryears have recently surfaced with expensive SUVs and lavish mansions, prompting a culture of violent "income redistribution" through kidnapping, scams and related tactics.

By far the greater national security challenge of the epidemic of kidnapping and other forms of gun-based terrorism is the danger in the proliferation of guns especially small arms. An epidemic which the UN has identified as a growing problem in parts of Africa has taken root here so quickly. The uncontrolled proliferation of arms in illegal hands is a veritable threat to the stability of the country as has been demonstrated by recent happenings in the Niger Delta.

The guns in the hands of kidnappers and sundry terror agents range from service pistols to assault rifles of varying degrees of sophistication. In the more volatile Niger Delta areas where the line between criminal gangs and militants has virtually disappeared, there is an intimidating arsenal ranging from anti-aircraft guns to rocket propelled grenades and general purpose machine guns.

The sources of these guns are wide ranging. Occasional seizures of arms caches in transit from the ports indicate a thriving international arms trade with Nigeria as a major destination or transit point. When we consider that what is reported might be only a small percentage of the total volume of arms in circulation. With the history of recent conflicts in countries bordering the gulf of Guinea (Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone), it ought to concern federal authorities that the proliferation of arms poses a clear and present threat to national security.

What is required is first, in today's parlance, a re-branding of the kidnapper and re-categorisation of the crime itself. Up to now, the authorities have largely seen kidnapping as just another crime and therefore left the police to deal with it. That will not do. I suggest that what we are dealing with is the beginning of a culture of domestic terrorism and it should be called by the right name so that we can design an appropriate solution. It even has a most damaging international dimension. Foreigners living and working in our midst have been the most attractive targets of most kidnapping gangs for obvious reasons. Some states have realized the grave danger that the scourge poses to their economies and have proceeded to enact fairly drastic legislations that prescribe severe punishments including the death penalty for offenders.

But what is at stake is more than a state concern. We are dealing with what is easily the most potent threat to our national security. Even members of the National Assembly have not been immune from the scourge. Quite a number of state commissioners and local government officials have recently fallen victim. With the increasingly defiant and violent nature of the crime (they engage the police and other security agencies in fire fight and sometimes outgun them!), members of the federal executive may not be so immune after all. It is therefore quite surprising that the National Assembly has not devoted nearly as much energy in deliberations and legislative action on this urgent matter as it has spent on all manner of dubious oversight assignments.

The uncomfortable truth in all this is that we are gradually drifting to that point where political outcomes and the general direction of social and economic activity will be determined by possession or access to guns. And the recent history of African states ought to instruct the Yar'Adua administration to deal with the matter very expeditiously. Somalia, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone should ordinarily be quick reminders of what can happen to a nation when the will of the sovereign is adjudged so weak that it can be challenged and even outgunned by criminal bands and part time gangsters.

There is a classic irony in the rising influence of guns and gun men in our land. A nation that has been celebrating the return of democracy and the end of military rule is suddenly gripped by the threat of the only instrument in the hands of all undemocratic forces: guns.