Growing up in Ibadan, parents left no stones unturned in warning us about the menace of kidnapers - called gbomogbomo in Yoruba. Everyday stories of lucky survivors were told to our hearing to all the more underscore the need for us to be conscious of strangers and danger. Prayers were specially offered in religious gatherings by parents entrusting their kids into God's hands lest one day any child got hypnotised by the diabolic touch of kidnappers and then led to their slaughter thickets for money-making rituals.

The kidnapper was more loathed than a villain in a gothic fiction. He, by reason of metaphor, was a paedophile who robbed children of their chaste innocence. No one compared with him in the love for filthy lucre. He was an epidemic whose morbidity rate was high among children.

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