Nigeria: Middle Class in Fear as Kidnappings Rise

Port Harcourt, Nigeria - Nigeria Masked men armed guard elite in this volatile oil-rich region, but the country middle class can only lock their doors and pray every time their children leave home.
Kidnappers who once targeted foreign workers in the oil are now abduct children - including one as young as 8 months old - for whatever ransom they can get.
The kidnapping crisis has forced the price of German shepherds skyrocket, because only the richest can afford private security in a country where most people earn less than $ 1 per day.
President Goodluck Jonathan, who comes from the Niger Delta, has regretted the explosion of kidnappings and promised to the military use to "Crush" behind the back.
"We can no longer continue to live in a society where even if your wife go to church, you need to find a (armored personnel carrier) to follow her," Jonathan told a crowd of supporters, ruling party last month.
"If the children go to school, you are looking for machine-gun security people to follow them. How many people can afford that?" he asked.
Kidnappers time and only focus on foreign workers in the oil and contractors for six figures ransom. Now, with oil companies keep their employees hidden behind barbed wire and under paramilitary protection, gangs increasingly turned to the Nigerian middle class families.
In recent months, abduct victims are as young as 8 months old baby seized in Port Harcourt in February. The primary school-age son of a local village chief was seized, while still in his school uniform, the boy was eventually released, presumably after the kidnappers' demands were met. Often targeted physicians have gone on strike to protest the ransom market.
Nigeria consistently underpaid federal police, whose officers routinely extort motorists at checkpoints, is no official data on the number of kidnappings sweeping the delta. However, newspapers, near-daily reports of kidnappings and ransom demands, and even the state-run television broadcaster has had to recognize the epidemic.
Those who can afford to hire police officers from elite units and deadly as the Mobile Police, or "kill-and-go" as Nigerians to pay. A report by the Soros Foundation's Open Society Justice Initiative suggested approximately one quarter of the officers of the nation are hired as private security guards for the elite.
They are a routine sight in Port Harcourt and elsewhere in the Niger Delta - paramilitary police units equipped to battle militants private Watchkeeping for the elite of the country.
Pickup trucks with masked men armed with Kalashnikovs speed through the streets, sirens wailing, followed by black sport utility vehicles with tinted windows that VIP customers.
Failure to use this to be so. Foreign oil companies have worked for 50 years in the Niger Delta, an area of marshes, mangrove-lined creeks, fields and palm trees, almost the size of South Carolina.
At first, many foreign workers in the oil in a fairly eventful Caterwauling nightlife prostitutes and cheap drinks kept running strict military dictatorships and brutal control over the region.
That began to change in the 1990s as local communities began to run out of oil companies. In 2006, converted into a full-fledged revolt, as militants, angry over the delta's continuing poverty, pipelines blown up, kidnapped oil company employees and fought government troops.
Today, oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell PLC keep workers nestled in massive double fenced compounds or direct transport from their offshore rig workers to the sea from regional airports.
Many of the militant activity in recent months off after several gang leaders agreed to an amnesty deal offered by late President Umaru Yar'Adua. However, small arms and machine guns remain all too prevalent in the region, analysts say.
"It's the foot soldiers that are kind of on the sidelines. ... They just do what they can abduct," said Mark Schroeder, director of analysis for sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S. security think tank STRATFOR. "The individual in the Nigerian middle class has not only ensure the safety of oil workers have."
As a result, middle class children, and priests, politicians and doctors have been targeted by criminal gangs. Typically, most released in a week or two after their families what they can scrape together to pay ransom.
Oil workers went on amounts above $ 165,000 (25 million naira). However, the Nigerian middle class families can pay much less, so gangs resorted to kidnap more of them to the same profit, said Schroeder.
Many victims' families leave the police out, for fear of officials in one of the most corrupt countries in the world will demand their own cut. As a result, statistics on kidnappings remains difficult to assess.
The overwhelming poverty and the allure of quick cash drives crime, says the local human rights activist Anyakwee Nsirimovu. In a nation of 150 million ruled by an often corrupt elite, some see it as the only way forward.
"They have an environment where the only way you can get what you want is to participate in criminal activities created Nsirimovu said.