The heavy silence of Kaduna State is rarely just quiet. It is the kind of stillness that holds its breath, waiting for the sound of a motorbike engine or the sharp crack of a rifle in the brush. For decades, men like retired Major General Abdulrahman Kuliya knew how to read that silence. They spent their lives decoding threats, mapping insurgencies, and wearing the starched camouflage of the Nigerian Army as a shield against chaos.
But camouflage offers no protection when you are eighty years old, sitting on your own veranda, watching the evening shadows stretch across the red dirt of your homeland.
When the gunmen came for the General, they did not care about his medals. They did not care about the decades he spent serving the state, or the secrets he held, or the respect he commanded in the barracks. To the bandits who operate in the porous, lawless stretches of northwestern Nigeria, an elderly retired general is not a symbol of national pride.
He is a commodity. A lottery ticket wrapped in a fragile, aging body.
The news of his abduction arrived in the standard, sterile language of a press release. A few lines on a digital ticker. A sudden burst of frantic WhatsApp messages shared among retired military officers. Then, the inevitable, agonizing waiting period that every Nigerian family fears more than death itself.
Two weeks later, the silence broke again. The General was dead. Not on a battlefield, surrounded by his troops, but in a makeshift camp hidden deep within the forests that have become the lawless heart of a nation’s security crisis.
The Price of a Lifetime
To understand why the death of a retired general in captivity matters so deeply, you have to look past the immediate tragedy of one family's loss. You have to look at what his capture represents.
For years, the narrative surrounding Nigeria’s kidnapping epidemic was framed as a problem of vulnerability. The victims were travelers caught on the lonely stretch of the Abuja-Kaduna highway. They were school children taken from poorly guarded dormitories in the middle of the night. They were farmers who wandered too far from their villages to tend to their crops. The unspoken assumption among the country’s elite was that safety could be purchased. If you lived in a gated compound, traveled with armed escorts, or achieved a certain level of status, the monster could not touch you.
The abduction of a major general shatters that illusion completely.
Consider the logistical reality of targeting a man of Kuliya’s stature. These are not crimes of opportunity executed by desperate, starving youths. These are sophisticated operations conducted by heavily armed syndicates who possess intelligence, tactical patience, and an utter lack of fear regarding the state’s retaliatory power. When a nation cannot protect the very people who used to command its armies, the average citizen is left asking a terrifying question:
Who is actually left to protect us?
The ransom economy in Nigeria has evolved from a sporadic criminal enterprise into a highly structured, multi-million-dollar industry. It operates on cold math. The bandits calculate the net worth of a target, the emotional desperation of the family, and the political pressure on the government. They factor in the cost of feeding the hostage, the logistics of moving them through the bush to evade military tracking, and the risk of a rescue operation.
In the case of an elderly hostage, the clock ticks differently. The syndicates know that time is their enemy, not because of the police, but because of biology.
Medicine in the Mud
Step into that forest camp for a moment. This is a hypothetical reconstruction, but it is grounded in the brutal, documented reality of dozens of survivors who have returned from the creeks and the woods of Zamfara and Kaduna.
You are eighty years old. The floor is the damp earth, infested with insects. The canopy above blocks out the sun during the day and traps the freezing mist at night. Your daily routine of blood pressure medication, carefully managed diets, and clean water is replaced by muddy stream water and a handful of stale bread or half-cooked rice.
The captors do not provide medical care. They provide ultimatums.
They hand you a satellite phone and tell you to call your children. They demand sums of money that sound like phone numbers—hundreds of millions of naira. On the other end of the line, your family is frantically scrambling, calling in favors, trying to liquidate properties, begging banks for loans, all while knowing that every hour that passes weakens the heart of the patriarch.
The negotiation process is a psychological war of attrition. The bandits use terror as leverage, playing audio of gunfire or threatening execution. But with elderly hostages, the true killer is often far more mundane than a bullet. It is exposure. It is dehydration. It is the sudden, catastrophic spike in blood pressure caused by sheer, unadulterated terror, without a single pill available to bring it down.
When General Kuliya’s body finally gave out, it was a grim confirmation of this mathematical reality. The bandits did not get their payday. The family did not get their father back. The state was left with another stain on its security record. Everyone lost, except the forest, which swallowed the secret of his final hours.
The Echoes in the Barracks
The reaction within the Nigerian military establishment has been one of quiet, simmering fury. For the active-duty soldiers currently fighting Boko Haram in the northeast or battling bandits in the northwest, the death of a general in a ditch is a devastating blow to morale.
Soldiers sign an implicit contract with the state. They trade their youth, their safety, and sometimes their lives for the promise that their sacrifice will mean something. They fight under the assumption that the institution they serve will look after them when the uniform comes off. They believe that the fearsome reputation of the Nigerian Armed Forces will serve as a shield for their families.
When that shield fails a general, the contract feels broken.
The security landscape has shifted dramatically over the past decade. What began as localized cattle rustling and communal clashes has mutated into an existential threat to the country’s territorial integrity. The bandits are no longer just hiding in the woods; they are governing them. They levy taxes on villages, set up roadblocks, and shoot down military aircraft with sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry.
The response from the authorities follows a predictable, exhausting script. There are promises of a "full-scale investigation." There are orders issued to "comb the forests" and "bring the perpetrators to justice." Condolence visits are paid to the grieving family by politicians in immaculate white robes, flanked by television cameras and heavy security detail.
But the cameras eventually leave. The security detail drives away. And the family is left with an empty chair and the haunting knowledge of how the story ended.
The Currency of Fear
We often talk about insecurity in terms of numbers. We count the dead, we calculate the GDP loss, we track the number of displaced persons living in squalid camps. But the true cost of Nigeria’s kidnapping crisis cannot be measured in naira or statistics.
It is measured in the erosion of trust.
It is the way a father looks at his children before they take a bus to university, wondering if he will have to sell his house to buy them back. It is the way a successful diaspora Nigerian hesitates to return home for Christmas, choosing instead the safety of a cold apartment in London or Houston. It is the quiet abandonment of rural ancestral homes, as the elderly flee to the congested, chaotic safety of the cities, leaving their lands to be reclaimed by the weeds and the gunmen.
General Kuliya’s life was defined by structure, discipline, and the defense of borders. His death was defined by the complete absence of all three.
The tragic irony is that the men who took him likely grew up in the very shadow of the system he helped maintain. They are the products of failed schools, empty clinics, and a broken justice system that offered them two choices: a life of grinding, forgotten poverty, or the quick, intoxicating power of an AK-47.
They chose the rifle. And in doing so, they became the architects of a nightmare that eventually reached out and dragged an old soldier from his home.
There will be no grand state funeral that can erase the bitterness of this conclusion. The military honors, the gun salutes, and the folding of the green-and-white flag will feel hollow against the backdrop of how he died. The true memorial for General Kuliya cannot be built with concrete or speeches. It can only be built by reclaiming the spaces where the rule of law has gone to die.
Until that happens, the silence of Kaduna will remain a dangerous thing. The forests will continue to grow thicker, the roads will stay longer, and the men with the rifles will keep watching the verandas, waiting for the next name to cross their list.
