The Abduction Of 14-Year-Old Habiba and the Conspiracy Of Silence [MUST READ]

With the abduction of Miss Habiba Isyaku Tanko, a 14-year-old Christian girl in Katsina State, her alleged conversion to Islam and forced into marriage with one Jamilu and the silence of the powers that be to secure the release of Habiba to her parents tells a lot about the conspiracy of silence that is going on about the needless abduction of young Christians girls, their forceful conversion to Islam and subsequent giving of their hands in marriage to Muslim men without even informing the parents.

“….In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are simply protecting their trivial age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.''

On the 13th day of April in the year 2016, Miss Grace Alheri Bawa left Miya town to visit her uncles in their family compound in Siri, a village in Bauchi State. Information from her father had it that she later followed one of her uncle’s children to spend the weekend in Bauchi City in one of her uncle’s house.

The father, Elder Bawa Buba, an ordained elder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Miya, in Ganjuwa LGA of Bauchi State, thought she was in the village until he received Grace’s message of Grace following his brother’s children to Bauchi.

Elder Bawa put a call to Dauda Buba, his elder brother, to whom his daughter has gone to visit to enquire whether Grace was with him as reported. To his surprise, he confirmed the information but was also told that he, Dauda, has also Islamized her and that he should forget about seeing her any time soon.

Shocked and thinking it was a joke, Bawa could not believe his ears when Dauda went further to tell him confidently to forget about having back Grace as his daughter as she is now a Muslim and has no dealings for an “infidel” like him!

Elder Bawa reported the issue to some of his brothers who were not pleased with what Dauda did. They all expressed displeasure over the issue and called upon Dauda to return Grace to her parents but Dauda told them that he wouldn’t and that the Bauchi State Sharia Commission and other big names were aware of the girl’s change of faith and how nobody can do anything to change it.

Elder Bawa’s family members were helpless and advice Bawa to take the case to Hakimin Miya (Village Head of Miya), Alhaji Sulaiman Yakubu.

From his story, it was clear that there was a conspiracy of silence as security agencies which were contacted and the Sharia Commission kept on passing the buck of securing Grace’s release to her parents to one another.

At one time, when he, in company of his pastor and a deacon from his church, went to Dauda’s house to secure his daughter’s release, the Sharia Commission threatened to arrest Grace and punish her if she dares have close dealings with her “infidel” father.

To cut the story short, Miss Grace was finally re-united with her parents after much pressure from her pastor and the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, Bauchi State chapter. Interestingly, the police initially asked the father to take the issue to court as it was, according to them, a civil case!