MDB Results 2026 · Nigeria · Day 6 of 6
Two Weeks
Kofi had one more question.
He had been asking questions all week — about power plants and take-or-pay contracts, about GPS databases and geofencing, about tax systems and Oracle implementations and what happens when the plumbing works. He had filled his notebook. His mother had been patient.
On the last morning, he asked the one he had been carrying since Day 3, when Toju had said: someone was watching, and the story of how they watched is the story of tomorrow. And the story kept getting pushed. Because the man who could tell it was CJ — Chuka J. Agu, the communications consultant who had built the social media presence of the project, trained the teams, filmed the beneficiaries, and been on the road outside Benin City on the 30th of November 2019.
They sat together in the hotel. CJ, Toju, and Kofi’s mother. Kofi sat across from CJ and looked at him carefully.
“What happened on that road?” Kofi asked.
CJ had been in the Niger Delta for three weeks. He had finished training sessions in Bayelsa, then Rivers, then two days with the communications team in Benin City. On the 30th of November, a project vehicle with a driver named Joseph took him toward Asaba. It was supposed to be a two-hour journey. A routine trip.
“It felt like a movie,” CJ said. “Prior to this I had never experienced anything. The closest I had experienced on the field would probably be a police checkpoint and the police being aggressive. But this was different. The guns were blazing. The gunshots were consistent and rapid.”
The car had just taken the ramp off the Benin road when a truck ahead had overturned. People were moving goods from the truck to another vehicle. A car overtook the project vehicle and cut it off. The car stopped. The guns went off.
“In less than five seconds, somebody came to my side and dragged me out of the car. Somebody did the same with the driver. They pulled me and put me in another car and covered my head with a beanie. And that was the beginning.”
They drove for two minutes. Then the car stopped again. CJ heard voices: that’s the car, that’s the car, let’s get that one. The guns went off again. Someone shouted: they’re returning fire, don’t kill the woman. Then: you killed the policeman.
They had attacked a second vehicle. Inside was Justice Chioma Nwosu-Iheme, a judge of the Federal Court of Appeal. Her police orderly of twelve years — who had been with her every day for a decade, who had sat in the front seat wearing a bulletproof vest — was shot in the forehead. He had no chance. They had aimed there specifically, knowing about the vest.
They stopped once more to take a woman and her daughter from a petrol station. Then they drove toward the river.
Inside the car, the beanie over CJ’s head had no gap for breathing. He started to lose consciousness.
“I was just seeing my feet,” he said. “I had some space for my nose. And then we drove to the riverside and they pulled all of us down and they moved us to another car, and they drove us to the next location.”
Toju was in his office in Benin City when the communications officer ran in.
“She came in visibly distressed,” he said. “She said there was a situation. CJ had been kidnapped. The driver Joseph was calling and crying at the same time. He was obviously shaking. I told him to calm down. He was almost hysterical. Talking out of sync. Babbling. You could tell from the phone.”
Toju sent another project vehicle to collect Joseph and bring him back. He did not want Joseph to drive. The police were already at the scene by the time the staff arrived. Toju called me. I was in Abuja. He then called the Chief of Staff to the Governor, the Chief Security Officer, the Commissioner for Budget and Planning, the Commissioner for Finance. He informed the DSS. And within hours the World Bank security officer, Mark Jones, was on the phone with specific instructions: if the kidnappers make contact, give them a particular number.
“Our concern was: let them not kill him,” Toju said quietly. “Let them not harm him. That was all.”
The location was a small village in dense forest, close enough to an airport that CJ could hear planes landing and taking off. The five captives were held in a room. The judge was given a mattress, hot water in the mornings, eggs for breakfast. The kidnappers had identified her overnight from social media. They called her Madam Justice. They knew the value they had.
“I was the elite guy,” CJ said with a slight smile. “They had moved me to a corner. The rest were on the other side.”
He was blindfolded for most of the two weeks. From time to time, in the moments when the guards moved away, he would lift the bandage slightly and look around. He thought about his wife. He thought about his daughter — eighteen months old. He lay on the concrete floor and thought about whether he would see them again.
The kidnappers interrogated him. He told them he was a photographer. They did not believe him. They said their native doctor would confirm who he was. The native doctor confirmed he was a photographer. On his phone, on his laptops, on his ID card in his jeans pocket in his suitcase, the name of the organisation he worked for was visible. None of them saw it.
They gave him a cigarette. He was not a smoker. He coughed. They laughed slightly and began to talk.
“They told me they learned how to do this in a prison in Akure,” CJ said. “They came out and joined the gang. And they kept talking about how the government had failed them. I said: I’m Nigerian too. The government failed me too. But you picked up a gun. I picked up a camera. There is no difference between both of us.”
Every day they said: you are leaving today. Every morning he woke up still there.
“The most soul-crushing thing,” he said, “was that every day they gave you hope. And at the end of the day they took the whole bag. I heard it fourteen times.”
On the last night, two of the guards came and sat with the captives. One gave a sermon. He quoted the Bible. He talked about Saul and his conversion. He prayed for their protection as they departed. The captives said Amen.
“In my head,” CJ said, “I was thinking: these guys are giving us hope again. I do not need this false hope.”
But that night they filed them outside. Into a vehicle. Driven at speed through forest paths. Stopping whenever someone moved in the village. CJ carrying the judge on his back for stretches when she could not walk, her strength gone from days without food.
They dropped the women on a highway at night, gave them two thousand naira each, and drove off. Then they drove CJ a little further, did a U-turn, warned him that they knew his address and would find him if there was any word about money, gave him two thousand naira, told him to run into the bush.
He ran. Then he came back out. Removed the bandage. The moonlight was, in his words, a lot of light for a long time.
“These guys went right,” he said, “so I went left.”
He walked to a line of trucks. A motorcycle rider took him to an army checkpoint. A mobile money agent sent him cash from his sister — who had asked him to say her childhood nickname before she believed it was him. He bought slippers. He bought a change of clothes. He checked into a hotel on the expressway and slept until morning.
In the morning he took a taxi to Benin City. To the Protea Hotel. He called Toju.
Toju sat quietly for a moment at the memory.
“We went to see him at the hotel,” Toju said. “He was very lean. But he was talking. He was talking so much. You know — I don’t know if you remember — you were just talking. Non-stop.”
“I hadn’t talked in two weeks,” CJ said.
Toju smiled.
“Yeah. You were just talking. A bit hyper. But it was good. Just to see someone you knew. To have a real conversation. I can imagine.”
Kofi’s mother said: “I was not at the Protea Hotel. I was in Abuja. I was in the backseat of a taxi on the way to the office. Day fifteen. My phone rang. It was Toju. He was at the hotel having breakfast with CJ.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Within five seconds I had sent a message to the World Bank WhatsApp group. By the time I reached the office ten minutes later, everybody was celebrating.”
Kofi looked at CJ.
“You went through all of that,” he said. “And you are still doing this work.”
CJ smiled.
“If I had my way, I would be in a small fishing village somewhere just catching fish, grilling fish. But I have bills to pay. And the work is what I know. It is home for me. Even though I am not full-time staff, I know the systems, I know the people. They are like second family now.”
“Are you not afraid?” Kofi asked.
“Since that incident,” CJ said, “the World Bank in Nigeria has been very specific about security and operations. They do not play with mission trips. Whether you are a consultant or staff, there are new guidelines and new policies that guide every mission. A new programme for safety in the field that every staff must take. You cannot go on a mission if you have not taken it. So they have been on top of their game.”
He paused.
“But yeah. Until I can find that fishing village and retire there — I will still be doing what I do.”
Kofi closed his notebook.
He had been to the buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. He had met the genies. He had seen the numbers and the gaps and the ratings and the ships. He had been to the Oba’s palace and stood in the parking lot and heard about the bronzes. He had seen the roads that youth from the community had built with their own hands. He had seen the database that Mustapha built in a boat in a storm. He had heard what it looks like when the plumbing works and what it costs when it does not.
And now he had heard this.
A man who had picked up a camera instead of a gun, who had been taken off a road in the Niger Delta for two weeks, who had carried a judge on his back through forest in the dark and walked barefoot to a truck stop and called his sister and said the childhood nickname and been told she was sending money — who was back at work because the work was what he knew and the people were like family and he still had bills to pay.
Kofi did not write anything. He just sat with it.
Then his mother said: “It is time to go.”
And he found his own way to the gate.