Blood on Oghara Farm Road: Delta’s kidnap kingdom, where trip to harvest cassava could cost your life

Ask His Royal Majesty, Noble Oyibo Eshemitan, Orefe III, the Ovie of Oghara Kingdom, and he won’t give you a date at all. He’ll give you a calendar. “Since January to date, every month, it’s become a recurring decimal,” the monarch says, weariness breaking through the formality in his voice. “There’s no month since January to date that we don’t have kidnapping, killing.”

By his count, not a single month this year has been spared. January bled. February bled. March, April, May — all of them bled. Then came the killing that finally cracked something open in the kingdom: the Adojor case, the man who was shot dead when returning back from farm while his widow was marched into the bush and held until N1.5 million was scraped together to buy back a life that still needed saving.

“They Wear Us Down With the Cutlass”

The victims’ accounts start to sound like one long, repeating nightmare with different names stitched onto it.

Isaac Oragborfia was kidnapped alongside his wife just three months ago, walking home from the farm. Four men, he says, spoke a language he recognised at once. “They were Northerners, the way they spoke they were Hausas,” he insisted. His phone was taken, N3 million was demanded and eventually paid — raised, in the end, by his own son, who carried the ransom into the bush himself to buy his parents’ freedom. “They kept beating us all through,” he said. “Since then, I have not been doing anything.”

Happy Ejorowho was carrying cassava home from the farm when five men fell on him. “A tall guy… he was the one carrying cutlass. He used the cutlass to hit me and I fell,” he recalls. In the bush, he found he wasn’t alone — two others had already been taken before him. Each of them paid N2 million to get out. He drives a fairly used motorcycle for a living now; the farm isn’t somewhere he trusts anymore.

Ruth Owotuoma didn’t stay to negotiate. Attacked on her bicycle at 4 p.m. one afternoon last June by two men she describes as unmistakably Hausa, she ran — and paid for that decision with weeks in the teaching hospital, recovering from what the escape cost her.

Esther Alubu wasn’t as fortunate. She was riding to the farm with her son when gunfire cracked ahead of them; she turned back, but too late. Two men she describes as Fulani threw wood across her path, dragged her and another woman into the bush, and marched them through a night of rain until ransoms of N1.5 million and N2 million, respectively, bought their release the following morning.

Then there’s Godday Akine, ambushed with his younger brother shortly after 6 a.m. on a Friday in 2024, at a waterlogged stretch of farm road where their motorcycle had to slow down. One man stepped into their path; another struck Akine across the head with a piece of wood, hard enough to put him on the ground. When his brother tried to run, one of the attackers caught him near the eye. Four kidnappers in all overpowered them, dragged them into the bush, bound them, beat them, and warned them that shouting would get them shot. Using the brother’s phone, the kidnappers called the family themselves to open ransom talks.

The brothers spent four days in the forest before their captors settled on a price — N1 million each, plus N600,000 for “food” — later negotiated down to N2.3 million total. They were released around 10 p.m., taken straight to a private Hospital, where Akine’s head wound was stitched and his eye treated. Neighbours pooled money for the hospital bill; some borrowed what they didn’t have. The wound has since closed. What hasn’t closed is Akine’s relationship with the farm that nearly killed him.

And then there’s Godstime Agent, whose wife’s story ends the way no one prayed for — a corpse found. “We now saw her corpse in the bush,” he says, still unable, weeks later, to bring himself to bury her. “She was brutally—” he breaks down in tears. He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to.

The Mother Who Wouldn’t Stop Fighting Them

Jackson Erifeta buried his father in March 2025. Four months later, in July, he buried his mother too.

She’d gone to the farm on a Thursday, cycling alongside colleagues on motorcycles. She never came home. By the next morning, after a frantic overnight search, her family found her body where she’d fallen.

“There were signs that she had been attacked,” Jackson says. “It appeared the assailants had tried to cut her, but when they could not overpower her, they used her own clothing to strangle her to death.”

What haunts him isn’t just how she died — it’s how many warnings went unheeded before it happened. “My mother had repeatedly complained about some Fulani herdsmen who were rearing cattle in the area,” he says. “She often complained that they were disturbing her and other farmers. She had told us that whenever she asked them to leave the farm, they would threaten her.”

She kept confronting them anyway. It was, her son believes now, a fight that cost her everything. “July has become a very painful month for me,” he says, “because it reminds me of her death.”

A Kingdom That Buries and Buries Again

For Leonard Maduku, there was no ransom call to answer — only silence, and then a body. His brother, Abraham Edesiri Maduku, vanished from the farm in 2024. Two days passed with no ransom demand, so the family went looking themselves. They found his bicycle first. His body soon after.

“We reported it at the police station,” Leonard says, “and their response was that they would look into the matter. But from that time until now, there has been no confrontation with anyone.”

He and his family now raise his brother’s four children — three boys and a girl — paying school fees for a man who no longer can.

Igho Adojor, daughter of the murdered Vincent Adojor, remembers being lied to for her own protection. She called home again and again, desperate for news of her mother, while relatives shielded her from the truth that her father was already gone. “We were devastated,” she says simply. “All we could do was cry.” Her father had held the family together — farmer, businessman, provider for two wives and ten children, the eldest of whom is at Delta State University. “Now that he has been killed, we do not know how we will survive.”

Her mother isn’t asking for sympathy. She’s asking for help. “I have seven children,” she says. “How do I train them? The government should help me.”

When Ransom Becomes a Shopping List

Nothing captures the cold, transactional nature of this crisis quite like the list Mrs Adojor was made to fill while negotiating for her own freedom: a large loaf of bread, five tins of sardine, five tins of milk, two packets of Benson cigarettes, wraps of weed, Tramadol tablets, a crate of malt drink, sachets of water. A kidnappers’ care package, itemised and delivered, before a single naira of ransom changed hands.

Even talking to her captors was a struggle. Unable to understand their language, the women had to track down a Hausa woman at Oghara’s cattle market to interpret the negotiations by phone — a woman who initially refused, and agreed only after they pleaded with her.

“An Isolated Case,” said the Commissioner

If one line has enraged Oghara more than any other in recent weeks, it’s this: the Delta State Commissioner of Police, CP Yemi (Olufemi) Oyeniyi, meeting the monarch, chiefs and community stakeholders at the palace after Mr Adojor’s killing, promised strengthened, intelligence-led policing — then described what Oghara is living through as amounting to only “some isolated cases of kidnapping and cultism.”

The Oghara Study Group wasn’t willing to let that stand. In a statement issued shortly after the commissioner’s visit, the group said it welcomed the engagement but flatly rejected the framing, insisting the kingdom is facing “an organised and persistent kidnapping crisis,” not scattered, unrelated incidents. Its own documentation, the group said, shows a recurring pattern of abductions, killings and multimillion-naira ransom payments running the length of the Oghara–Sapele, Otefe–Ovade and Warri–Sapele corridors — hardly the footprint of anything “isolated.”

High Chief Stephen Egbivwie, the Unugbrogodo — traditional prime minister, clan head, and head of the council of chiefs — of Ogharefe in Oghara Kingdom, said, “That Commissioner of Police should describe what we face as an isolated case — that is not proper. We have asked the cattle rearers to leave our bushes, leave our farms. They attack our people, kill many, and kidnap many for ransom of millions of naira.”

Asked for the police’s position on the “isolated case” remark and the broader pattern of attacks, force spokesman Edafe Bright pointed to action taken rather than disputing the numbers. “As a follow-up to these reported incidents, the CP personally visited Oghara late June, met with the king, stakeholders, the chairman of Ethiope West LGA, vigilantes and other stakeholders, deliberated and modalities were put in place,”

he said. “And I think from that time till now, we have not recorded any other incidents.”

The Chairman Who Won’t Answer His Phone

While the king speaks, while the chiefs speak, while grieving mothers and widowed fathers speak, one man has stayed conspicuously silent: Hon. Christian Onogba, Chairman of Ethiope West Local Government Council. Repeated visits to his secretariat, repeated calls, repeated texts — all unanswered, from the man whose council sits at the administrative centre of a kingdom now burying its own on what feels like a monthly schedule.

Beyond the spokesman’s account of the late-June meeting and its “modalities,” the police have offered little else: no arrest figures, no update on the Maduku case or the others still open, just a promise — relayed through the palace — of a rebuilt vigilante network under a newly posted Divisional Police Officer the king describes, carefully, as showing early promise.

A Youth Association Running Out of Patience

In Obromudu community, under the wider Oghara Kingdom, the Adojor killing is painful — and a warning. “Such an incident has occurred in Obromudu Community,” says Comrade Godstime Agwariame, the community’s youth chairman, flanked by his vice chairman, Comrade Sylvester Abogore, himself the nephew of the murdered man. “Neighbouring communities have experienced several cases of kidnapping.”

He recounts the day itself in the flat, practised language of someone who has told this story too many times already: the distress call, the rush to the scene, the crowd already gathered around a lifeless body, the desperate search for the missing wife stretching from that afternoon into a ransom negotiation that opened at N30 million and eventually settled — if “settled” is the word — around N3 million.

Even as he speaks, another case is unfolding. “Just yesterday,” he says, “one of our brothers from a neighbouring community reported that his brother had gone to the farm to harvest palm fruits and had been missing for three days. The things he went to the farm with were found there, including his slippers, but there has been no information about his whereabouts up till now.”

The youths aren’t waiting on anyone else anymore. Under the Oghara Youth Association, they’ve organised their own watch rotations across the farms, while the traditional council — working from the belief that the attackers are herdsmen operating out of the bush — has ordered cattle owners to bring their animals into town, where they can be watched.

The Kingdom’s Reckoning With Itself

What makes the king’s account most striking is that he doesn’t let his own kingdom off the hook. Pressed on persistent rumours that some Oghara indigenes have been quietly leasing farmland to herdsmen — land that then becomes staging ground for this very violence — the monarch doesn’t deny it. He confirms it.

“We had that information,” he says. “Seven of them were brought to this palace… just because they want to get money. We warned them, and they owned up that they no longer give our land to cattle rearers.” The kingdom’s chiefs, he says, have now resolved collectively: no more land to herdsmen, on pain of banishment.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit publicly. He could easily have said nothing at all.

What Oghara Is Demanding Now

The Oghara Study Group has moved well past press statements. The group is preparing to petition the Ethiope West Local Government Legislative Council, the Delta State House of Assembly and the National Assembly for formal public hearings — hearings that would put victims, survivors and security agencies on record together. It’s also exploring strategic public-interest litigation to test, in open court, whether government has met its constitutional duty to protect lives under Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution.

Its demands are specific: intelligence-led operations against known criminal hideouts, more police personnel and rapid-response vehicles for Ethiope West, a Community Security Liaison Desk at the local government level, better lighting and surveillance along the Oghara–Sapele and Otefe–Ovade corridors, psychosocial support for survivors, and an independent socio-economic impact assessment to finally put a number on what this crisis has cost the kingdom — in ransom, in lost farmland, in disrupted schooling, in shattered households.

The group has also drawn a hard line against the unrest that consumed the mosque. “OSG strongly rejects mob justice, vigilantism, ethnic profiling and collective blame,” its brief states. “Criminals must be identified through credible investigations and prosecuted in accordance with the law.”

The Long Night That Isn’t Ending

For now, Oghara waits — for a new Divisional Police Officer to succeed where his predecessors didn’t, for a local government chairman to finally answer his phone, for a state government to treat the kingdom as something more than an “isolated case.” The police point to the late-June meeting and its aftermath as proof the modalities are working; people on the farm roads say the fear hasn’t caught up with that assessment yet.

It waits, too, for something no policy can legislate: the courage of ordinary people to keep walking to their farms.

“We are just managing and struggling to survive,” says Igho Adojor, speaking for a family that lost a father, and for a time, a mother, in a single afternoon. “There is no help from anywhere. Only God can help us.”

In Oghara today, that isn’t a figure of speech. For many families here, it’s the entire security plan.

Vanguard