Earlier today, a friend and I had decided to go visit another friend who doesn't stay too far away. The plan was to spend a couple of hours there, relaxing and just catching up.
Due to the fact that his place was just a stone throw away (although it was located on the side of the road), I decided to dress really casual, a short and shirt with my slippers on.
We both left home and began to walk to his place. Now usually, whenever I'm walking by the roadside, I always make sure to be very observant about the things happening at far distance in front of me. That is one habit I developed ever since I moved to this place, rather than focus on the floor with occasional glances at my front like I used to do back in the day, I now prefer to look in front of me, with occasional glances at the floor.
And trust me when I say that I'm glad I did because as we were getting close to our destination, I had looked up from the ground, to see some armed men, dressed in the Nigerian police force uniform, trying to drag a young man into their vehicle. This was nothing short of a daytime kidnap, the only difference between these guys and your typical kidnappers was the fact that they had uniforms on.
The moment I saw this, I stopped dead on my track and my friend did too, because he too had seen them. While we were calculating on the next move to make, we heard one of these local commercial bike driver say to us to run as he drove past us. All of this happened in like two seconds of us spotting the officers but rather than run, I had calmly turned back and just walked in a different direction.
Luckily for me, I know that area very well and had instead taken a different route, not to continue on my journey, but to hide. We had stayed there for about ten minutes, watching people walk by and just observing their body language. If the police were still there, we will be able to tell from the guys walking past us.
Anyways, after waiting for a while and it seemed like the coast was clear, we had both walked out and rather than continue our journey on our destination on foot, we had both boarded a commercial motorcycle instead, even though the house we were going to was right in front of us.
Funny enough, I've heard some of my guys talk about how scared I am when it comes to the police, especially seeing how I'm not a fraudster or doing anything illegal...but what they don't realize is that I've been in this state for six years now and haven't been arrested once while most of them have, this isn't because I'm being scared but rather careful.