By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

When I arrived in Minna, capital of Niger State on January 18, 2026, I carried the burden in my mind, of the frightening security situation in that state in particular. I had gone to see my nephew and to as usual, have some pep talks with him and his wife, especially in view of the fact that his father, my immediate elder brother, was no more on this side of God’s creation.
Because we talked far into the evening, my nephew convinced me not to go for a lodge around town but suggested that I should pass the night in the room of his neighbour who happened to be away on a journey too.
I decided to go to sleep around 9.30pm because I was thoroughly exhausted after driving on the devastatingly bad Suleja-Minna road for nearly four hours instead of two hours from Abuja.
Immediately my nephew introduced me to the young man who usually sleeps in the sitting room of the two-room ensuite, I began to say my usual last prayer before lying down. At that point, the young man drew my attention to the fact that he would want to go out, and that he would lock the entrance door with the key and that he would go away with key. His excuse was that he would not want to disturb me when he return. I thought that he was just going for a few minutes to buy something across the road.
After my prayer, I lied down to sleep. By 10.00pm, I suddenly woke up to find out that the young man had not returned. I became worried! Why has he not returned; where must he have gone to?
While different questions began to fill my thoughts, I heard the entrance door being opened. The young man entered, went to a corner in the room to pick something. When I casually asked him where he had gone to, he did not answer. Instead, he picked what he came for and was going out again. I ran to meet him at the doormouth, asking him where he was going again. He still did not answer, but merely closed the door, locked it and went away with the key. I was virtually caged in the room like a prisoner.
At about 10.30pm, sleep completely disappeared from my eyes as I kept on thinking about what actually was happening. To say that I was siezed by undefined fear was to say the obvious.
I picked my phone and called my nephew who slept with his wife in another apartment within the fenced compound. I complained that the young man had not returned, but he assured me that he would soon return. Not satisfied, I called my wife back in Abuja, as at 11.00pm to inform her about my location.
At about 12.45pm, I heard the door open. It was him. He shut the and began to prepare to lie down, so I thought. All these were happening in the darkness; there was no electricity. I was already battling with darkness, heat that left me sweating profusely, sleeplessness, uncertainty of my fate due to the strange behaviour by the man.
After he entered and locked the door, I thought he was going to sleep. But a few minutes later, I heard him talking in Hausa language. He was talking so audibly that I could hear him, though I didn’t quite get what he was saying. As a matter of fact, I thought he was talking to someone with whom he might have returned, but, no. He was just talking. My fear heightened.
Was he talking to someone on phone? At a point, I wanted to pick my phone and call my nephew to come and open the door so that I would go and sleep in his room, but I restrained myself because I didn’t know if there was any kind of conspiracy. If you don’t believe in conspiracy, especially between the person you know and the stranger, it is just that you have never adverted your mind to it.
My thoughts at that time were confusing but not far away from the conspiracy theory, especially in the kind of country we live today; in the kind of the people whose motives are difficult to place.
Amidst hundreds of thoughts crossing my mind, a powerful, uncontrollable sleep siezed me, maybe around 3.55am only to be woken up by a call to Muslim prayer at about 5.00am. That was when I woke up, prayed and got set to face a new day.
When I narrated the scenario to my nephew in the morning, his response was shocking: “the man has some mental challenges: he always behaves abnormally.”
And so, it was confirmed that I slept in the same room, alone, with a man that is suffering from mental instability. Anything could have happened that night, and the defense would be, he is not mentally okay!
What a night!!