Vocal critic Idris Abubakar, popularly known as Dadiyata, could be officially presumed dead in 2026 after going missing for almost seven years.

Six years have gone by since kidnappers snatched Dadiyata from the entrance of his Kaduna home.

The critic disappeared on August 2, 2019, and has since been the subject of an unending search that has not yielded much.

Security agencies have no answers, friends and well-wishers have not heard from him since, and there are no leads on his abductors.

The grim reality of never finding closure draws near as Section 164(1) of the Evidence Act, 2011, says if his friends and family do not hear from him in seven years, he can be presumed dead.

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This provision reads thus: “A person shown not to have been heard of for seven years by those, if any, who if he had been alive would naturally have heard of him, is presumed to be dead unless the circumstances of the case are such as to account for his not being heard of without assuming his death; but there is no presumption as to the time when he died, and the burden of proving his death at any particular time is upon the person who asserts it.”

Although speculation has been rife about his chances of survival after this much time, the constitution does make it legal to presume this outcome after 12 months go by seven times.

Dadiyata was 34 at the time of his abduction, married to Khadijah Ahmad for six years and living in the Barnawa area of Kaduna with his wife and two daughters.

The man was active on Twitter (now X). He often criticised former president Muhammadu Buhari over certificate forgery claims and made jokes about Umar Ganduje, former governor of Kano State.

Dadiyata was a staunch follower of Rabiu Kwankwaso, a former Kano governor.

On the day he vanished, Dadiyata arrived home at about 1 am and was ambushed by gunmen who drove him away in his BMW. It was the last time anyone saw him.

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Since his disappearance, a movement dubbed ‘Where is Dadiyata?’ has continued to demand answers from the Nigerian government.

Like him, Steven Kefas, journalist and another critic of the government, was taken on May 8, 2019, three months before Dadiyata.

The Kaduna police arrested Kefas and detained him for 162 days over a Facebook post he made. He eventually got out of detention.

Ibanga Isine, another journalist who was a vocal critic of the Kaduna State Government, and Luka Binniyat, who authored several reports of government negligence of terror attacks on Kaduna residents, faced arrests and harassment for several years.

While these critics lived through the ordeal, Dadiyata’s case remains unsolved, and with the constitutional hourglass losing its final drops of sand in a few months, there is not much time to find Dadiyata alive.