By dusk on Jan. 30, 2022, Motunrayo Shittu, 30, held her infant and fretted that her husband, who had phoned an hour earlier, hadn’t returned as promised. After several hours, she took her worries to bed with her three children. The next morning, her cell phone lit up with a call from hubby: the politician and former local government chairman in the state, Bamgboye Adegoroye. In horror, she heard the gruff unfamiliar voice of a criminal—an abductor—speaking shredded English to demand a ransom of N30 million—an equivalent of $73,000. Numbed by panic, Shittu reached out to the police station in Ekiti State, midway between the capital of Abuja and the metropolis of Lagos.  But like thousands of citizens caught in the cross hairs of organized crime gangs in Nigeria’s six southwestern states, she called in the help of a paramilitary group created just two years ago dubbed “Amotekun,” meaning in …