Source: Leadership
Today marks the eighth anniversary of the mass abduction of school girls in Chibok town which brought the once obscure Borno State community to global attention. On the night of that day today, Boko Haram terrorists invaded the Government Girls' Secondary School, Chibok, and abducted a total of 276 schoolgirls from their dormitory.
It was the first time such a large number of school children would be abducted in such fashion and, expectedly, it drew global outrage, with world leaders in governance, business, entertainment, sports, etc., joining in the call for their release. Locally, the girls' cause was championed by the 'Bring Back Our Girls Group (BBOG)' which held peaceful demonstrations in Abuja for about three years to keep the pressure on the federal government to continue searching for the girls until they are returned alive.
The incident was a major embarrassment to the then President Goodluck Jonathan administration as it came under harsh scrutiny due to its perceived lethargic response to the incident, and it is believed to be one of the factors that eroded public confidence in the administration which ultimately cost it dearly in the 2015 general election.
President Muhammadu Buhari who took over from the Jonathan administration had made copious promises that his government would do everything within its power to secure the release of the girls. Of the 276 schools that were kidnapped that night, according to reports at the time, 57 of them managed to escape their captors that night of the attack, 21 others were released in October 2016 by the terror group in a deal brokered by the Red Cross, while federal government secured the release of 82 of them in May 2017 in a prisoner swap deal that reportedly involved releasing Boko Haram terrorists in detention. Some others were freed during military operations while six of them were also reported to have died in 2016.
However, about 100 of them are still missing. It is believed that, among the horrors they had faced in the hands of the violent criminals, many of them had been married off to terrorists while others may have been sold into slavery, as the slain former Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau claimed in one of his videos. Alarmingly, in our view, everything about the Chibok girls has gone quiet and there is no indication that government detectives are still making efforts towards finding and rescuing them from their present dire circumstances. Apart from the schoolgirls whose abduction grabbed world attention, there were a reported 2000 persons, mostly women and girls, who were in Boko Haram captivity at the time the Chibok kidnapping occurred. If the school girls are still missing, one can only imagine the fate of others.
Sadly, in our opinion, the Chibok incident opened the door for the kidnapping attacks on more schools across the northern parts of the country. In 2018, at a school in Dapchi, Yobe state, 110 girls were taken away by criminals. Fortunately, 104 were returned after a month, except for five that had died in the process and one, then 15-year-old Leah Sharibu, who was withheld for refusing to convert to Islam. Since then, mass abductions in schools have become commonplace, with bandit-terrorists raiding schools in Kaduna, Niger, Kebbi, Katsina, and Zamfara at will and demanding huge ransoms. Last year alone, 1441 school children were kidnapped and some of the victims are still in captivity.
As a newspaper, we are concerned that eight years after these girls were kidnapped, so many of them are still held captive. This is even more disturbing when the present APC-led administration, when it was in opposition, beat the then ruling PDP over the head on the matter claiming that it had the magic wand to rectify the situation. Today, the administration has not only failed to secure the release of the Chibok girls, but also has failed to prevent or discourage further kidnapping of schoolchildren, let alone rescue them. These days, parents of kidnapped school-children are left to their own fate and are forced to yield to the demands of the terrorists. Even more worrisome is that the federal government and its agencies seem to have given up on looking for kidnapped children, and even adults, in Nigeria. That has emboldened the terrorists who have now turned the kidnapping of helpless Nigerians into a billion-naira crime industry.
Therefore, on this day, we urge the federal government not to relent in its primary duty of securing life and property, including, especially, our schoolchildren. It must dedicate special forces to deal with issues of kidnapping in order to hand over a safer country to the administration that will succeed it next year. That is the best legacy it can bequeath the nation after eight years in power.