By Akin Owolabi
What appeared to be a national sigh of relief with the planned Western World intervention in the frantic efforts to rescue the 234 (are they 219 remaining?) Chibok Secondary School girls abducted by the beastly Islamic sect – Boko Haram – on April 14, this year is fast turning out a forlorn hope.
Over a month after the voiced intervention, the Americans, in fact the cream of the Western world, are either yet to get off the starting blocks or be in a hurry to spring surprises. Newspaper reports indicated that the Yankees were priming to storm the war theatre in North-eastern region of Nigeria. People imbued with specks of humaneness are sorely peeved about the insensitivity of the international community to the physical and psychological torment of those innocent girls.
Two months gone and the girls are still in their captors’ dens in a manner that suggests that their bizarre precarious condition can wait while the world powers slowly ingest the modalities for bringing the girls out of the insurgents’ house of horror.
There shouldn’t have been too much ado in urging France, the most genial of all colonial masters in contemporary history, which too has offered to join forces, to harness her enormous goodwill in Nigeria’s neighbouring Francophone countries – Niger, Chad and Cameroun – to draw a ring around those human predators who have been lurking, prancing and terrorising Nigeria partly from across the borders. Britain has been lethargic about the enormous debacle in her erstwhile colony and member of her neo-colonial body – Commonwealth. The terror gripping Nigeria culminating in the April 14 abduction is such that national pride could be swallowed and sovereignty infringed without a qualm. It deserves the most urgency ever. Yet, the international community is fence-sitting, dilly-dallying and criminally nonchalant. Precious human lives are being left in the jaws and pawns of human lions.
We behold an international community of super powers, with awesome weaponry, still strategising on ways to rescue the girls abducted by the sect of a religion that confers the lowest possible value on feminity and view human life as of no account. This is a group that relishes the mass termination of human lives, including adherents of its faith, viewing such calamity as a restive odour, a holy sacrifice to a blood-thirsty god. United States stalked Osama bin Laden, that Islamic arrowhead of terror, breaching international laws and bombing suspected hide-outs in Afghanistan for over a decade before snuffing life out of that crook in Pakistan. That September 11 terror strike in Washington DC galvanised USA to unprecedented international activities. Osama would have been smoked out within a week if he were to be in USA. This same America is yet to employ such empathy and grave concern over the Chibok girls.
A number of groups are culpable in the Chibok girls’ unending travails. First, in ascending order of guilt, are the girls’ parents who stubbornly, yet unwittingly exposed their children to abduction. How on earth could a discerning parent feign ignorance of the war situation in the North-east by consigning his/her biological girl to the school environment even when the insurgents, in their crass unreasonableness, charged that Western education is a crime punishable with death? Boko Haram had, prior to the April 14 mass kidnapping, wantonly raided
schools. It had attacked well-fortified security formations, sacked several police stations.
Why then should any parent rely on human promises of security? A canon in law states that any person who knowingly submits himself to injury cannot turn round to claim damages. The parents obviously surrendered their girls for abduction. It is true that formal education in the then Eastern Nigeria was suspended for the 30 months a civil war lasted. So, keeping the girls together for the purpose of writing this year’s senior secondary school final examinations has turned out the most foolish enterprise of the parents. No reasoning parents ought to have put their teenagers on the shelves in a culture where child marriage is a passion, where the ravages of obstetric fistula diseases on kid mothers are ignored with pathological indifference.
The security agents too have performed far below par since the declaration of a state of emergency in the Northeast. They are not judicious in the assignment of men and materials. They have yet to display adequate professional skills and acumen in the war against terror. The political class has failed woefully and the security system appears to be following suit. Boko Haram is not as invincible as it appears.
Those making a vocation in protest should go to Chibok in Borno State to express their disgust and stop disturbing the peace in Abuja and Lagos. No amount of politically motivated protests can bring back those girls just as worldwide angst has led us nowhere. Solution lies in concerted international push against the insurgents.
The neighbouring countries in the Northeast should be involved. Let’s call a spade by its name; Islam has become a nightmare. It is really sad that the greatest possible monstrosity is being perpetrated in the name of a particular God. It is nauseating that unspeakable opprobrium and reproach are being heaped on this silent God through globally coordinated violence and unprecedented carnage. Mere denial of extremism by the mainstream is not convincing enough. Real conviction is that the mainstream should spearhead frontal assault on their violent members. What we see is a numbing placidity on the part of mainstream Islamic world, criminally silent and lethargic over the bloodletting in its domain and the world in general. The True God of love and peace has no hand in violence.
Two months gone and the girls are still languishing in their predators’ dens, crouched in room corners where they are serially and severally violated by their abductors or their assignees. Some of those girls, particularly those treated fairly, should be pregnant by now. A sizeable number of them would be a heap of sexual wreck while some may have been ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases.
This too long a time in Boko Haram’s callous embrace is like having immolated those girls who would have been permanently damaged to the extent that no amount of rehabilitation therapy would completely shake off the trauma. The Chibok incident has further exposed man for what he really is – a brute – geography and religion notwithstanding.
Akin Owolabi wrote from Ota, Ogun State
