Last Thursday, Nigerians received with incredulity the news of the release of 21 of the over 250 students of the Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok abducted by the Boko Haram insurgents on April 14, 2014. The release came exactly 30 months after their capture. They were at the school to sit for their Senior School Certificate Examinations. En route to captivity, dozens of them had the courage to jump down from the moving trucks and flee into darkness.
Surprisingly, what greeted the news of the abduction was disbelief on the part of the government of the day even though the military came up with the story 48 hours later that all the girls had been rescued. But it turned out to be a ruse. It was when the terrorists released the video of the abductees for the entire world to see that the reality dawned on the government.
But it was a little too late. What instantly followed was a global outrage and the incident portrayed the government in bad light.
The response to the dastardly act threw up the #BringBackOurGirls (BBOG) Group jointly spearheaded by the former education minister, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, and rights activist, Hajia Hadiza Bala Usman. The mantra reverberated across the world.
The failure of the Jonathan administration to respond swiftly to the episode marked the beginning of a long, agonising wait for the parents and relations of the abductees in particular and the entire nation in general.
The release of the 21 girls came to many as a pleasant surprise just as their captivity shocked the entire world. Their freedom came at a time when all hopes of their rescue were lost. The hopelessness set in when President Muhammadu Buhari declared he had no new intelligence reports on the girls on the 631st day of their abduction. The rescue of the girls was one of the key components of his campaign. The breakthroughs so far recorded in the theatre of war is largely due to the total support the military has received from the Buhari administration in its quest to overcome the insurgency.
The 21 girls’ freedom is a welcome development but it represents an insignificant percentage of the total number of those taken into captivity. Although the federal government is insisting that the girls’ freedom was secured unconditionally after months of negotiation, many still wonder why their release was not total. Several of such attempts had broken down in the past amidst speculations that the immediate past government and the present one had been negotiating with fake Boko Haram representatives.
Whatever the government did to secure the release of the 21 girls should be extended to the other abductees. It is heart-warming to note that negotiation for the release of the remaining surviving abductees is ongoing. The new development would have further raised the expectations of the parents whose children are still being held. But the revelation that only 104 of the captives are willing to return home to their families speaks volumes about the mind shifts and disillusionment the captivity had subjected them to. Those who are unwilling to return must have been brainwashed or are emotionally attached to the militants they have been married to.
The Federal and Borno state Governments have taken the right steps by quickly reuniting the released girls with their families in order to resume their academic pursuits and normal lives. Some of the freed girls came back as teenage mothers, physically and psychologically battered, after being sexually abused and living in a condition that smothered their dreams. They have been traumatised for years and lived in despair until their release from captivity. Most of them looked emaciated and require medical attention and trauma evaluation.
The release of the girls provides a soothing balm on the wound of the nation which their abduction represents. We commend all the concerned parties in the rescue efforts especially the BBOG Group for their tenacity in the long-drawn-out struggle for the girls’ freedom even in the face of intimidation by overzealous security agents. But the struggle is not yet total.
Be that as it may, victory over the insurgents will be a battle half won if all the other abductees in their custody are not freed and resettled in their communities.
