Mirage of Chibok girls’ release

It is now 177 days that the over 200 girls of Government Secondary School, Chibok were forcefully taken away in the dead of the night by the Boko Haram terrorists and kept in captivity. Before the incident occurred on the fateful night of April 15, no one by any stretch of the imagination thought that such mass abduction by a gang of ragamuffins could ever take place. That perhaps accounted for the reluctance on the part of the federal government to act promptly.
For weeks after the episode, politics was brought to the front burner when immediate action was necessary to intercept the abductors. Government’s apologists dismissed the abduction with a wave of the hand, describing it as a ploy by the opposition to paint the government in bad light. There have been strident calls for decisive action by the Federal Government to secure the schoolgirls’ freedom and end the trauma of their parents, some of whom have died of heart attack.
Developments that followed the abduction have merely raised and dashed the hopes of Nigerians, making many to question the sincerity and seriousness of the authorities to end the long drawn expectations. Not even the internationalisation of the campaign that followed the #BringBackOurGirls mantra has so far yielded any positive results. And it took the visit of the teenage Pakistani rights activist, Malala Yousafzai, to get President Goodluck Jonathan to meet with some parents of the abducted girls not in Chibok but at the Presidential Villa, Abuja during which she made this emotional remark: “It is quite difficult for a parent to know that their daughter is in great danger. My birthday wish this year is… bring back our girls now and alive.”
We recall the reports about the girls being freed which were attributed to the Defence Headquarters, only for rebuttals to follow shortly afterwards: In mid July, 2014 the web was awash with reports, laced with fake video clips by an online news portal, http//fnne.ws/2014/7, under the banner, “Breaking News: Nigerian Military Finds Missing Chibok Girls (see video)”.
Another back-and-forth claim on the Chibok girls was again credited to the Nigerian military on September 22, 2014 supposedly ‘sourced’ from its Twitter handle. This, too, was promptly refuted by the military. The third incident was the one denied by the army which prompted the Borno state government to issue a clarification to the effect that returnee students were mistaken for the missing Chibok girls.
The narratives about the release or non-release of the missing Chibok girls are indications that the situation has merely heightened public anxiety about the girls’ freedom. The recent involvement of the Australian hostage negotiator, Stephen Davis, also gave a glimmer of hope with the federal government claiming to know where the girls are being held. Only recently, the former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon (retd), offered to mediate between the insurgents and the government for the girls’ freedom but nothing positive came out of the move. In spite of all these efforts, the release of the girls has remained a mirage.
The former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, was widely quoted as revealing that half of the abducted girls might be freed, but with pregnancy. On the front page of almost all the major national dailies last week was a report of an abandoned Chibok girl carrying a four-month-old pregnancy. She reportedly trekked for three days before villagers found her at Maraban-Mubi in Hong Local Government Area of Adamawa state.
The pitiable tales about the abducted Chibok girls and some of them that reportedly escaped from the insurgents’ den at various times raise pertinent questions about the ability of our leaders to live up to their constitutional responsibility of protecting lives and property of the citizenry. The abduction of these hapless girls remains a wound on the nation’s conscience. Only their rescue can heal it.