Senior Correspondent, ISHAYA IBRAHIM, chronicles efforts by individuals and groups outside Nigeria in mobilising actions towards the release of abducted school girls in Borno State
Even as the President Goodluck Jonathan-led administration seems confused on the circumstances surrounding the abduction of 234 students of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, the position of obviously flustered citizens and the international community to the Nigerian government has remained unambiguous in the “Bring Back Our Girls” project. The campaign, which has caught up with all segments of the society, aims at jolting the Nigerian government into action to find the girls.
In the streets of New York, Adelaide, London, Ottawa and unlikely places such as Tehran and the Swat District of Pakistan, the campaign, a fall-out of the April 29 rally in Abuja by women groups, has gone viral.
Prominent world figures, including the United States First Lady, Michele Obama; 14-year-old Pakistani education activist, Malala Yousafzai; former United States Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton; former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown; Hollywood superstar, Angelina Jolie; Iranian Prime Minister, Hassan Rouhani; and others have signed on to the “Bring Back Our Girls” effort.
Media coverage of the abduction
News of the mass abduction has inundated the world’s media networks like the Cable Network News (CNN), Al-Jazeera and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), with updates of the incident being broadcast on hourly basis, while international journalists have swarmed the country nosing for developments on the story.
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook were also not left out in the campaign for more to be done to rescue the schoolgirls. By the close of work on Wednesday last week, statistics had indicated that the #BringBackOurGirls hash tag, the Twitter handle dedicated for the campaign which was first used on April 23, had generated more than 360,000 tweets and re-tweets so far.
Within the same period, the 160,000 tweets from users who specified a location, the BBC, said had shown that half came from Nigeria, followed by the United States of America (U.S.), the United Kingdom (UK), South Africa and other countries. High-profile pop stars such as U.S. singer, Mary J. Blige, and UK’s Jessie J also picked up on the story, and generated thousands of re-tweets
Protesters on the march
Earlier in the week, hundreds of New York residents joined in solidarity to pressure the Nigerian authorities to rescue the girls. All through the rally, the protesters chanted in unison, “Bring Back Our Girls” as others waved placards with messages like “All girls and women should feel safe, no matter where they are from”.
In Ottawa, Canada, scores of black and white folks came out to protest in solidarity with the over 234 girls kidnapped. A number of the protesters were Nigerians in the Diaspora who had decided to make a statement and also show support for the missing girls.
In Manchester, the United Kingdom, protesters staged a vigil in Piccadilly Gardens on May 6 to shed light on the plight of the girls seized by Boko Haram terrorists.
The campaigners wore red to show solidarity and support for the Bring Back Our Girls movement. Spokesman for the campaign, 37-year-old Nikki Wallace, told a UK news blog that: “It is a truly awful situation; nobody should have to go through something like this, especially in the modern day. We need to take some kind of action to ensure the girls return home safe. Not enough is being done and that needs to change quickly. Bring Back Our Girls is gaining momentum and we need to increase the public’s awareness of what shocking things are happening all around us.”
Enter Washington, London, Paris, Beijing
On the level of states’ involvement, the U.S. has offered to help in rescuing the girls. The Guardian in the UK reported that the U.S. was doing its utmost to help resolve the “terrible situation” but stopped short of offering to send troops – in contrast to Britain, which is prepared to send Special Forces and intelligence gathering aircraft.
Obama had said: “In the short term, our goal is obviously to help the international community and the Nigerian government, as a team, to do everything we can to recover these young ladies.”
White House spokesman, Jay Carney, also added that Obama had been briefed by his national security team. “We view what has happened there as an outrage and a terrible tragedy. The president has been briefed several times and his national security team continues to monitor the situation there closely. The State Department has been in regular touch with the Nigerian government about what we might do to help support its efforts to find and free these young women.”
On the specifics of the help being offered by America, Carney said it was counter-terrorism strategy to Nigerian investigators in information-sharing and improving Nigeria’s forensics and investigative capacity.”
The UK had also offered to assist. Its Foreign Office Minister, Mark Simmonds, said the country would give “planning support” to the Nigerian authorities because of the incapacity of the Nigerian government to deal with the problem.
“The forest area (Sambisa) where the girls are rumoured to be held is 60,000km2 (23,166 sq miles). It is an area of hot dry scrub forest 40 times the size of London; it is a wild territory, very difficult for land and air-based surveillance operations to take place… you have extremely porous borders with neighbouring countries – Chad, Cameroun and Niger, so there are very serious challenges,” he said.
France has also assured Nigeria that it will make its military resources, including its Special Forces, available to Nigeria to help rescue the girls.
China has also offered to make its satellite available for Nigeria, to locate the missing girls. Already, U.S. drones are in the country warming up for the operation.
Confusion in the Villa
Incidentally, while world leaders and activists were working for the release of the girls, the Nigerian government seemed rather obsessed with the actual figures of the missing girls, or whether any girl was missing in Chibok, Borno State.
What critics had considered as doubt from the government was expression of a private opinion of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) National Women Leader, Kema Chikwe, in which she said: “How did it (the kidnapping) happen? Who saw it happen? Who did not see it happen? Who is behind this?”
Chikwe, a former Aviation Minister, however, later explained her position, stressing that the questions were not raised in bad faith but to assist in the search.
But on Sunday, May 4, during the presidential media chat, President Jonathan hinted that the kidnapping was shrouded in controversy, owing to the failure of the school’s principal to furnish him with the identity of the missing girls.
“The principal of the school told me last night that 54 girls had returned. We need the identity of those girls,” he said.
And to ascertain the real identity of the girls, the president set up a fact-finding committee headed by retired Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Sabo. Other members of the committee included Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) who has since rejected his appointment; Hajia Hauwa Ibrahim and Fatima Kwaku.
Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, said the committee would resolve the inconsistencies which the government had not been pleased with, especially as it had to do with the number of affected schoolgirls as well as their location, among others.
But while the president and the PDP women leader were being diplomatic about their feelings on the missing girls, the president’s wife, Patience, was blunt outright. At a recent meeting with select women leaders, she declared: “We, the Nigerian women, are saying that no child is missing in Borno State. If any child is missing, let the governor go and look for them. There is nothing we can do again.”
But as the world looked up to the Nigerian authorities to bring back the girls, The Economist of London had observed that foreign politicians had curiously said more about the attack than their Nigerian counterparts.
Learning from the people
For Dr. Tunde Oseni, lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations, Lead City University, Ibadan, the presidency’s response on the abduction was sloppy.
“Seriously speaking, I had reservation for the kind of communication skills that were being displayed by both President Jonathan and the First Lady, particularly in the last couple of days. The way they made their opinions known to the people seemed disjointed and uncalled for. I think maybe they had been thrown off balance by the kind of overwhelming domestic and international pressure on their capacity to deal with the insurgency in Nigeria,” he said.
“The Chibok girls’ abduction was a controversial one, but from media reports, some girls were missing. I think what the government was doing was not to really deny but to downplay the fact that some girls were missing. It is just an image management issue. But the truth of the matter is that it had taken an international dimension. And there was no need to further deny the fact that some girls were missing. Efforts should just be put together to rescue them, though we don’t know the number of the missing girls.”
But public affairs analyst, Ogubundu Nwadike, reasoned that the peculiarity of the incident informed the kind of responses from the presidency.
“The event surrounding the abduction of so many Chibok school girls should be devastating to all right-thinking persons. Unfortunately, the issue, as usual, had been politicised, and in such circumstances, camps inevitably emerged and it would remain unfair for anyone to expect the First Lady to side the robust opposition against the attitude of the government to the unfolding drama. Again, I felt Madam was playing perfectly to assigned character in the circumstance,” Nwadike said.
Jacob Zenn, African Affairs analyst at The Jamestown Foundation, had offered insight into the mass abduction of the school girls. His incisive analysis of the abduction was published on the BBC website. “For the past one and half years, Boko Haram has been carrying out kidnappings of girls, but this one was on a much larger scale than anything else. It should also be noted that Boko Haram began this tactic when the Nigerian security forces also began kidnapping, or rather taking as prisoners, the wives and children of Boko Haram members.
“On an operational level, Boko Haram is likely using these girls as human shields and keeping them in their camps which will prevent the Nigerian Air Force from bombing those camps. Further, there is also the potential monetary reward if Boko Haram can sell some of them back to their parents.
“It is very likely that the girls had been split up into dozens of groups – maybe into twos or threes or fours. Any effort to rescue them would have to be done in a very piecemeal fashion and might take over a decade. When you look at Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they took some girls captive more than a decade ago and some of them still remain captive, though most of them have been freed or escaped,” Zenn said.