Between Chibok girls and unworthy victims (1)

Even with the release of 21 of their daughters from the captivity of the notorious Boko Haram sect these may not be the finest moments for parents of the more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls abducted more than two years ago. It certainly means more intrusive media attention and, for campaigners and hangers-on, more business and controversies.



The travail of Chibok parents whose daughters have been in the forest dungeon of the Boko Haram insurgents since April 2014 could be any parents’ nightmare; your daughters are somewhere where you absolutely have no control over what happens to them or how; where some filthy characters do as they please with them; and even when they come to back, if they ever do, they have been transformed to total strangers. It’s a complete nightmare! So I sincerely sympathise with these parents.



But their situation is not worse than other parents who have similarly lost children in similar circumstances to the same set of delinquents but are unequally treated. A recent report the Human Rights Watch published estimates that from the start of the conflict up until now the Boko Haram insurgents have abducted more than 2000 people, many of whom are female and from schools. Yet, hardly are stories of these unworthy victims ever told. They are mere statistics!



When the news of the girls’ abduction was broken shortly after April 14, 2014 I told those gobsmacked by its scale that it wasn’t the first nor was it the worst. Those ‘screaming to high heaven’ I reminded that prior to the Chibok girls’ sad saga there had been several raids in towns and villages and in schools and homes in the flashpoint states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa with similarly shocking crimes like abductions, beheadings, rape and much else.



The atrocities in places like Buni Yadi, Mamudo, Baga, Doron Baga and many others, as monumental as they were, have all faded into oblivion and no one seems to remember anything about them or the victims, dead or alive. And it is so because in the first place no one took them seriously enough to give them the kind of media attention they deserved. So, not unexpectedly though, the victims are only some statistics or reference points in some footnotes!



In one of my previous analyses of the sect’s change of modus operandi I argued that due to the urgency to sustain the insurgency at all cost the sect resorted to three types of abductions: high profile abductions to demand ransom from victims’ families; abduction of young women, especially, to serve as insurgents’ brides and domestic servants; and abduction of young men that are conscripted to swell the ranks of the sect’s foot soldiers.



All three categories of abductees are citizens of Nigeria whose situations deserve equal treatment. The ‘200+’ Chibok girls are in a category and should not have eclipsed others!



Shortly after the Goodluck Jonathan government rose from a meeting in February 2015 promising to get its acts together and seriously give the terrorists a run for their money and soldiers (or mercenaries) began combing the forests and freeing captives from Boko Haram confinements the numbers we saw of people no one ever thought were in captivity were unbelievable. Amongst them were scores of frail women and babies and the aged!



Again, after this regime came to power and more terrorist hide-outs were taken out and hostages set free, the numbers were even more stunning, revealing the levity with which the sect’s systematic and downright daring abduction spree had been treated, while we, the ‘complicit’ millions, looked on.



I have no problem with the campaigns to free the Chibok girls. If nothing else their amplification drew the world’s attention to very serious crimes that had been callously wished away. They, therefore, should have been a benchmark for compelling the authorities to uniformly handle all cases of abductions, not just a privileged few.



But the trouble with the campaigns, despite the sincerity of some of the campaigners, is the crass opportunism that has stepped in.



Towards the end of 2015 a character hoping to reap from the misfortune of the girls contacted me for some professional advice on a project they were working on. The project, it turned out, was one of many of such dubious schemes some Nigerians and their foreign collaborators were undertaking to un-altruistically put the Chibok girls’ plight on the international media front burner and compel the government to, by all means, act.



In the first of my three-part article three weeks ago I posited that one of the problems of this regime, despite its sincerity and the unquestionable patriotism of the president, is its silence, which gives an impression of the lack of a clear policy direction in most cases. And it’s the vacuum this perception has created that some malevolent opportunists take advantage of.



(To be continued)