Between Chibok girls and unworthy victims (2)

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.



Agenda-setters, in view of this perception, notoriously exaggerate their ability to coax the government to do their biddings, even indirectly. So, dubious campaigns are kick-started and sustained and certain policies mischievously and deceitfully imposed on the regime.



It is in this manner that the real intent of the campaign to bring back Chibok has been hijacked and turned into a franchise of which all manner of franchises are owned by individuals with furtive motives.



In a desperate bid to debunk the claim that the government has allowed itself to be manipulated by some campaigners using the unfortunate girls’ plight as a buffer, Defence Minister Mansur Dan-Ali left many who listened to his RFI Hausa interview, recently, in no doubt of his poor grasp of the situation. I was, particularly, very irritated.



In the interview he argued that a certain group of people says the government is not working (i.e. not doing enough to rescue the girls), so whenever any of the girls is rescued she is colourfully received in the full beam of the media to discredit the claim. I have no problem with that, as long as other victims get the same treatment.



Rather than treating it as a case of the Chibok girls and other victims – who don’t really matter because no one speaks for them – there should have been a clear policy on how to respond to the needs of every of the victims, especially those still in the insurgents’ dungeon or in IDP camps or elsewhere.



Many of the former abductees in IDP camps with no sufficient food or other basic needs are also Nigerians fully deserving of a better deal. Many were in schools too and had dreams but now live in camps totally detached from those dreams and fighting to live. The kids, who in any case have done nothing to cause their travail, also have a future in which we should invest. They deserve scholarships and something to live for.



But I wonder how of many of us still remember the story of the teenage girl Zahara’u Babangida, whose father forcibly turned over to Boko Haram, which, in turn, conscripted her into its army of suicide bombers. Even when Zahara’u heroically defied her captors and refused to detonate her suicide vest in a marketplace in Kano, thereby saving scores from death, no one acknowledged her heroic feat.



Instead she was taken into police custody and treated like a criminal. No one knows what has become of her. No one has asked any questions since then, even though she is as much a victim as the Chibok girls. Hers is just one of many traumatising tales of rights abuses (of youngsters) that have been hypocritically dismissed.



Until recently no one knew what had become of the 1000s of kids often left behind by Boko Haram insurgents fleeting recaptured territories. International Human Rights groups like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been warning that the kids are usually treated as collaborators (whatever that means) and taken into military custody. This has been an on-going practice, which no one has faulted or tried to stop. And this is so because these kids are part of the collective cruelly banded as unworthy victims.



It, therefore, came as no surprise that it was only after these groups’ pressure that UNICEF intervened and secured the release of nearly 900 of these poor children that have suffered double victimisation. And because they are so ‘inconsequential’ they would be carted to already overflowing IDP camps where, left at the mercy of abusive officials, no one would ever remember they ever existed.



If in the end all the abducted Chibok girls come back home, which I solemnly pray for, and they are all hosted to lavish receptions at the presidential villa and given presidential handshakes and scholarships and job promises but we fail to stop treating the others as unworthy victims, we would have fully failed and we would have sufficiently sowed seeds of future insurgencies. So ignoring these victims is, in fact, at our own peril.

(Concluded)