•Leah Sharibu should be free and the Federal Government ought to do more
Leah Sharibu marked her 16th birthday in captivity, and it is a reason to lament. The 16th birthday for many young girls all over the world, and especially in Nigeria, is an age as eye opener, when she is expected to begin to see herself as a young girl verging on womanhood.
But she marked that day alone, away from the happy face of family, of mother and father and siblings, away from birthday songs, and special meals. It is usually less a year for rumination than celebration. But for Leah, we can only imagine what transpired in her youthful mind. Whatever it was, she could not be a happy person, for no one is happy in chains.
Leah Sharibu was not the only person ferreted away by a gang of goons from her school, Government Girls’ Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State. They were 112, and the nation had a gasp of joy when the goons, in a choreographed return to a curious applause by locals, brought back most of the girls. Leah was one a few that did not return.
The reason allegedly was she could not compromise her Christian conscience, and the zealots who took her away would not release her until she relented. That we are still unhappy with the narrative probably implies that she has remained true to her beliefs and would not allow the intimidation of a band of marauders break her relationship with her God.
The Federal Government under President Muhammadu Buhari has promised without result to secure her release. The nation has endured such promises for about a year and half, and silence has overshadowed official response.
The Bring Back Our Girls Movement convener, Oby Ezekwesili, tweeted: “History will record that a young daughter of our country Leah Sharibu was left behind when her schoolmates were retrieved from terrorist abduction. She stood unwilling to negotiate her faith for freedom. @MBuhari promised, yet Leah is still with the terrorists. She is 16 today. Tragic.”
She is now a prisoner of conscience and of hope, but no one is sure she is a prisoner with hope. Prisoners of conscience are usually held captive by governments, not by men of the pious underworld. That makes her case especially bad.
The other snag is that Leah, as she is now commonly called, has not been able to talk. No one has testified to seeing her since she was held, and no one can actually tell us that she is alive.
That she is believed to be alive is more, ironically, an act of popular faith. Given her captors’ record for violence and the fragility of the victim, the public imagination is awash with speculations. Is she who left her school and Dapchi an innocent still retaining her physical and sexual purity, or have the red-blood men stolen her innocence?
She is not just telling her story in captivity. She represents many a young women and nubile girls whose anonymities are lost in the commonplace savagery of routine abductions over the past few years. Some of them are the now painfully familiar Chibok girls with quite a few of them still in abduction. Those who came out of the shackles were only speculatively free as some of them have become mothers and wives, and have embraced the Stockholm syndrome and bonded with their captors.
In rhetoric, the presidency has not shown enough of empathy to impress us that it is working privately to release the girl. Lai Mohammed, the information minister, led a Federal Government delegation to the parents once. But what the family needs and the country needs is not consolation, but freedom.
Leave a Reply