- Over 90 Chibok school girls unaccounted for
The infant whose life was beginning wheezed in her sleep. She babbled in a language no school could teach. Her mother, Jinkai Yama, leaned over, her lips pursed as if she meant to kiss the child. There was so much love in her intent gaze. The child probably felt it as she snuggled close to her mother’s belly.
It’s 10 years since Yama’s abduction by the terrorist group, Boko Haram. Now 26, she is eager to reclaim the decade that was stolen from her life. At 16, Yama was abducted alongside 275 other girls from the Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS), in Chibok, Borno State.
One year after her abduction, Yama was forcibly married to Usman, a Boko Haram insurgent. But she got separated from him when he joined the Mamman Nur faction of the terrorist sect. Usman relocated to join the new faction leaving Yama behind, pregnant with a child.
Yama remained with the late Abubakar Shekau splinter group. She was subsequently taken to Dutsen Gava, in Gwoza LGA of Borno State. There, she caught the attention of another insurgent called Abubakar. The latter married her and sired two other children with her.
One day, in Dutsen Gava, Yama climbed a mountain and saw a military formation nearby. After some careful observation, she discovered that several Boko Haram members and their wives were sneaking out of their stronghold to surrender to the soldiers.
A few days after her discovery, she grabbed her three children and snuck with a group of fellow captives to surrender to the soldiers. She set out with fellow escapees at 10 am and by 2 pm, they arrived at the nearby military formation of the Joint Task Force (JTF)’s Operation Hadin Kai to give themselves up.
“My husband, Abubakar, is still Dutsen Gava. I didn’t let him know about my plan to escape. He would have prevented me,” she told The Nation.
At the time of her surrender, Yama was with her three children and two other abducted Chibok girls: Falmata Lawal and Asabe Ali. Yama, Lawal and Ali were numbered 20, 3, and 12 on the abducted Chibok girls’ list.
Like Yama, Kauna Luka was abducted from GGSS, in Chibok, in her teens. She was 15 years old at the period. Luka spent about eight years living as a captive bride of Muhammad, a Boko Haram insurgent in Sambisa.
She said, “I had two children for Muhammad. My first child, a boy, was named after the after but he died quite young while we were in the forest. Then I had a second child for my Muhammad. Her name is Maryam and she is currently two years old.”
Luka disclosed that although Muhammad showed her kindness, she couldn’t bear to live with him any longer. “He forced me to marry him,” she said.
Luka, 25, escaped captivity in the company of two other Chibok girls, Ruth Bitrus, 24, and Hannatu Musa, 26. The military received the trio after spending eight years with their abductors who later married them.
Apart from Hannatu Musa who came out of the bush with two children, Ruth Bitrus and Kauna Luka have a child each.
Despite the circumstances in which Yama, Luka and others got married and had their children, they cannot bring themselves to hate them. “I love my three children. It doesn’t matter what their fathers did or who they were, my children are a gift from Allah. I love them and I will take care of them,” said Yama.
Likewise, Luka confessed deep love for her daughter, Maryam, stressing that the two-year-old bears no blame for the circumstances in which she was conceived and birthed to the world.
“I am happy that I have her. She is a sweet, innocent child,” Luka said.
Indeed, no child should be born into ugliness. And no parents would pray that their teen girls experience the horror endured by Yama, Luka and others from the point of their abduction to their forced marriages in Boko Haram’s terrorist camp.
Read Also:106 freed Chibok school girls resume school Sept.
At their escape, Yama, Luka and a few others underwent medical examinations and purported rehabilitation with their children in the custody of the Nigerian army. They were subsequently handed over to the Borno State government.
A few months earlier, the Nigerian Army had presented two Chibok schoolgirls rescued by troops of Operation Hadin Kai in Borno. The General Officer Commanding (GOC) 7 Division of the Nigerian Army, Maj. Gen. Shiaibu Waidi disclosed that the troops of Operation Hadin Kai had rescued 11 of the abducted Chibok girls in the previous months.
Maj. Gen Waidi identified the rescued girls as Yana Pogu who was rescued with four children and Rejoice Penki, who was rescued with two children. The two girls were of serial numbers 19 and 70 on the list of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls, he said.
Other rescued abductees include Hauwa Joseph, Mary Dauda, Miss Ruth Bitrus, Kauna Luka and Hanatu Musa. Others are Falmata Lawal, Asabe Ali, Jinkai Yama, Yana Pogu and Rejoice Senki, Aisha Grema.
Most of the girls, who were rescued with their children, were listed as number 18, 46, 41, 58, 7, 11, 3, 12, 20, 19 and 70 respectively (in the order of rescue) in the list of the abducted Chibok Schoolgirls.
The statistics of the 276 abducted Chibok School girls indicate that 57 girls escaped in 2014, 107 girls were released in 2018, three recovered in 2019, two recovered in 2021 and 11 girls rescued in 2022.
“This brings to a total 180 Chibok girls out of captivity, remaining 96 girls still unaccounted for,” the GOC said. At the backdrop of the development, the Theatre Commander (TC), Operation Hadin Kai, Maj. Gen Christopher Musa announced the opening of a new camp for hosting repentant Boko Haram members that were surrendering and assured that the new camp was in a safe area where the military could secure it.
Boko Haram: The scourge
Boko Haram (literally meaning ‘Western education is forbidden’) emerged as a confessed jihadist group in north-east Nigeria in 2009. Purportedly incensed by resentment of bad governance, corruption, and the marginalisation of the north, the sect metamorphosed into a terrorist group, killing nearly 350,000 people by 2020 and displacing more than two million others, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Established in 2009, Boko Haram terrorised Nigeria’s northeast shutting targeted schools and forcing so many others to shut down for the safety of both students and their teachers. The Government Girls Secondary School for girls in Chibok, however, reopened in April 2014 to enable its students to take their final exams. But around 11 p.m. on April 14, Boko Haram insurgents invaded the school and forced 276 girls from their dormitories onto trucks, and whisked them off into the lawless cover of the Sambisa forest, a nature reserve the jihadist group had taken over to wage a bloody war against the government and the northern populace whose interests they claimed to protect.
Kidnap was not the plan
At the risk of rehashing narratives of their abduction from Chibok, it needs to be highlighted that the girls’ abduction from their southern Borno town wasn’t the initial plan of Boko Haram. Findings revealed that Mustapha Chad, the Boko Haram commander who orchestrated it had led an unsuccessful attack on the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) base in Adamawa’s capital, Yola. Smarting from its botched attack on the military formation, Chad ordered the abduction of the girls as an afterthought.
However, a conflicting account penned by one of the abducted girls, Naomi Adamu, stated that the insurgents who struck on April 14, 2014, had come to steal an “engine block.” It is not clear what piece of machinery they wanted; there had been some construction work at the school a few weeks earlier, so it may have been the machine used for moulding cement blocks, which can also be used for constructing crude weapons, or they may have been after an engine block from a vehicle.
But when it could not be found, they reportedly argued over what to do with the students they had gathered in groups. After considering several options, they decided to take the girls with them.
“They started argument in their midst. So, one small boy said that they should burn us all and they said, ‘No let us take them with us to Sambisa.’ Another person said, ‘No let’s not do that. Let’s lead them… to their parent homes.’ As they were in argument, then one of them said, ‘No, I can’t come with empty car and go back with empty car… If we take them to [Abubakar] Shekau [Boko Haram’s leader], he will know what to do.’”
The news of their abduction soon went viral on the mainstream and new media thus launching the terror group into the limelight. The late Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, milked the global attention as much as he could. “Just because we kidnapped these young girls, you are making noise?” Shekau had asked in one of several statements, where he’d also threatened to sell the 276 girls as slaves.
Those who refused to marry his followers were truly used as slaves to break stones, fell trees, build thatch houses, do laundry, and engage in other hard labour. Anyone who tried to run was whipped, tied up, and denied food.
There is no gainsaying the Chibok abduction sparked global outrage and the #BringBackOurGirls, an international campaign spearheaded by prominent personalities all over the world including the then U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, Madonna, and the Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, among others.
But the search for the Chibok girls only began a month after the abductions, despite the outrage on social media and immediate offers of military and intelligence support from the US, Britain, France and China to the then president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan.
Drones and spy planes scanned the vast Sambisa Forest, but with limited success even as the late leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, threatened to sell the girls at a market.
Ten years after…Life as a social pariah
Ten years on, many of the Chibok child abductees, now women, have been freed or escaped, but about 96 abductees are allegedly still missing.
The experiences of Yama, Luka, Hafsatu, among others, certainly contrast with the reality of some former captive wives of Boko Haram in the past. While it may be said that the returnee Chibok girls initially enjoyed some degree of warmth and acceptance from the government and their immediate families, the reality was markedly different for ex-captive wives of Boko Haram and their children abducted outside Chibok.
Many who returned home, some of whom gave birth while in captivity, have often been viewed as Boko Haram collaborators and shunned by their communities.
The Nation’s findings revealed that communities are wary of accepting children sired by Boko Haram fighters. They are scared of reintegrating with their teenage mothers and women too – it doesn’t matter that they were abducted, forcefully married and serially raped by members of the terrorist sect. Nobody wants to be seen with offspring and ex-wives of the dreaded terror sect.
Thus the infant children that some of the Chibok girls had with their Boko Haram husbands face extreme stigmatisation.
Popular cultural beliefs about ‘bad blood’ and witchcraft, as well as the extent of the violence experienced by people at the hands of the terrorist sect, form the basis of this fear. This general perception has been exacerbated by stories of women and girls returning from captivity and murdering their parents. Such accounts give rise to the fear that “If we accept sons and daughters of Boko Haram, they (the mothers) may come back to kill us.”
Women and girls who spent time in captivity are often referred to by communities as “Boko Haram wives,” “Sambisa women,” “Boko Haram blood” and “Annoba” (which means epidemics). The description of these girls and women as an ‘epidemic’ reveals fears that their exposure to the terrorist group could spread to others. This infers that these girls and women were radicalised while in captivity, and if allowed to reintegrate into their communities, they might recruit others. However, excluding some cases in IDP camps, communities expressed the belief that over time relations could be rebuilt and that the women and girls could gradually be accepted and trusted by the displaced community.
However, acute fear and suspicion persist of children born of sexual violence, whose fathers are believed to be Boko Haram fighters. It is unlikely that such fears and suspicion will decrease, according to Dr Abubakar Monguno of the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID). Monguno, working with a team including Dr Yagana Imam, Yagana Bukar and Bilkisu Lawan Gana from UNIMAID, and in collaboration with the International Organisation on Migration (IOM), the Borno State Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development, International Alert and UNICEF, authored a report on the crisis. Findings revealed that hostile perceptions place children conceived of rape and violence in Boko Haram terror camps “at risk of rejection, abandonment, discrimination and potential violence.”
Just recently, two Chibok girls rescued from Boko Haram terrorists bemoaned the discrimination and stigmatisation they allegedly face from officials and students of the American University of Nigeria (AUN), who label them “government children” and avoid interacting with them.
The Chibok schoolgirls kidnap survivors, Amina Ali and Jummai Muttah, appeared on Arise TV on Friday morning to describe how they spent the last 10 years enduring humiliation and discrimination from friends and strangers, including employees and students of the American University of Nigeria, who constantly “looked down” on them.
Kidnapped in 2014, Ali escaped from her captors in 2016. She and other abducted students who regained freedom were awarded scholarships by the Federal Ministry of Women’s Affairs to enrol in the university to continue their studies.
But her educational journey in AUN had proved more arduous than originally thought, Ali admitted. She explained that her educational background (both primary and secondary schools) in Chibok, where she was taught in the native Hausa language, did not adequately prepare her for the English language standards of AUN, as she was only starting to improve her oral English.
Due to her challenge in communicating in English and her abduction experience, Ali revealed that she’s constantly picked on and mocked by her peers and even school officials.
“The way they are used (sic) to look down on us. We also face the issue of discouragement because of how we speak. Back in Chibok, some of our teachers used to teach us in Hausa. We didn’t even know how to speak from JSS1 to SS3. We just started learning to speak English after we came out (of captivity),” Ali said.
Ali, captured at 17 years, said AUN lecturers often disregarded her class assignments, which she found “discouraging.”
She said, “So, we are not good at that. So, in our present school, instead of encouraging us that we should not give up, they discourage us and anything we do, they would not appreciate,” she stated.
Now 27, Ali said the school authority rebuffed her complaints, telling her and other survivors to be grateful for their government scholarship and stop complaining.
“Sometimes, if we complain to some of the school authorities, they will say that you are government children. Are you the only people that Boko Haram kidnapped? The government spend Nigeria’s money on you, yet you still complain about how people treat you. That’s what they used to tell us,” said Ali.
Corroborating Ali, Muttah, another survivor and AUN student said, “We are not happy with what is happening.” According to her, even their classmates complain. It has gotten so bad that when they have group assignments, and their classmates “run away” immediately they learn that they were “part of the abducted Chibok girls. “They don’t want to do assignments with us…So, this thing discourages us in school, and it makes us wonder why people hate us so much,” said Muttah.
Muttah implied that the discrimination she suffers in school has further damaged her self-esteem, given that she is still healing from stigmatisation by her neighbours and townspeople at Chibok, who have also labelled her child —conceived in captivity after being defiled by terrorists— as a “Boko Haram child.”
‘Children are like flowers’
Even at the risk of rejection by their families and communities, some of the returnee Chibok girls who were barely teenagers at the time of their abduction by Boko Haram insurgents, are displaying natural affection for the children they had with their Boko Haram husbands.
“Children are like flowers. They are like roses. Roses are poisoned with ugliness. The situation in the northeast is too ugly to raise a child. Life here is very ugly. Very, very ugly for the Nigerian child,” lamented Halima Sule, a Borno-based social health worker even as she acknowledged the valour of young mothers duelling both innate grief and external aggression over circumstances beyond their control.
One such mother Hannatu Ahmedu. At 16, she was abducted and forcibly married to a Boko Haram insurgent. The forced union produced a child.
“People can think the worst of me, I do not care,” said Ahmedu, “I have this child now and I can only love him and care for him. People want me to dump him. My childhood friend wants me to kill him. If I didn’t abandon him while running in the forest, why should I abandon him now? I can only love him. He’s my destiny,” she said.
Like Ahmedu, returnee Chibok girls: Yama, Luka, Lawal and Ali among others have equally accepted their children as their “destiny.” They could only love and care of them perhaps all born of rape and sired through forced marriages to insurgents, their mothers would have less cause to worry perhaps or dread the moment they would begin to ask why their neighbours call them ‘bad blood’ and treat them with scorn.
Yama, for instance, has made peace with her fate. She would return to school and become successful in a trade, in order to give her daughters the best life possible.
So doing, she hopes she would have no cause to respond in pain to difficult questions from her wards. Yama may have no cause to couch the sordid details of their conception in a clutter of woe and earnest tears.
Despite her anguish at remembering, she would tell them to ignore hatred and unkind words. She would tell each child that there is a garden in her face where hope blooms. She would never have cause to call them the living proofs of her shame.
