Tag: Chibok

President Goodluck Jonathan has said that the over 200 secondary school girls abducted in Chibok, Borno State are still within the country and could not have left the Sambisa Forest.

He made the remark while addressing the world press at Transcorp Hilton, Abuja at the end of World Economic Forum on Africa.

According to him, the personnel of some of the countries who promised to assist Nigeria locate the girls are already in Nigeria towards a collective effort to find the girls.

“The attackers are in a part of Borno State described as Sambisa forest. It is a forest area and we are working with the experts that will used remote sensor to see that wherever they are we will see.

“So the best we can say is that they are within the Sambisa forest area. Of course I agree that there are stories that they have moved outside the country but if they move that number of girls to Cameroon, people will see. So I believe that they are still within Nigeria.”

President Jonathan thanked countries that have shown concern and commitment to help rescue the girls and urged them to continue to press on that the terrorists must bring back our girls.

“And they have no choice because I am quite pleased that the whole world is singing the same message that they must bring back our girls. And there is no where they will take these girls to, they have no hiding place, we must work with the global community that is quite keen to make sure that we bring back these girls, ” Jonathan said.

He pleaded with the parents of the girls to continue to exercise patience stating as a father and the President of Nigeria feel, he feels pained and doesn’t sleep with my two eyes closed and will not sleep with his two eyes closed until the girls are brought safely back to them.

He went on: “I’m in touch with a number of presidents. Of course you are aware of my conversation with the American President and the United States government, French Government, the Chinese Government and other countries, willing to assist us. I have been talking to all the presidents around Nigeria Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Benin and I am going beyond that also because the crisis we have in Nigeria cuts across Africa. It goes up to Central Africa, it goes up to North Africa.”

“So I’m discussing with the leaders within the region and of course the world leaders that will support us. A number of the countries already their personnel have arrived Nigeria to assist us to find the girls. Collectively we must find these girls.” He added
The President also declared that the allegation that Nigeria was slow in responding to terror in the country was a misconception.

He said: “There is no slow response at all. No, No, it is a misconception. The response is not slow. I have explained this. Borno State can be described as the headquarters of the terrorists, Boko Haram, they are more in Borno State, then followed be Yobe and then Adamawa. These are the three states we have declared state of emergency already.”

“So they have military personnel in those states. Immediately this happened, they have been following it both the Army and the Airforce, they have been combing. The only thing we did not do because we felt it was not necessary then was to video the aircraft moving, the military people moving and the fighter helicopters. We did not do the video to show because the people were on ground because of the state of emergency because of these terrorists. That is why people thought it was slow, no it was not. We started work immediately. It was not slow, the Nigerian government responded immediately. If somebody gives you the impression that government is slow, that is not correct.”

On whether there is a political solution to Boko Haram, President Jonathan maintained that there is an element of politics in terror but that it is complex and beyond poverty.

He said: “Yes, political solution is there, some elements of politics is there. But terror all over the world is beyond economic. Sometimes people say it is economic situation in the country. Yes, we have poor people around the world even in Nigeria, but terrorism is a little beyond poverty. Because if you see the weapons they are using, the vehicles, even to sustain that army, and the logistics, the movement and fuel they need, the food they need, that means a lot of money is coming in from one source of the other. So it is just not issue of poverty.”

“Yes, we agree when young people have no source of income, the likelihood of criminals recruiting them into criminal gangs are higher than in a society where they have means of income and we are addressing it.”

“We are cooperating with state governments on programmes but some of them we cannot continue because terrorists are destroying them. So we must first solve the security problem before development programs, ” President Jonathan said.

An elder of Kibaku (Chibok) Area Development Association (KADA) of Borno State, Mrs. Grace Allabeh Ndirmbula, has said a representative of the area, Mrs. Naomi Mutah Nyadar, did not impersonate her or any parent at a session last Sunday in Abuja with First Lady Patience Jonathan.

She faulted the arrest and detention of Mrs. Naomi at Asokoro Police Station after an audience with the First Lady.

Mrs Ndirmbula made the clarification in a statement against the backdrop of the controversy over the status of Mrs. Naomi at the meeting with the First Lady.

The statement said: “To set the records straight and for the avoidance of any doubt and to the best of my knowledge Mrs. Naomi Mutah Nyadar, along with Mrs. Saratu Angus Ndirpaya were nominated by me Mrs. Grace Allabeh Ndirmbula to attend a meeting at which I could not possibly be present due to my distant domicile to represent Kibaku Area Development Association (KADA) and the Kibaku Community at large. Mrs. Naomi Mutah Nyadar did not and had no reason to impersonate Mrs. Grace.

“All we are asking is for all the good people of this great nation Nigeria and the international community at every level to put hands on deck to bring back our daughters. They are daughters of all Nigerians and beyond.

“Putting blames on innocent protesters, parents, or the State Government will not help to rescue these helpless girls. The more time we waste on side issues instead of majoring on what matters the more we extend their suffering and rescue more difficult.

“We are still praying and trusting the Most High God who rules in the affairs of men and nations to use whomever He wills to bring our daughters back. God bless and bring sanity, peace and progress to our dear country, Nigeria.

The Kibaku elder explained how Mrs. Naomi was nominated to represent Kibaku women at the Villa in Abuja.

She said: “On Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 6am, I, Mrs. Grace Allabeh Ndirmbula, received a call from Kwapchi Bata, the Senior Special Assistant to His Excellency the Executive Governor of Borno on Media, requesting for a nomination of a worthy representative of Chibok (Kibaku) women in Abuja to attend an urgent meeting convened by Her Excellency the highly respected Wife of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria at Asso Villa.

“The meeting accordingly was to be held as from 12:00 noon that same day. The woman representative of the Kibaku Area Development Association (KADA) was to join the Borno women contingent that was already in Abuja.

“Due to the suspension of flights from Maiduguri to Abuja and the long distance and hours it takes to travel to Abuja by road, it was impossible for me, Mrs. Grace Allabeh Ndirmbula who is resident in Maiduguri to reach Abuja and attend the meeting as scheduled.

The  girls in the school dorm could hear the sound of gunshots from a nearby town. So when armed men in uniforms burst in and promised to rescue them, at first they were relieved.

“Don’t worry, we’re soldiers,” one 16-year-old girl recalls them saying. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

The gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School to gather outside. The men went into a storeroom and removed all the food. Then they set fire to the room.

“They … started shouting, ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ (God is great),” the 16-year-old student said. “And we knew.”

What they knew was chilling: The men were not government soldiers at all. They were members of the ruthless Islamic extremist group called Boko Haram. They kidnapped the entire group of girls and drove them away in pickup trucks into the dense forest.

Three weeks later, 276 girls are still missing. At least two have died of snakebite, and about 20 others are ill, according to an intermediary who is in touch with their captors.

Their plight – and the failure of the Nigerian military to find them – has drawn international attention to an escalating Islamic extremist insurrection that has killed more than 1,500 so far this year. Boko Haram, the name means “Western education is sinful,” has in a video seen Monday claimed responsibility for the mass kidnapping and threatened to sell the girls. The British and US governments have issued statements of concern over the fate of the missing students, and protests have erupted in major Nigerian cities and in New York

The 16-year-old was among about 50 students who escaped on that fateful day, and she spoke for the first time in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. The AP also interviewed about 30 others, including Nigerian government and Borno state officials, school officials, six relatives of the missing girls, civil society leaders and politicians in northeast Nigeria and soldiers in the war zone. Many spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing that giving their names would also reveal the girls’ identities and subject them to possible stigmatisation in this conservative society.

The Chibok girls’ school is in the remote and sparsely populated northeast region of Nigeria, a country of 170 million with a growing chasm between a north dominated by Muslims and a south by Christians. Like all schools in Borno State, Chibok, an elite academy of both Muslim and Christian girls, had been closed because of increasingly deadly attacks by Boko Haram. But it had reopened to allow final-year students to take exams

At about 11 p.m. on April 14, a local government official, Bana Lawal, received a warning via cell phone. He was told that about 200 heavily armed militants in 20 pickup trucks and more than 30 motorcycles were headed toward his town.

Lawal alerted the 15 soldiers guarding Chibok, he said. Then he roused sleeping residents and told them to flee into the bush and the nearby hills. The soldiers sent an SOS to the nearest barracks, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) away, an hour’s drive on a dirt road.

No help arrived.

When the militants showed up two hours after the warning, the soldiers fought valiantly, Lawal said. Although they were outnumbered and outgunned, they held off the insurgents for an hour and a half, desperately waiting for reinforcements. One was killed. They ran out of ammunition and fled for their lives.

As dawn approached, the extremists headed for the boarding school.

There were too many gunmen to count, said the girl who escaped. So, even after the students realized the men were Islamic extremists, they obediently sat in the dirt. The men set the school ablaze and herded the girl’s group onto the backs of three pickup trucks.

The trucks drove through three villages, but then the car of fighters following them broke down. That’s when the girl and her friend jumped out.

Others argued, the 16-year-old remembered. But one student said, “We should go! Me, I am coming down. They can shoot me if they want but I don’t know what they are going to do with me otherwise.”

As they jumped, the car behind started up. Its lights came on. The girls did not know if the fighters could see them, so they ran into the bush and hid.

“We ran and ran, so fast,” said the girl, who has always prided herself on running faster than her six brothers. “That is how I saved myself. I had no time to be scared, I was just running.”

A few other girls clung to low-hanging branches and waited until the vehicles had passed. Then they met up in the bush and made their way back to the road. A man on a bicycle came across them and accompanied them back home.

There, they were met with tears of joy.

“I’m the only girl in my family, so I hold a special place and everyone was so happy,” the girl said. “But that didn’t last long.”

The day after, the Defense Ministry put out a statement quoting the school principal, saying soldiers had rescued all but eight of the girls. When the principal denied it, the ministry retracted its statement.

With confidence in the military eroded, the residents of Chibok pooled their money, bought fuel for motorcycles and headed into the dangerous Sambisa Forest. The forest sprawls over more than 23,000 square miles, nearly eight times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, and is known to shelter extremist hideouts.

Mutah Buba joined the search party hoping to find his two sisters and two nieces. They got directions from villagers along the way who said they had seen the abductors with the girls on a forest path. Finally, an old man herding cattle at a fork in the road warned them that they were close to the camp, but that they and their daughters could be killed if they confronted the militants.

The searchers returned to Chibok and appealed to the few soldiers there to accompany them into the forest. They refused, point blank, Buba said. Parents in Chibok ask why they came within a couple of miles of their daughters, yet the military did not.

“What was strange was that none of the people we spoke to had seen a soldier man in the area, yet the military were saying they were in hot pursuit,” said Buba, a 42-year-old drawn home to Chibok by the tragedy from Maiduguri, the Borno state capital 130 kilometers (80 miles) to the northwest.

The military says it is diligently searching for the girls, with extensive aerial surveillance.

“Every information relayed to security agencies has so far been investigated, including the search of all places suspected as a possible hide-away of the kidnapped girls,” Information Minister Labaran Maku said Friday.

Many soldiers have told the AP they are demoralised, because Boko Haram is more heavily armed and better equipped, while they get little more than a meal a day.

Some of the kidnapped girls have been forced into “marriage” with their Boko Haram abductors, sold for a nominal bride price of $12, according to parents who talked with villagers. Others have been taken across borders to Cameroon and Chad, they said. Their accounts could not be verified, but forced child marriage is common in northern Nigeria, where it is allowed under Islamic law but not the country’s Western-style constitution.

In the meantime, the parents are frantic. Through sobs and jagged gasps for air, the mother of a missing 15-year-old said she had lost confidence in the authorities.

“I am so very sad because the government of Nigeria did not take care of our children and does not now care about our children,” said the mother, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her daughter. “All we have left is to pray to God to help them and help us”

The mother of six wondered what would happen to her daughter’s lofty ambition to become a doctor. She said the girl spent her time caring for the family, and would cook whatever her mother wanted to eat.

“She is my first-born, the best,” said the mother, who broke into a scream followed by wails of sorrow. “What am I to do as a mother?”

Spurred by growing national outrage, President Goodluck Jonathan on Friday set up a committee to work out a rescue strategy, and expressed confidence that the military will find the girls.

The only way to get the girls back is through negotiation, according to an Islamic scholar who has mediated the release of previous hostages. The scholar, who remained anonymous because his position receiving messages from Boko Haram is sensitive, said the militants are willing to free the girls for a ransom, but have not specified how much.

The 16-year-old who escaped keeps thinking of her friends, and wondering why she was able to get away while they are still captive. She is at times afraid and at times angry.

“I am really lucky and I can thank God for that,” she said. “But God must help all of them … Their parents are worrying. Every day, everyone is crying.”

 

•Courtesy: Associated Press