MORE than 10 months after she was abducted, in company with some 109 other schoolgirls from a girls college in Dapchi, Yobe State, the teenage Leah Sharibu is still languishing in the detention of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) faction of the Boko Haram insurgents. She is not the first schoolgirl to be abducted and detained endlessly, nor, given the virulence of insurgency in Nigeria, particularly as orchestrated by a conscienceless terror group like the Boko Haram, is she likely to be the last. But her case has elicited global and sympathetic attention because of the unusualness of her worldview, not to say its clarity, and the circumstances of her abduction and continued detention.
Miss Sharibu was abducted in February, 2018, the only Christian among 110 schoolgirls taken by the terrorists. About one month later, with provocative and garish splendour, the terror group drove into Dapchi with 104 of the girls and released them to a grateful, ululating and idolising crowd. Miss Sharibu was not among. The federal government, which negotiated the release of the girls, did not give any indication it knew any girl was held back. In a culture now indicative of the shambolic nature with which the Nigerian government transacts national businesses and political affairs, the news of Miss Sharibu’s plight was first broken by her schoolmates and parents. No one is sure that during negotiations the government even knew the young girl was denied freedom on account of her defiance and religious convictions. But if they knew, excluding her from the final deal was both indefensible and scandalous.
Before the release of the 104 schoolgirls, it was far easier to accommodate Miss Sharibu in the freedom deal. Since March 21, 2018 when the girls left captivity, the government has made very heavy weather of freeing the only schoolgirl still left in the camp of the increasingly vicious ISWAP militants. And so whether the abduction itself or the mishandling of the initial negotiations for the release of the girls, the federal government is culpable. Dapchi town should have been secured, not to say the school itself, after the more infamous abduction of the 214 Chibok, Borno State, schoolgirls in 2014. And the negotiation to free the girls should have been more painstaking and comprehensive. The anti-terror war has proved very costly and intractable, much more than anyone ever envisaged when the crisis began actively in 2003 but breaking out again in 2009. Families have been shattered, including those of serving military personnel whose losses have exposed the desultory manner the country has prosecuted the war against a group of some 5,000-7,000 militants lacking in training, doctrine, discipline and coherent ideology, while the economy has taken a severe beating.
But much more than anything else, Miss Sharibu, who has been chosen by this newspaper’s Board of Editors as their Person of the Year, has demonstrated that in the midst of a national whirlpool of vices, all hope is not lost. On the surface, she demonstrated a rare attachment to her faith on a level that is clearly transcendental, far nobler than the general conception of religious conviction in a country where many wear their religions on their sleeves, where religion has for all practical purposes been politicised and transformed into business and commercial ventures. There is of course nothing wrong with devotion to one’s faith, and it is even possible that given the subtle persecutions and intimidation people like Miss Sharibu have endured over the years, they have become more disposed to an instinctive defence of their faith. It is also possible, and much more likely than anyone has perceived, that Miss Sharibu’s family background had sensitised and primed her to stand up to be counted when her faith is being subjugated or subjected to various official intimidatory practices.
Indeed, given the fact that she was the only Christian schoolgirl among the about 110 abductees, it is likely she had lived with a constant and refining reminder of her Christian background — in school prayers, dressing and social relations. These and many more experiences probably made her inured to the dangers she faced in defying her abductors, regardless of their guns and cruelty, and irrespective of the slothfulness of the government in projecting neutrality in matters of faith or protecting and defending religious minorities. The government may protest their innocence, but they have done enough in many parts of Nigeria to indicate only subjective neutrality. Having thus faced the ordeal of sticking out like a sore thumb, and being constantly reminded of that difference, Miss Sharibu and her ilk may think nothing of the defiance that has become both culturally and experientially intrinsic to their worldview. Occasional harassments may elicit transient shock and uncoordinated and unpredictable responses; institutionalised harassments, such as many of Miss Sharibu’s ilk are familiar with, have on the other hand and over the decades provoked the coordinated and contemplative responses regarded today as truly and deeply inspirational. If only on this superficial level, Miss Sharibu is undoubtedly deserving of this newspaper’s Person of the Year.
But her story must be contextualised better than this, and must be analysed on a far more subliminal basis than just a young girl standing up for her faith. In a multicultural and multi-faith country where religion has been both politicised and vulgarised, where shockingly many leading government officials are themselves closet religious extremists who secretly nurse the purgatory schemes redolent of political rightism and Nazism, analysts must be careful to accurately contextualise the profound courage displayed by Miss Sharibu in the face of her mindless and relentless persecutors. Hers was unlikely to be a campaign to project Christian values per se, nor, strictly speaking, was it a scheme to deploy faith attributes and values in order to defy her abductors and persecutors. Had it been both these, one month with her abductors would probably have been enough to cure her of the desire for either martyrdom or heroism. She is now more than 10 months with her captors; her courage is, therefore, more likely intuitively defensive than projective, not designed to claim rights or stand grounds or sharpen faith-based identifications, but formulated as personal and psychological imbuement quite unrelated to the man, terrorist or faith next door.
By making Miss Sharibu the Person of the Year, this most secular and liberal of newspapers is merely drawing attention to a different narrative about faith-based actions, that rather than estimate the value of a person in terms of his religious identifications, the society must begin to acquire the culture of examining the more transcendental theme of man as a principled person whose leitmotif speaks to grander values and virtues. Miss Sharibu was neither defending nor projecting her faith; she was, perhaps unconsciously given her age, standing up for the larger perspective and ideal of tolerance in a way that is richly accommodating, never exclusive nor isolationist, but also ultimately not threatening. Her principled stand can therefore not be rhapsodised on the basis of religious purity but on the basis of her attachment to and projection of human essence: that no matter the cost, a person must stand for something or die trying; and that certain causes may in fact be found to be so noble and enriching that a person must be willing to die for it, far beyond culture, far beyond faith, far beyond class.
When she was abducted, Miss Sharibu was 15 years old. Her stand and life are probably more emblematic of high ideals than her age signifies. But that stand, whether related to her age and faith or not, is reassuringly indicative of greatness and maturity anchored on principles and courage. In recent years, Nigeria has shown how clearly destitute of such virtues her people have become. For Miss Sharibu to look her captors in the face and defy them in their imperious demand that she recant, despite the force they could muster, reminds the analyst of Nelson Mandela’s statement from the dock when he opened his defence at the Rivonia Trial on April 20, 1964. Said the iconic South African and statesman: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
Miss Sharibu’s stand also reminds the analyst of Winston Churchill’s statement during a crucial cabinet meeting in May 1940 in the opening months of World War II. Referring to the question of whether to appease Adolf Hitler’s Germany or not, the new British prime minister had said: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” This is of course not an attempt to draw a parallel between Miss Sharibu and the British prime minister, but it probably indicates, upon a consideration of the fierce argument that accompanied the initial policy of appeasing Hitler, that the seed of a man’s principled stand on any issue is probably both intrinsic and unmistakeably complex. It cannot be easily explained, nor does it depend on age, faith, birth or association. Comparisons are odious, but it is enough that Miss Sharibu’s freed classmates told his family that their daughter was kept in captivity because of her refusal to recant. Had she been kept back because of any other reason, it would probably not have qualified her for more than a mere mention as has been done for so many other abductees. Her defiance and courage in the face of her armed tormentors and captors, her young age, and her loyalty to her ideas and worldview in a country impoverished by poverty of ideas and lack of values and principles, qualify her for more than a mere mention. She is an unusual person.
By making her their Person of the Year, this newspaper not only acknowledges her essence and role as a model for everyone, young and old alike, they may also coincidentally help to renew focus on her plight, and perhaps even inadvertently endanger her life by putting a higher premium on her being. But overall, they will hope that her rescue someday, in addition to her fortitude, will enable her reach a potential comparable to or even exceeding that of Yousafzai Malala, the Pakistani schoolgirl who survived an attempt on her life in 2012 in the course of advancing girl-child education. More, this newspaper hopes her stand and her plight would continue to prick the national conscience in a way nobody or any single event has done for a very long time.
The Chibok and Dapchi abductions are a blight upon the reputation of Nigeria, an indication of the increasing impotence of government policies and ineffectiveness of national security policies. Like other sundry crimes laying the society waste, abduction of schoolgirls and sometimes their murder continue. The young schoolgirls were entrusted into the care of the country and its government. Now many of them are lost forever. When Chibok happened, few thought that after some sort of rescue had been managed another abduction could ever happen again, at least not on the massive and embarrassing scale that gripped world attention in 2014. But four years later, it happened, this second time with flourish and with theatrical overtones added by the abductors for effect. To underscore national impotence, Miss Sharibu has been left behind in captivity, her abductors sneering at the country and making jest of its effete leaders, while her family has been left inconsolable to publicly nurse their private grief. Could another major abduction not happen again? No one can say for sure. But if Nigerian leaders still have a conscience, if Nigerians still have any shame left, they would swear that the Chibok and Dapchi abductions would be the last. But there are no guarantees in a country so tentative and so unstructured that its leaders lack the imagination to connect the dots between their dysfunctional polity and their abysmal resistance to new paradigms. No matter how the Miss Sharibu affair is resolved, the government is still unlikely to examine the foundations of the crimes inundating the country, let alone recognise that real change is the key to a stable and prosperous future.