During interviews on NewsNight, an Arise TV programme, monitored by UTHMAN SALAMI, a founding member of the Bring Back Our Girls, Dr Emmanuel Shehu and the Director of Media and Communications of the Kibaku Area Development Association, otherwise known as Chibok Community, Dr Allen Manasseh speak on the 10th anniversary of the abduction of more than 200 girls from their school in the Chibok community in Borno State
Dr Shehu, it looks as if the agitation has died out suddenly. Do you want to start with the agitation of BBOG?
10 years is a long time for an advocacy group. According to our ethics, we don’t commemorate or celebrate the anniversary. We just marked the anniversary because of the tragic circumstances of the whole thing. The advocacy has continued. It is just the nature of advocacy that has had to change. 10 years is a long time. People have to face other issues.
You will not see the same tempo of physical presence on the street because people have to bear their own responsibilities. It is a voluntary movement. It is not a means of livelihood for anyone. Tomorrow, there will be various activities in various parts of the country and internationally, which show that the movement is not dead.
The BBOG, are you trying to rediscover yourself again? 10 years of local and international support. Are you going to redouble efforts to get the remaining girls released?
We are not rediscovering ourselves. We are what we are. We are concerned about accountability. Our focus from the beginning has been that we will be there for the girls until everyone is accounted for. This remains our focus: there must be closure. It can’t be open-ended. It doesn’t matter which administration is in control of the country, but there must be closure, and every girl must be accounted for. It’s been 10 years. We just can’t leave it open.
Since the Chibok girls were abducted, as we warned that it could be a trend in the country, it has escalated. It has been a pattern that other terrorists have copied to maintain their acts of terrorism. But the sad part of it is that in the cause of this advocacy, two things came up among several issues.
One is the issue of safe schools: ensuring that schools are kept safe. And we know that commitments were made internationally, and the Nigerian government was also meant to give its backing for safe schools. However, there is no accountability for what happened to the issue of safe schools as funding and also the issue of the Missing Persons Register. We can’t continue as a country without proper accountability for our citizens and not knowing how many people are missing in a community regularly.
How does the BBOG react to a situation where, 10 years later, some non-governmental organisations are paying rent for up to 15 to 20 years, as alleged by the former Chief of Defense Staff, General Lucky Irabor? What do you say about this?
It is unfortunate if that is what has happened. But BBOG never had an office. We were very transparent in our activities. We were investigated several times by the security agencies. And all our funding was self-generated. Our advocacy was straightforward: rescue the girls, make the schools safe, and ensure that these things do not happen again. So this accusation does not affect us. We won several international awards because of our advocacy, which underscored the level of our transparency and the essence for which BBOG existed.
Can it be rightly or wrongly stated that the abduction of the Chibok girls may have marked the beginning of kidnapping and banditry in the country?
The unfortunate incident of April 14, 2014, was not the beginning. Before, there had been attacks in schools. There was a school that was attacked, and the male students were slaughtered. There had been other similar cases of kidnappings. But the nature of the Chibok abductions, the audacity, and how the security agencies humiliated themselves—in one minute they said they were after the girls—the next moment it turned out it was not true.
It just showed that they were not responsive and didn’t have the capacity for rapid response. We thought from that moment on, after we met at the Unity Fountain and made that demonstration to the national assembly, that the administration and the lawmakers would be serious about it. But they were not. That was when the advocacy took off.
Govt must expose people behind abductions –Chibok Community spokesman
Dr Allen Manasseh, what is the progress made so far by the government and international aid organisations where some of the students were sent abroad to further their education?
From the start, we never thought that the advocacy would take so long. We thought a few days into the abduction, there would be conversion efforts by the security because when the abduction happened, the state was still under a state of emergency. We thought all efforts would be made possible to get them rescued, but that didn’t happen, and then the counting started.
Yes, if we look back at when 21 (of the abducted girls) were released, as well as the second batch, and the parents were called to Abuja to welcome them, the jubilation was so massive because we have seen how the nihilists with apocalyptic ideology were attacking the North-East. It was terrible.
Recently, the freed Chibok girls who are at the American University of Nigeria talked about the pain and stigmatization even in their communities, and for those of them who have children with these terrorist groups, How true is it that the Borno State Government is not taking good care of them, even when the commissioner for Information and Women Affairs says that they have helped in rehabilitating them and given them new skills to learn?
This is not true because the girls that the commissioner for information in Borno State is talking about are the girls who recently escaped on different dates and were rescued and brought back to civilization with the help of the military. Most of these girls escaped on their own, and they were brought to Maiduguri. Those are the girls the commissioner was talking about. As for the batch of 82 and 21, as well as the rest of the girls that escaped before then, you could see that they passed through some intensified kind of rehabilitation away from the community and Borno State. Having spent two years in captivity, some of them are still experiencing the trauma, as it was reported.
If you compare those who have spent two years with those who have spent almost nine to 10 years before they were rescued, even before, the process of their rehabilitation should be different. We, as a community and families, are saying that the location was not even the right place to take these girls for rehabilitation.
There was a time when the so-called repentant Boko Haram members protested; some of those girls were beaten, and that has not made it to the media. And we said, “Take these girls out of Borno. Take them to a place where they will have a clear mind that they are safe and have proper integration in the presence of their families’’, but not in a situation where you box them up. You don’t allow people, families, or organisations that need psychosocial support to see them.
Psychosocial support is an intensive process that requires professionalism. It is not a political thing; so you just don’t bring politicians to keep watch over the girls without any credible organisations that are known for these processes.
What we are saying is: move them out of this state to a place where they can be properly taken care of. We are not saying that Borno State cannot take care of these girls, but what we are saying is that it is not the right environment for them to be rehabilitated.
For your daughter to go into their den and then come back alive, was something worthy of jubilation and whatever kind of happiness. And for parents who have been waiting helplessly with hope that their children will return, it is about trauma, pain, and anger that they have forgotten.
This is because we were expecting—since there were possibilities of getting them rescued, and when the batches of the girls were released—the parents were so hopeful that not long from then, they would make progress on the rest of the girls, and the government kept promising that they were doing everything to get them back, but nothing happened.
As Dr Manasseh said, we don’t like to call it a commemoration, but when that milestone year is approaching, everything will be on board again. The media and everybody will shout “Bring Back Our Girls’. Several statements from different governments will be issued. As it stands, the parents are demanding accountability and closure in the matter.
Would you agree, as some watchers have alleged that there are some political and religious dimensions to the Chibok girls’ abduction?
We have been hearing this from the start. And we ask this question: What is the concern of a child who was sent to school by a poor parent but was abducted without the consent of their parents for anything political? What the parents are saying is: Give back, daughter, because it is better to have your daughter at home than to have them abducted by terrorists. We have stated this since the beginning: even if these abductions were politically motivated, expose those people responsible because a crime is a crime, whether it is politically or religiously motivated.
Terrorism is terrorism, whether it is lone-sponsored or state-sponsored. If the government has worked to have lists of those responsible for politically motivated terrorism, everybody will rejoice that we have exposed moles in politics and even in government, as stated by a former president, who said that there were people who were sympathetic to Boko Haram terrorists. We were calling for the exposition of those people. We don’t care whether it is politically motivated or not.
