Nigeria's Inept Government Response

"I am pained that my other colleagues could not summon the courage to run away with me. Now I cry each time I come across their parents and see how they weep when they see me."
"I am really scared to go back there; but I have no option if I am asked to go because I need to finish my final year exams which were stopped halfway through."
Sarah Lawan, 19, Chibok Government Girls Secondary School student

Women march in protest in Lagos, Nigeria, over the failure to rescue the 273 students from the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School who are still held captive. Photograph: EPA

 

A quick thinker, Sarah Lawan would do well as a decisive, action-oriented legal expert. She has a dream of becoming a lawyer. To do so she will have to qualify, to complete her last year of high school. It is that last year that troubles her with the need to attend a school in an area of her country that has been burnt down to the ground and will required rebuilding, in the hopes that there are enough young girls remaining who will be able to muster the courage to defy their fears and the reality that if nothing is done to stop their rampages, a terror group may reenact a scene of violent abduction.

The government of Nigeria, administering a population representing the largest in Africa, and considered to be an economic success story with its vast fossil fuel reserves in an global market anxious to acquire its oil, has been fairly disinterested-to-useless in countering the atrocity that is now a month old, where almost three hundred girls were abducted from their high school environs. This is a government which attempted to downplay the event on two horizons, claiming a far lower number to have been abducted, and then discounting the event entirely.

Members of the Nigerian Cabinet, including the president's wife, claimed that it was a staged event, conducted for the sole purpose of embarrassing the government, holding it up to international ridicule. This is a government whose president, Goodluck Jonathan, steadily refused all offers of assistance, from Britain, from France, from the United States, to aid in the recovery of the girls from the talons of Boko Haram, known for its violent brutality.

No need for false claims to embarrass the government. They have diminished their authority and the regard in which the government is held both internally and externally all on their very own. A government that, despite its large revenues, oversees a population that remains poor and ignored; with one half of the country prospering, the other hobbling along, their plight of no concern to their central government.

The 19-year-old science student spoke of her grieving for the safety of the 275 students remaining in harm's way. A few of them will no longer be harmed, killed by snakebites. Others will undergo additional harm, traded to slavers in adjoining countries eager to take the defenceless, vulnerable children they view as slaves. Speaking from her home in Chibok, Sarah Lawan spoke of her regret that other girls hadn't followed her example, to escape, despite their fears of reprisal.

The girls were told that should they attempt to escape their abductors they would be killed. Most chose to remain with the terrorists, but Sarah and up to fifty other girls gambled that they would attempt an escape, come what may. And that decision proved to be serendipitous for their future; scarred by their experience, but saved from a fate none of them would want to experience; re-united with their families because of their bold decision-making.

Britain, France, China, Spain, the U.S. and Israel have sent their national experts in hostage negotiation and security and intelligence procedures to Nigeria which had a mere few days earlier finally assented to outside assistance. The purpose of their assistance will be twofold; to help in the rescue of the girls, and to apprehend the five-year-old Islamist terror group from further depredation upon a large population that has suffered thousands of deaths and 750,000 fearfully displaced from their homes.

"They may have laid landmines, one cannot rule that out. Even as they go along abducting children, they are also going after food, grabbing food", warned former Nigerian Air Force Commodore Darlington Abdullah. Boko Haram, a designated terrorist organization in North America and the European Union, has declared through its leader Abubakar Shekau that the girls will be sent into slavery.

A screen grab from Boko Haram's video released Monday shows a girl, wearing the full-length hijab, talking to the camera at an undisclosed rural location. About 100 of the 276 missing Nigerian schoolgirls are seen in the terror network's video. Getty Images

An option was presented: the girls would be released upon the release by Nigeria of Boko Haram militants whom they hold in prison. The government has firmly refused to even contemplate such a surrender to the demands of the terror group. Unheard of, claims the Nigerian government, to surrender to the demand that violent militants be released to secure the freedom of almost three hundred innocent children.

A video released showing about 100 girls seems to give credence to the belief that many of the girls have been sold as slaves, leaving them with a portion of the girls they captured yet in their possession. "There's an atmosphere of hope -- hope that these girls are alive, whether they have been forced to convert to Islam or not", commented the town leader, Pogu Bitrus.

Seeing the girls brought a small level of comfort to their parents, some Christian, some Muslim in a mixed society. A society whose tolerance for one another may be fraying perilously at the edges with the ongoing violence perpetrated by Islamist terrorists on both the larger Muslim population and their Christian counterparts, in their 50/50 sectarian split.

HO/AFP/Getty Images A man claiming to be Abubakar Shekau, the leader of extremist group Boko Haram, speaks in the video.