As the nation marks two years of the abduction of 276 students from their hostel at Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State today, the Federal Government has said it can’t say when the schoolgirls would return.
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo yesterday said that despite efforts to rescue the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by the Boko Haram sect in Chibok, government cannot give a definite date for their rescue.
The vice president, however, reassured that from the security reports available to the federal government, it was still possible to rescue the girls. There are fears that the missing girls may never be found alive.
The girls were reportedly abducted on April 14, 2014 by some armed men suspected to be Boko Haram terrorists operating in the north-eastern flanks of the country. The abductors were said to have stormed their school at night, commandeered them out of their dormitory, bundled them into large capacity buses and ferried them away to an unknown destination.
The incident, which took place during the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, attracted global attention, particularly when that administration was accused of failing to take prompt action to rescue the girls.
The seeming lethargy on the part of the Federal Government to rescue the girls gave birth to the Bring Back Our Girls (#BBOG) movement, a group of volunteers agitating for the return of the girls.
It also become an issue during the 2015 election eering with the then opposition, All Progressives Congress (APC) promising to rescue the girls as soon as it assumed the mantle of leadership in the country.
Barely one year into the life of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, this promise has not been kept and this has also drawn a lot of criticisms from the BBOG and other civil rights groups.
Speaking at a one-day roundtable in honour of the Chibok girls and other victims of internal conflicts, the vice president cautioned that people should not assume that government was not doing enough to bring back the girls to their families.
Osinbajo revealed that at every Security Council meeting that he has attended, President Muhammadu Buhari had always sought to know the fastest way to rescue the abductees. He said because the issue was very complicated, government would not say exactly when it would be achieved. ”
At every security council meeting that I have attended, the president has always been concerned about Chibok girls. He thinks of how this can be done quickly. “But it’s a very delicate issue and we cannot say we can deal with it next week.
Every rescue attempt must take the safety of the girls into consideration,” he said. Osinbajo assured that “from the security reported we get, we will be able to bring back the girls, but we must exercise some caution and patience, and not sound as if it can be done, but it’s not being done.”
He pointed out that everything that could be done to rescue the girls was being done with the assistance of international partners, saying that apart from the rescue of the girls, the situation of other vulnerable Nigerians remained the focus of the present administration. According to him, in dealing with the poorest of the poor in the country, there seemed to be a problem around the core subject of what a budget should be.
The vice president said that people must pay attention to how government programmes were designed as “the soft under belly of our system is that we expose the most vulnerable to the harshest conditions. That’s why the government has come up with intervention programmes, including conditional cash transfer.”
He said compiling the list of the poorest in the society has been difficult despite the assistance received from some international agencies. Osinbajo stressed the importance of a commitment to doing it. “We must push it.
That intervention must come from government’s funding of programmes that enables people to do something for themselves and lift them from poverty,” he said. On education, he said that there was very little advocacy around getting the tiers of government to make more funds available for education. He noted that state and local governments must ensure children go to primary school.
The vice president added that somebody has to be held responsible for the number of people out of school. In an opening address by the National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno, he observed that there has been increase in the use of children as suicide bombers, but stressed the determination of government to check the trend.
