Chibok schoolgirls: whereabouts unknown

From a simple trip to prepare themselves for the senior secondary school certificate examination, the girls have been forced into a journey to virtual oblivion, no trace, and no confirmed sightings. Just speculations of them being married off, or sold into slave labour. The nation-and a sympathetic international community-have been in agonised soul-searching since.   Where […]

From a simple trip to prepare themselves for the senior secondary school certificate examination, the girls have been forced into a journey to virtual oblivion, no trace, and no confirmed sightings. Just speculations of them being married off, or sold into slave labour. The nation-and a sympathetic international community-have been in agonised soul-searching since.   
Where could the girls be? Thousands of people have died in the Boko Haram insurgency and the efforts to contain it. Could the girls be among the body-count? Or they may be somewhere-perhaps alive, but unable to let their compatriots be aware of whatever predicament they may be in?
 Ever since that day they disappeared, the circumstances of their ordeal, the initial vacillation of the government and its security apparatuses , and the sustained but so far fruitless search for them, have exercised the minds of many Nigerians, to say nothing of the deep anguish that the affected girls’ parents must be in. Some parents could not withstand the trauma of not having the least idea where their wards could be, and what their fate could have befallen them.  President Goodluck Jonathan’s lukewarm attitude to the security challenge, characterised also in the same week by the Nyanya bus-station bombing near Abuja that claimed several lives,  stunned leaders and celebrities all over the world, and propelled the message of the Nigerian hashtag Bring Back Our Girls to practically every country on earth.  It portrayed the administration and its top officials and party stalwarts as insensitive and not up to the task of securing the country and protecting the citizens.
The government’s initial response to the abduction was one of disbelief, and then allegation it was a setup by some regional politicians to undermine the Jonathan administration portrayed is being incompetent.
Public anger in Nigeria swelled when it was revealed the government had at least 48-hour intelligence that an attack on the girls’ school was imminent, and did practically nothing to abort it. Things hardly improved with several officials and sundry apologists of the government casting aspersions on the advocates of the safe return of the Chibok girls from their captors.  There were several attempts by the government, with the deployment of security personnel, to launch rival groups in order to crowd out the original movement from the public space.
To compound issues, the military that had been engaged in the fight against the Boko Haram insurgents and the captors of the girls, provided conflicting, sometime misleading signals, regarding the location of the girls, their condition, and in one sensational episode, claimed that most of the abductees had been freed by soldiers.
Yet as the military operations have reportedly cleared all the known camps and suspected hideouts of the militants, questions regarding the fate of the abducted girls remain unanswered.  The Chibok girls’ saga will remain forever etched in the minds of many people here in Nigeria and around the world as the outgoing administration’s single most important security failure, regardless of whether the girls walk out of their captors’ den today or whenever.
It is also the Chibok girls’ story that served to bring the ramification of the brutality and depravity of the Boko Haram insurgency to global attention.
The president-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari, has let out word that a large part of his administration’s business would be devoted to tackling security, including the Boko Haram challenge. This would not have necessary on a scale that it has become if President Jonathan had sustained the firmness that his predecessor, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, had showed in the determination to stamp out the insurgency.
That was not done, and that’s why the question, Where are the Chibok schoolgirls?, still demands urgent answers today.