The ultimate Chibok sacrifice

How did we reach the stage whereby these parents see nothing but a hopeless situation ahead? For sure all of our hopes were raised the day a so-called kidnap kingpin was captured by the authorities. My first happy response was ‘At last, the girls will be found.’ I reached this conclusion because the kingpin of […]

How did we reach the stage whereby these parents see nothing but a hopeless situation ahead? For sure all of our hopes were raised the day a so-called kidnap kingpin was captured by the authorities. My first happy response was ‘At last, the girls will be found.’ I reached this conclusion because the kingpin of any gang is generally the brains behind any project. Grabbing him means knowing everything about the ugly operation and bringing the reign of terror to an end. At least as far as the kidnapped Chibok girls are concerned. But not so with Babuji Ya’ari.
After all the noise about arresting him and subjecting him to interrogations in Abuja about the whereabouts of the Chibok girls, we are yet to hear anything about their location or their fate. This probably confirms the belief of those who knew him in Maiduguri, who told Weekly Trust that Ya’ari was just a businessman whose links to Boko Haram could not be confirmed. Now he has been in captivity since early July and we are nowhere near finding the kidnapped schoolgirls.
Someone should tell our government and security agencies to send Babuji Ya’ari home, he is surely not the kingpin they claimed.
Then a few weeks ago, the Americans waded in and raised our hopes even higher. Just when suspicions were high that the girls who undertook the suicide bombings in Kano were very likely the abducted schoolgirls, American investigators said they had found out where the girls were. We can recall that the United States was one of the first countries to offer help when the Chibok girls were abducted way back in April. Four other countries also offered to help us find them, yet despite this international gang-up the whereabouts of the girls is still unknown.
Even our chief of defence staff, Air Marshall Alex Badeh was quoting as saying they knew exactly where the girls were but did not wish to endanger them by launching attacks in the area, in other words they didn’t want them to end up as collateral damage. And yet they haven’t devised another means of rescuing them that will not involve bloodshed.
So while our authorities continue to play with our feelings over the location of the girls, their parents have despaired and begun to sing a funeral dirge. You can’t blame them. It is over four months since their daughters’ disappearance. Despite their number and the fact that certain villagers have claimed having seen them being moved about in truckloads, our authorities and their international helpers have claimed a total inability to rescue them.
For sure this is a thing of great shame not only to our nation but to the international community as well. ‘How big is Sambisa?’ was written on one of the placards held when Chibok mothers and their supporters staged a march in Abuja some months ago. And indeed that is the question, how big and how dangerous is this forest that the combined might of the US, Nigeria and the coalition of willing assistants cannot storm it and free our girls? Indeed Chibok mothers have a reason to lose hope.
Nothing proves that these girls are really not too far from civilization and probably not even far from the place of their abduction like the way their school mates were able to escape earlier.
How much longer will our government take before it makes a decisive move to free them? Many had advocated a prisoner-swap with the so-called Boko Haram sect through dialogue but the government won’t hear of it. How then can these girls be saved if we won’t storm their captors’ forest hide-out and won’t negotiate with them?
One really can’t blame the parents who said they are waiting for their daughters’ corpses in order to bury them. No one faced with such a Catch-22 situation can afford to remain optimistic. The rest of us will continue to pray that they will one day be reunited with their daughters, in living flesh and blood, not as corpses destined for graves. That they are willing to sacrifice their daughters, as collateral damage, in order to end the Republic of terror existing in Sambisa, is a fact appreciated by all of us. It is the ultimate sacrifice anyone can make but we desperately hope that it would never come to that.