The direct involvement of the United States – and the other countries that have reportedly pledged support – is a huge psychological boost to the search for the girls. This is already evident in the change in the rhetoric of some of our powerful politicians from the part of the country where Boko Haram originated, who had made excuses for the activities of group and, without condemning the essential evil of the attendant mass murders and other violent acts like the recent mass “kidnap” of the schoolgirls, preferred to blame the President Goodluck Jonathan for such activities, and even canvassed for a regional amnesty for the culprits.
It is noteworthy that, with the mere mention of the coming of the Americans and their allies, such raucous, chest-thumping posturing in the face of patent evil has reduced considerably or disappeared altogether. And most people, however reluctantly, seems to have rallied under the “Bring Back Our Girls” slogan generated to drive the search for the victims, and raised to a global crescendo by CNN and other cable news networks.
But if the American soldiers and their foreign allies succeed in Chibok, where their Nigerian counterparts have seemingly failed, it is not because they are inherently better. The bullet is no respecter of nationality. It is rather because some of us are not likely to show them the politics-and-ethnicity-induced contempt they have for the rest of us, our current government and its institutions, which I believe drove their resistance to or non-cooperation with the government’s effort to combat the Boko Haram menace, making such foreign intervention a necessity. No homebred terror can overcome the strength of a united people. And it is our lack of unity as Nigerians, not the incapacity of our government or soldiers as some allege, that has made it hard for our forces to defeat the Boko Haram insurgency.
However, while we rally under the compelling “Bring Back Our Girls” slogan, we must keep in mind that the rescue effort is still being trailed by a host of unanswered questions as to what really transpired on the night the girls were taken into captivity. Some of the questions amount to wondering if what transpired was a normal kidnap or a staged abduction, with a hint that some powerful interests behind the incident may be playing hide and seek with the Chibok girls to achieve political ends, not least of all the end of portraying President Jonathan as incapable of providing security for our country and thereby undermine his electability should he decide to run in the 2015 elections.
From the imponderable logistics of “kidnapping” such a huge number of human beings at once in an operation that seemed too smooth for a state under emergency rule, to the gaping hole that some analysts have identified in the stories of a supposed eyewitness of the incident, to the apparent implausibility of some of the stories told by some of the “victims” and their “parents”, to the near-total obscurity of the identity of the “victims” and their “families”, questions have issued from sceptics as to what really transpired that night, and what is currently going on.
Suffice it to cite the following publications by Fox News (of the United States) and The Punch (of Nigeria), of accounts by Asabe Kwabura, the principal of Government Secondary School, Chibok, from where the girls were “kidnapped”, to buttress why some people have questioned the credibility of the story of the “kidnapping”.From Fox News: “Kwambura said the students were kidnapped because of a terrible mistake. She said the insurgents arrived after midnight … wearing military fatigues and posing as soldiers … She said she believed them when they told her that they needed to move the girls for their own safety. So she allowed the extremists posing as soldiers to load the students on to the back of a truck. It was only as the armed men were leaving, and started shooting, that she realised her mistake…” (Source: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/04/17/fate-115-abducted-girls-unknown-nigeria-says/). Then, from an interview with The Punch (Mrs. Kwabura’s answer to a question, “How did you find out that your pupils were missing?”): “When it happened, I was not in the school premises. I went to Maiduguri for a medical check-up. I was called by my daughter around 11.30pm … She told me that some insurgents were in the school and were trying to escape. That was how I heard. My daughter resides in my house, which is located inside the school. We were together in the house and I left her in the house before I went for the check-up.” (Source: http://www.punchng.com/feature/how-my-pupils-escaped-from-boko-haram-school-principal/) So we get the contradictory impression from Mrs. Kwabura that she was an eyewitness of the “kidnap” and also absent from the scene of the “kidnap”. And yet some people seem to think that, though aware of that being impossible, none of us should raise doubts, that we should all join their bandwagon of the uncritical.
The girls were said to have been in the school – a coeducational institution – to write exams to be conducted by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC). The sceptics are also asking why the girls were kept in the hostels while the boys remained at home, and why the school authorities refused when WAEC offered to conduct the exams in a more secure setting.To such sceptics, finding answers to such questions will clarify what truly transpired that night. Without such clarity, we may be embarking on the wrong kind of search that may not yield the best result. And I believe ignoring such questions is how not to prove the seriousness of our desire to bring back our girls.
— Oke, a writer, poet and public affairs analyst, sent this piece from Abuja.
REF http://leadership.ng/columns/371527/trail-chibok-girls
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