They say the first casualty in war is truth. So it is easy to empathize with those who find it hard to believe that over 200 girls were taken from GSS Chibok on April 14, 2014.
Blame for the doubt cannot be laid entirely at the feet of politics. The doubt does not arise strictly as a result of Kema Chikwe’s request for lists and pictures or Dame Jonathan’s robust interrogation of the matter. Neither does it rest solely on the ample
shoulders of Niger Delta jihadist Asari Dokubo and his scraggly, sympathy-evoking crew of anti-#BringBackOurGirls protesters.
The doubts arise from the messiness that is Nigeria, which stains the way we think and everything that we try to do. However, situating the story firmly in the inescapable context of Nigeria provides clarity.
First, the numbers. The fact that it is difficult to determine if 234 or 276 were initially abducted and how many escaped is not peculiar – we have a strange relationship with numbers in Nigeria. We do not know how much money we make from oil or how much we lose to corruption, our census is contentious and, for every situation involving dead bodies, there
