The security agencies could do more to safeguard the people
Whether voluntary or induced, the return of the Dapchi school girls by their captors is a welcome development. While we rejoice with the families of the freed girls and commiserate with the families of those who lost their loved ones to the madness, we must also point out that the manner in which the whole episode was handled by the federal government raises several questions.
Even then, the authorities must interrogate the circumstances surrounding the death of five of the girls while everything must be done to ensure the return of the one still held back by Boko Haram on account of the refusal to renounce her Christian faith.
In disputing media reports that ransom was paid to secure the release of the girls, Information and Culture Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed said: “It is not true that we paid ransom for the release of the Dapchi girls, neither was there a prisoner swap to secure their release.
What happened was that the abduction itself was a breach of the ceasefire talks between the insurgents and the government, hence it became a moral burden on the abductors.”
If there is anything that the current administration is yet to understand, it is that accountability in government is not just about dodgy book keeping or dishing out cheap propaganda. In informing citizens about issues of public good, government must be credible, sensible and minimally logical. In a democracy, the most unpardonable crime a government can commit is to insult the intelligence of the elite as this government has done several times. That explains why many Nigerians are cynical about the official version of what transpired in this sordid Dapchi saga.
While we give the federal government the benefit of the doubt on the claim that no money was paid Boko Haram to secure the release of the girls, we nonetheless state very clearly that appeasement and negotiation with terrorists as an official policy devalues the state. Once terrorists and their sponsors know they can easily arm-twist a government, they have a ready source of money with which to reinvest in new arms supplies for the next escapade.
In societies where governments negotiate and pay ransom for kidnapping, the insurgency label is not only a selling point for organised crime, it can also become self-perpetuating.
More disturbing is that repeated attacks on schools by the insurgents have created fear in many vulnerable students and their parents and is affecting the attitude to education with Boko Haram (whose guiding philosophy is ‘western education is sinful’) winning the psychological war.
So emboldened were the insurgents who returned the abducted Dapchi girls that they took time to lecture their parents never to send the children back to school. Yet, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), when children are denied opportunity for education “not only are their lives shattered, the future of the nation is stolen.”
While we urge a quick resolution of the Leah Sharibu dilemma, what the Dapchi tragedy has shown very clearly is that the insurgents still possess sufficient capacity to capture as many of our school girls as they want, which then means we have left our children at the mercy of violent predators who hide under the guise of Islamic religion to perpetrate evil.
ThisDay
