Last month, 137 families in Kuriga in Nigeria’s Kaduna State breathed a collective sigh of relief as their sons and daughters returned home after over two weeks in terrorist captivity.
The children were abducted from their school on 7 March when armed assailants descended on the premises just as classes were about to commence. The school reported that 287 students were taken; however Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani has since attempted to dismiss the figure as being a ‘figment of someone’s imagination’, despite initially citing the same number himself.
Several questions emerge from this: what is being done to confirm that all of the students have indeed been freed? What about the thousands of other individuals who have been abducted by terrorist groups in recent years? And finally, how can this still be happening a decade after mass kidnappings in Nigeria first landed on the international agenda?
An attack that shocked the world
On the evening of 14 April 2014, Boko Haram gunmen invaded the predominantly Christian town of Chibok in the Gwoza Local Government Area (LGA) of Borno State, setting fire to homes and public buildings and looting food before kidnapping 276 students from the Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS). The majority of these abductees – 217 – were members of the Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria (EYN, Church of the Brethren in Nigeria).
The girls were aged between 16 and 18 at the time, and were taken as they about to sit for the West African Examination Council (WAEC) certificate. The school in which they were staying had been closed for four weeks prior to the attack amid deteriorating security conditions.
The kidnapping was the first mass abduction in Nigeria to gain sustained international focus, and it remains the most infamous. Protests demanding greater government action were held in cities across the country, and subsequently around the world as the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls trended globally on Twitter and elsewhere.
On 7 May 2014 the then First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, joined the campaign, tweeting a picture of herself holding a sign with the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, and days later delivering her husband’s weekly presidential address to express outrage at the kidnappings and to promise that the US government was doing ‘everything possible to support the Nigerian government’s efforts to find these girls and bring them home’.
The governments of Canada, China, France, Israel and the UK all promised similar assistance, the UN Security Council condemned the abduction ‘in the strongest terms’, and in July 2014 the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for the ‘immediate and unconditional release of the abducted schoolgirls.’
Three successive Nigerian governments have asserted that they would do all in their power to ensure that all the girls – now women – are rescued and returned to their families. So far, each has failed to live up to this promise.
Civil society campaigning has continued, and while several girls have been released following negotiations, payments and suspected prisoner exchanges, and many others have escaped – often with children born in captivity – 87 remain unaccounted for.
Particularly alarming are continued questions of government complicity surrounding, among others, current Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima, who was the governor when the girls were obliged to remain at the GGSS overnight, despite specific instructions from the federal authorities that all students should sit these examinations ‘in safe locations’ in the state capital.
A resolute failure
Whether or not the then Borno State authorities were or are complicit, there is no question that they and the Nigerian federal authorities past and current, have resolutely failed, not only to deliver on their promises to rescue all of the Chibok girls, but also to protect thousands like them who have been abducted by terrorists over the past decade.
The security situation in the country has deteriorated to the point that Nigeria now sits on the precipice of failed statehood, as terrorist groups including Boko Haram, the al Qaeda affiliate Ansaru, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) and a militia comprising members of the Fulani ethnic group continue to carry out horrific attacks, including mass abductions for ransom, on vulnerable non-Muslim communities across the north and centre of the country, and increasingly towards the south. The unchecked lawlessness has mutated and now impacts Hausa Muslim communities in the northwest in a similarly appalling manner.
The attacks are unrelenting. For example, prior to the Kuriga kidnappings 17 people were abducted from Goningora in the Kajuru Local Government Area (LGA) of Kaduna State on 28 February by Fulani militia.
Days before the students were abducted, around 200 women and girls were abducted on 4 March by Boko Haram terrorists following attacks on three Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Ngala Town in Borno State. In the same week, on 10 March, 15 Quranic pupils were abducted in a dawn raid on their school premises in Gidan Bakuso village, Sokoto State. They were released 13 days later. Two days after that abduction, on 12 March, militia men kidnapped 61 people from the Buda community in Kajuru LGA, Kaduna State. On 16 March, 14 women were abducted from Dogon Noma in Kajuru, while 87 people were seized from the Kajuru Station community on 17 March, including minors and babies.
Also on 17 March, and in more heartening news, terrorists released nine of 21 students who were abducted from the University of Gusau in Zamfara State in September 2023 after spending 178 days in captivity. However, the remaining 12 are still unaccounted for.
This is a brief snapshot of a situation that has become the near-daily reality for communities across Nigeria who have been left vulnerable to violent attacks and abductions for ransom by terrorist groups for over a decade. The response from successive governments thus far has been wholly inadequate.
The current federal administration must become far more proactive in addressing the critical security situation. It must ensure that the armed forces are sufficiently resourced – and mandated – to tackle every insurgency; it must deliver on promises to liberate all who remain in terrorist captivity; and, most crucially, it must prioritise the protection of schools and communities which have been left without this for far too long.
By Reverend Yunusa Nmadu, CEO of CSW-Nigeria
FoRB in Full 