EDITORIAL: Chibok and Nigeria’s unremitting plague of kidnappings

EDITORIAL: Chibok and Nigeria’s unremitting plague of kidnappingsHard hit by climate change, farmers in Nigeria’s ‘food basket’ face new foesINVESTIGATION: Beautiful infrastructure but poor staffing, lack of drugs hinder PHC services in Borno communitiesEDITORIAL: Chibok and Nigeria’s unremitting plague of kidnappingsThe kidnapping of 276 female students of Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State on 14 April 2014 thrust Nigeria into a trajectory of global notoriety.

The cost has been quite steep in other heart-wrenching ways: Nearly 50 of the parents of the victims have died while waiting for the return of their children. Although the military has, so far, done a poor job of providing timely and up-to-date casualty figures, several men and women of the Nigerian armed forces have paid the supreme sacrifice in the theatre of war in the North-east.

Schools have become targets of miscellaneous non-state collectives with varying agendas. From Boko Haram’s ideological motivation against the education of young girls and contestation over the “place” of women in society, to the bandits’ commercialisation of schoolchildren’s abduction, this phenomenon does not have to be accepted as the natural order of things in Nigeria.

In other words, mass kidnappings of children persist because we have made it a political, ethnic and religious issue, rather than a societal problem that must be eradicated. In the Chibok case, President Goodluck Jonathan was initially convinced that no kidnapping had occurred. When the evidence suggested otherwise, the narrative of his government was that the kidnapping was to “embarrass” the administration and ensure its loss in the 2015 presidential election.

The execution of the war on insecurity – linked rhetorically with the imperative of rescuing all the Chibok girls by President Buhari during his inaugural address in May 2015 – for personal gain at the detriment of rank-and-file troops, has led soldiers to describe the operations as a “It is hard to win the war against terrorism, insurgency, banditry and mass kidnapping when frontline troops do not believe in the mission and feel that they are being sent to die for a country that does not care...

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