Thousands have been kidnapped, but what makes 278 girls so special? We discuss.
Chibok was a little-known town until one night in April, when Boko Haram terrorists raided a Government Secondary School in the town and kidnapped 273 girls.
Before and
after that night, thousands of people have been kidnapped by Boko Haram.
Men have been forced to carry arms and join in the fighting. Women have
been made to live in slave-like conditions. Children have had their
childhoods cut short with the burden of captivity.
This begs the question, why are a group of girls
given much more importance over the thousands more who have suffered
similar, or probably worse conditions?
Our answer sits in a dark corner of January 1970.
Nigerian
launched "Operation Tail-Wind", a final offensive against Biafran
forces, and by the middle of January, the war was officially over.
The Head of State at the time, General Yakubu Gowon, delivered his famous "no victor, no vanquished" speech, which brought a symbolic end to the wa
What that speech didn't talk about was that three (3) million people are estimated to have died in that war.n the following decades up until this day, thousands and possibly
millions of lives have been lost in meaningless conflicts and incidents,
from the inter-tribal and inter-religious riots across Nigeria to
extrajudicial killings by the armed forces.
Fast forward to the advent of Boko Haram and our long
history with forgetfulness still lingers. It is how we move on after
every incident, as if it never happened, expecting that somehow, those
wounds will heal, or the vacuum the dead left will be filled.
We
reduce the all the dead to words like "30 killed in crisis", "114
killed in the riots" "43 boys killed in Mubi". We reduce them to
statistics for the next elections, or speech, or report. Nothing ever
happens.
For the first time in our history, a
large group of victims isn't just numbers, they are people. People with
names, with ages, with facesWe know Amina Ali. Mary Usman. Jummai John. We know all kidnapped girls.
We know their hobbies, we know their parents. We know their school.
Their names give them individuality.
Make no mistake, this doesn't make the thousands of
others less important, they deserve a life of freedom where they can
fulfill their dreams.
Here's a quick fact. When a
child goes missing in the U.S, an AMBER Alert is declared. That
Broadcast Emergency Response service was named after Amber Hagerman,
a 9-year-old who was abducted and killed in 1996. Amber doesn't make
other missing children less important, but it makes her iconic in the
sense that she was the beginning of something important.
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