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Protesters march to the Nigerian presidential villa.
Protesters march to the Nigerian presidential villa. Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters
Protesters march to the Nigerian presidential villa. Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters

The campaigners who won’t forget the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram

This article is more than 9 years old
For more than six months, Oby Ezekwesili has been leading daily protests in the Nigerian capital, keeping pressure on the government to ‘bring back our girls’

On 14 April 2014, at least 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped at gunpoint from their dormitories at Government Secondary School Chibok in north-east Nigeria. Since 30 April, protesters have been rallying daily to demand the federal government “Bring Back Our Girls”. Oby Ezekwesili, a Nigerian former federal minister of education, has been campaigning every day.

This is Day 230 [15 December] and we’ve been doing our daily “sit-out” at the Unity fountain [in Abuja]. It’s been a demonstration of the determination of Nigerians from all walks of life – from all ethnic groups and religions and political persuasions – to completely forget all of these primordial positions and be united. These are 219 vulnerable young women that the system failed to protect, by first enabling their abduction, and then by the inability of our government to rescue them. Some Nigerians keep asking whether the girls really were abducted, and others believe we’ve done enough. They say: “Even if the girls were rescued today, they’re not going to be the same people that were abducted, so why don’t you just forget about them?”

We have faced significant attacks by the institutions of government, physical and verbal assaults and psychological warfare against our advocacy. I have been shocked at the ineptitude and the cynicism. As a former government official, I know that the public sector has never been stellar in its effectiveness, but it has also never been this remarkably incompetent.

Our most recent march was to the Chadian embassy, registering our concern over the role that Chad played in what turned out to be a scam of a so-called ceasefire.

There’s an election next year and the only conversation we are interested in hearing is: what will you do to end the terrorism in the north-east? When will you rescue the Chibok girls and all other abducted citizens of our nation? The politicking is very, very annoying. We’re not going to relent in demanding the constitutional duty of the government to citizens, which is the security of life and property. The Chibok girls are entitled to justice, like any other citizen. We have had cases where prominent Nigerians were kidnapped in places like the Niger Delta and our security infrastructure worked to rescue them within record time. So why should the children of the poorest of our society be abandoned, be forgotten? Understand that when citizens make that demand, they do in fact expect action on the parts of those who govern them.

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