Two-hundred and sixty-two days after
their daughters were kidnapped from school, some of the distraught
parents of the students of Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno
State, on Thursday criticised President Goodluck Jonathan for not
fulfilling his promise to rescue the girls from the custody of Boko
Haram.
The abduction of the 219 girls from their
hostel at night on April 14, 2014 has attracted global outrage and the
President had promised several times that the girls would be rescued
alive.
Nine of the abducted girls’ parents,
during their meeting with the BringBackOurGirls group on Thursday in
Abuja, carpeted the President for failing to bring back the schoolgirls.
The leader of the parents, Rev. Mark
Enoch, accused the government of having a hand in the abduction of the
girls, noting that the principal of the school in Chibok had, few hours
before the abduction, locked the girls in their hostel and warned them
not to leave.
Enoch explained that the relatives of the
principal and the school matron were able to rescue their daughters
from the sect, leaving other girls in captivity.
“This is intentional, the hand of
government is in the kidnapping; we want the government to bring back
our girls. If they cannot do it alone, they should seek the assistance
of the United Nations and some advanced countries, the distressed father
said.
The cleric, who appreciated the BBOG for not giving up on the girls,
noted that but for the activities of the coalition, the issue of the
girls would have been forgotten given the remote location of the Chibok
community.
The BBOG lamented the failure of the
President to mention the issue of the Chibok girls in his New Year
broadcast, stressing that it showed that the government did not care
about them.
Few days after the girls were abducted,
Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the kidnapping. It released a
video of the girls while the sect’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, boasted
that the young girls, most of who were said to be Christians, had been
converted to Islamic religion and that they would be given out in
marriages at a token.
While unconfirmed reports said that some
of the girls had died of snake bite in the forest where they were kept, a
handful had escaped from the insurgents’ captivity.
The United Nations in August had announced rehabilitation facilities for the escaped Chibok girls.
Culled from ...Punch
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