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A government spokesman said he was not aware if a ransom was paid for the release of the 21 Chibok girls [AP]

Focus on All Abducted by Boko Haram & ‘Ignore the Noise’ – Sanusi to #BBOG

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Monday, April 17th, 2017
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Muhammad-Sanusi-II

It is a great honor for me to have been invited to speak on this landmark occasion of the third year of the atrocious and barbaric attacks in Chibok that led to the capture of hundreds of young girls from the school.

In three years Nigerians have been horrified by this act and the consequent crimes of forced marriages, forced labour and may be even sale into slavery. Let me begin by congratulating my sister and friend Oby Ezekwesili and all the other sisters and brothers in BBOG who have kept this issue alive and remain committed until we see all the girls back.

As we remember the girls captured in Chibok three years ago, we must remember that they constitute only a fraction of the victims of this insurgency. I would urge BBOG, while you keep this issue of Chibok on the table, to broaden your message to cover all girls and boys abducted by BH, and also draw attention to the condition of girls and women in our society in general.

To give you an idea of the extent of this problem, as at today, in Dalori 2 IDP camp near Maiduguri alone, there are over 1,500 BH-abducted girls who are either pregnant or carrying babies, who have been freed by the military. Hundreds of orphaned children are being carried away to unknown destinations and they are all gone into oblivion due to society’s neglect.

It is therefore critical, for the BBOG to gain much broader support in the populace and be more effective, to use the dramatic case of the Chibok girls as a referent and a plank, but not the exclusive focus of its struggle. Our interest should be in Bringing back all our girls. But after these girls are brought back, shall we ask ourselves as well: where are they being brought back to? What kind of society? How much better is the “normal” environment we all take for granted than Boko Haram camps?

These questions ultimately force us to face the reality that the kind of society we have created in fact is the root cause for the emergence of groups like Boko Haram and occurrences like the Chibok tragedy.

All my life, I have been engaged deeply with the question of women and the oppressed and marginalized groups in our society. I have come to accept, like you, that remaining committed to this discourse is a risky and potentially costly venture in this environment. The elite consensus is about a culture of silence and complicity, where everyone remains in his or her comfort zone, and where the voiceless majority are allowed to remain where they are.

The argument, it seems, is why should you care about poor rural women when you are able to educate your own daughters in the best schools in the world? Why should you hold up a mirror to our faces, expose our unclean underbelly and remind us of the brutish life to which, over many decades, we have subjected a large mass of our population?

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