For seven painful years, parents of the abducted girls from Government Secondary School Chibok in Borno State have been waiting and praying for the release of their young daughters by the Boko Haram terrorists who invaded the school in the Chibok community and abducted 270 students on April 14, 2014.
In recent weeks, the Nigerian military have been relentless in their attack against the Boko Haram insurgents in the Northeast and the bandits terrorising the Northwest. As a result a lot of the Boko Haram members are surrendering, some commanders even asked Nigerians for forgiveness.
In any event, among those that surrendered were one of the abducted Chibok girls, Ruth Ngladar Pogu and her husband, a Boko Haram-ISWAP terrorist and it got the attention of people because of her identity as a Chibok girl. They surrendered themselves to the Nigerian troops in Bama on July 28, 2021.
The Borno State Governor, Babagana Umara Zulum, has received her at the Government House in Maiduguri.
Zulum’s spokesperson, Malam Isa Gusau, in a statement said the governor received the Chibok schoolgirl at the Government House on Saturday in the presence of overwhelmed parents who reunited with her.
“I am extremely excited both as Borno’s governor and father of all sons and daughters of the state, and also as a father to daughters. I know the feeling of families of those still under captivity but we have to remain hopeful especially with today’s development,” the governor said.
The Chairman of the Chibok Girls Movement, an association of all affected parents, Yakubu Keki, expressed joy over the return of Ruth.
It was a joyous moment of course, however, what is telling and glaring about this atrocity is that this young girl now came out with two children, a baby and a small boy of two-three years old.
Terrorists abducted your daughter, changed her religion, ‘married her,’ disrupted her education and made her stranger to her parents, relatives and community. Because no matter what some would forever be suspicious of such girls through no fault of their own. This is the scenario.
This Chibok girl’s case is a metaphor for all those young girls and women abducted and suffering the same fate at the hands of terrorists, but without the benefit of being among students and kept in the limelight by the media.
Apart from crime against humanity, crime against women should be added, being violated in the name of marriage.
Many cases of rape by terrorists such as bandits are not reported. Just two months ago, one man told me that bandits invaded his village in Sokoto State, they tied up his brother’s young wife and raped her.
One woman also told me that in her village in Katsina State, the bandits invaded and raped women. The husbands knew about it, while some of the violations took place in the presence of the husbands and children.
The wickedness and wanton acts of killings, maiming, raping in the name of religion (Islam) that criminalises such acts should not go unpunished even if they have surrendered.
There should be a place to get justice for those they have wronged. They cannot bring back those years Ruth had spent, agreed, but such girls should be able to get compensation of whatever kind and their abductors to face justice according to their crimes.
As for the society, a lot depends on it for the integration of such girls back into it. Stigma is a problem in our society where victims of rape, some illnesses and so on are ostracized. There is a lack of ‘humanity’ in the hearts of many, making the victims move away, hide themselves and wish to be dead.
As such the society needs orientation and enlightenment, after all this fate could befall anyone. The victims need support and love to help them overcome their traumatic experience.
Ironically, this includes family members, because in one such case a few years ago a young girl in Borno State came out from the Boko Haram captivity with a baby. She was rejected by her parents because of the baby. But as a mother she loved her own baby. So, she wished to go back to Boko Haram.
In this regard, the fate of such innocent children should be looked into. They should be treated as any other child, not Boko Haram children.
The atrocities of Boko Haram know no bounds but we should not play into their own hands and compound things by losing our humanity and not offering the milk of human kindness to its victims.
