The release of the Dapchi girls

As I write this there is jubilation in the land. The surprise release of 104 out of the 110 girls taken away from their school, Government Girls Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State, by Boko Haram on February 19, has replaced the ashes in our mouths with honey. We all join them and their parents in celebrating their return home. Their freedom should help to rekindle our hope in the capacity of the government and its security agencies to protect us from the criminal elements on the fringes of humanity who are making life nasty and brutish in a country and a region once known for peace and harmony. 

This is no mean achievement for the government. Given the mind boggling cocktail of  security challenges it faces, its repeated assurances that it has the capacity to fully protect us on the streets, in our homes and offices and our children in their schools, were beginning to ring hollow indeed. It may be too early to see this feat as an indication that the Buhari administration has recovered its baton, but it would be unfair not to acknowledge its achievement and duly congratulate the president. We were beginning to lose hope in the rescue of the girls. We thought they too had been distributed among the Boko Haram insurgents as child brides, never to be found and re-united with their families. We feared the fate that befell the Chibok girls taken away four years ago and who have never been found would befall them too. 

Our jubilation is shadowed by the loss of six of the girls. Five of them died and one is held back by the insurgents because she refused to renounce her religion. We do not know yet how the five girls lost their lives. It was not in a shoot-out between our security forces and the insurgents, obviously. Even sadder is the lone Christian girl held back by Boko Haram. The Nigerian government should do everything it can to secure her release. Only so can this feat, the first by the Nigerian state to rise to the height of its sense of responsibility, go down in the history of this insurgency as a milestone in the tough task of defeating Boko Haram.

I cannot help being saddened by the reaction of PDP to the freedom regained by these young girls. The party said that the kidnap and the release of the girls were stage-managed by the president to shore up his political fortune. If so, Buhari must be really desperate to risk the lives of these young girls for his personal political mileage. This is silly, utterly silly. The kidnap of the girls was a national tragedy; their release is a victory that cannot be denied the president and his security team.

Even sillier are the comments in the social media by those who argue that Buhari acted promptly to rescue the girl because they are Muslims. These dimwits appear to conveniently forget that the 260 Chibok students, most of whom were Christians, were abducted under the watch of a Christian president in 2011. President Jonathan, the man who toured every middling place of worship in 2011 and 2015 in search of divine assurances of victory at the polls ignored the plight of the young Christians. Religion played no part in what Buhari did. He did what every responsible leader would do in such circumstances because he is the president of Nigeria, not an imam.

Now that the girls have been released, it is time to find out what happened. As of this writing the federal government has not told the nation how and under what conditions the girls were released. We are left to guess that it was a negotiated settlement. It is interesting that one of the conditions by the insurgents was that they be allowed to return the girls to their school where they kidnapped them. And they did. It makes me jittery to see them dictate to our security forces. We were in a rather weak position. And they knew it. 

More importantly, this is the  right time for  the committee set up by the national security adviser, Major-General Babagana Monguno, to tell us what happened and who to blame in the abduction of the girls. Nothing should be swept under the carpet. I am sure there is not enough room for more rubbish under the carpet any way. Pardon my naivety. People quite often get away with murder both factually and figuratively in this country because no one is ever made to account for his failures or wrong judgments.

Two important leads offer themselves. Goni Bukar Lawal, the member representing Dapchi community in the House of Representatives  told his colleagues on the floor of the house: “There was military presence in the eight local government areas in Dapchi until one week to the attack. It was surprising to us that the military withdrew its men and one week after, there was an attack.”

Amnesty International has similarly let it be known that our security forces knew weeks before of an imminent attack. So, why?  I know  the Monguno committee would do its duty, submit its findings and mum becomes the word. The guilty would be let off the hook and the heads that should roll would be left sitting pretty on the fat necks of those whose sense of duty to the state and its people put us through the wrenching month of wailing for our girls. 

I think President Muhammadu Buhari has just secured for himself a second term in office.