Daily Times

On April 14, 2014, 276 girls were abducted from a college in Chibok, Nigeria after an attack by Boko Haram, one of the most barbaric terrorist organisations in the world. The majority of these girls have still not been recovered; a few have managed to escape. This incident devastated Nigeria and caused the brutal actions of Boko Haram to gain the attention of the international community. However, the girls have yet to be rescued and the world has moved on. Yet the protests and public outcry on the anniversary of the Chibok kidnappings show that Nigeria has not forgotten and is still grieving. A report by Amnesty International states that around 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram to be forcibly made domestic and sexual slaves or suicide bombers and that many were killed for resisting, according to scores of testimonies by surviving victims.

After the recent elections, the Nigerian people seem more hopeful that the newly elected Muhammadu Buhari will be able to overcome the incompetence and corruption of Goodluck Jonathan’s government to finally deal with the Boko Haram crisis. As President Buhari admitted, it may be too late to rescue these girls because their whereabouts are unknown and many of them may be dead. Nevertheless the government must execute rescue efforts to recover all the abductees and child fighters captured by Boko Haram. Troops from Chad and Niger have been able to expel Boko Haram from several swathes of Nigerian territory that the group had taken control of, but rebuilding those areas will prove challenging for the new administration because of infrastructural damage and the displacement of nearly one million people. The Nigerian people’s election of a former military ruler shows their faith in Nigeria’s once strong military, yet there is a great deal of scepticism whether the military and the state, in their current condition, will prove equal to the task. One of the reasons why Boko Haram has been able to gain such strength is because of the stark differences in education rates and development in northern and southern Nigeria, which are predominantly Muslim and Christian respectively. Nigeria has historically been divided on religious lines, with Muslim majority regions suffering from illiteracy, unemployment and underdevelopment. One of Buhari’s challenges will be to unite Nigeria under a secular government, which effectively provides the necessary security and welfare to its people, to ensure sustained peace and prosperity. A consistent secular policy is the only way to defeat a group that has killed and abducted thousands in the past six years to impose their own perverted version of Islam onto a religiously diverse country. *