The three options to bring back Chibok girls.

The three options to bring back Chibok girls. Former Education Minister and leader of the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, visited the Lagos Head office of the Vanguard Newspapers, last week, with some members of her group in what can be described as a sustained move to rescue the over 219 Chibok school girls, who were abducted on April 14 by the Boko Haram insurgents. Ezekwesili, who cried for over five minutes during a chat with Vanguard senior editors, said she and her group would not stop the campaign until the girls were rescued. She dismissed as balderdash insinuations that joblessness is responsible for her campaign, and the campaign is politically-motivated and being funded by opponents of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Federal Government. With her during the visit were Mrs Wonu Folami (former Lagos State Attorney General), Mrs Sekinat Yusuf (former Lagos education commissioner), Maureen Iyasele, Dr M. Adefeso and Debola Williams among others. How bring back our girls campaign started To get our young people under policy issues I have to interact with them in a language they understand, so I am much into social media. In April, I tweeted on Monday morning, Monday was the 14th , on what could be done to contain the Boko Haram insurgency and by the evening over 500 suggestions had been tweeted. And so the next morning, people continued to tweet. It wasn’t until about 1 O’clock that I saw something on BBC saying over 100 girls were abducted from a school in Borno. And I thought this had to be a joke. So I then tweeted on that news and I said, ‘is anyone out there in Borno able to confirm whether this report I am picking up from BBC is accurate?’ And then people began to respond and said yes, they heard that some abduction happened. So I started tweeting and saying can the Federal Government, can the military, can our security confirm whether the girls have indeed been abducted in Borno state? There was no word. That was all of the 15th. The 16th I continued tweeting, it wasn’t until the 17th that we got a press release from the military. The press release said some number of girls were abducted, we have rescued some number of them and only about eight are missing. And I was like over the moon, I praised our military, I rejoiced and congratulated them. And then some of these young ones on twitter said ‘Aunty, what are you congratulating them for? It is not true.’ I said, ‘what do you mean it is not true? Have we become so down as a nation that you don’t even believe our institutions like the military?’ They said, ‘Aunty, which military? We don’t believe it is true. Aunty stop celebrating, they haven’t rescued anybody.’ I was so angry at the young ones. Part of why I am on twitter is this whole engagement on the matter of engaging in public policy, you must do it on the basis of verifiable evidence. I teach public policy through my twitter account and most of them follow it. I couldn’t commit to doing this in the classroom setting as I was asked. But my son said, ‘Mum, you can use your twitter account and you will teach more people than can come into the classroom. The three options to bring back Chibok girls, by Oby Ezekwesili on September 06, 2014 / in Interview 9:14 pm / Comments *‘Our struggle in the face of intimidation’ By Clifford Ndujihe, Dapo Akinrefon & Charles Kumolu Former Education Minister and leader of the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, visited the Lagos Head office of the Vanguard Newspapers, last week, with some members of her group in what can be described as a sustained move to rescue the over 219 Chibok school girls, who were abducted on April 14 by the Boko Haram insurgents. Ezekwesili, who cried for over five minutes during a chat with Vanguard senior editors, said she and her group would not stop the campaign until the girls were rescued. She dismissed as balderdash insinuations that joblessness is responsible for her campaign, and the campaign is politically-motivated and being funded by opponents of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Federal Government. With her during the visit were Mrs Wonu Folami (former Lagos State Attorney General), Mrs Sekinat Yusuf (former Lagos education commissioner), Maureen Iyasele, Dr M. Adefeso and Debola Williams among others. How bring back our girls campaign started To get our young people under policy issues I have to interact with them in a language they understand, so I am much into social media. In April, I tweeted on Monday morning, Monday was the 14th , on what could be done to contain the Boko Haram insurgency and by the evening over 500 suggestions had been tweeted. And so the next morning, people continued to tweet. It wasn’t until about 1 O’clock that I saw something on BBC saying over 100 girls were abducted from a school in Borno. And I thought this had to be a joke. So I then tweeted on that news and I said, ‘is anyone out there in Borno able to confirm whether this report I am picking up from BBC is accurate?’ And then people began to respond and said yes, they heard that some abduction happened. So I started tweeting and saying can the Federal Government, can the military, can our security confirm whether the girls have indeed been abducted in Borno state? There was no word. That was all of the 15th. The 16th I continued tweeting, it wasn’t until the 17th that we got a press release from the military. The press release said some number of girls were abducted, we have rescued some number of them and only about eight are missing. And I was like over the moon, I praised our military, I rejoiced and congratulated them. And then some of these young ones on twitter said ‘Aunty, what are you congratulating them for? It is not true.’ I said, ‘what do you mean it is not true? Have we become so down as a nation that you don’t even believe our institutions like the military?’ They said, ‘Aunty, which military? We don’t believe it is true. Aunty stop celebrating, they haven’t rescued anybody.’ I was so angry at the young ones. Part of why I am on twitter is this whole engagement on the matter of engaging in public policy, you must do it on the basis of verifiable evidence. I teach public policy through my twitter account and most of them follow it. I couldn’t commit to doing this in the classroom setting as I was asked. But my son said, ‘Mum, you can use your twitter account and you will teach more people than can come into the classroom.’ Oby during her visit to Vanguard Newspapers. Oby Ezekwesili with her team during the visit… So when these children were very cynical and unbelieving, very distressful of what they’ve heard, I picked on them and I said, ‘our social capital cannot be allowed to derogate so badly that you cannot believe one of the most important institutions. Don’t let your distrust get to this point.’ They said, ‘okay we hope you don’t get to regret this.’ It was like they were right. For the next two days, there was no word. By the19th there was word from the Defence headquarters and the word was basically we are wrong, we are sorry, this was a wrong information. It was so embarrassing. But guess what, to show you the spirit of the engagement on this matter, I immediately picked up on that and said, ‘all right, maybe we can come back to this later but I think everybody ought to support our military to go in full force to find our girls. They need to trace these girls and to bring them back, that is the most important thing right now.’ And I began to tweet encouragement to inspire to say we must just go after this people and get the girls back. Then after that, the embarrassment was a bit too much. No word again, everything was quiet. I continued to tweet on the matter. In fact, I established a new # tag and I called it ‘Where are our 85 daughters?’ I said we must stand in solidarity with these Chibok girls that have been missing for almost 10 days and there is no word on their rescue and that we must all stand. And they stood. I said to the whole world, ‘please join us in declaring bring back our girls and that is how bring back our girls went virile on social media. So, we agreed to do the march on April 30 and on that day, we were out at Unity Fountain, Abuja and people came. People just read about it and walked up to become part of it. That was the genesis of the bring back our girls. On that April 30, we had more women but a number of men also came and we marched to the National Assembly. By then, we had written the leadership of the National Assembly to say to them, ‘have you not heard that some girls are missing?’ Nobody was speaking from government and nobody had a clear cut of what we were up against. The National Assembly leadership was open to receiving us but when we marched and the crowd was much, they decided to come out and meet us. It was a day in Abuja that it rained cats and dogs and both ourselves and the leadership of the National Assembly led by Senator David Mark that came to meet us were soaked beyond measure. But people were motivated and said we will not let this pass again and so, they engaged and promised us that they were going to meet with the president that evening and that they were going to raise all the concerns that we brought to them. Afterwards, we all marched to the Unity Fountain and I said to the crowd that there were two options we had. Option one was to say that we have spoken with the leadership of the National Assembly, they have promised that they will go and talk to the president, we can all go home and see what will happen. Then, once we have information, we can send to all of you. The second option was we could come back tomorrow and basically identify other important points in our security apparatus and find out what exactly was going on. The people said, ‘we are coming back tomorrow until the girls come back.’ Basically, that was how those who came on April 30 came back and we began to identify key agencies that we could engage in. We wrote the Chief of Defence Staff, we had meetings with them. We wrote to the presidency in order to have a meeting with them but the presidency delegated it. That was the process and frankly speaking, the engagement of the citizens, for me, was amazing. One thing became our common bond, the Chibok girls and that was how we became a movement. Part of what I believe made everyone stick with the issue was that even though April 30 was nearly three weeks after the abduction, there was no ownership of that problem by our government. There was a complete lack of interest. There was no expression of concern. There was indifference, The next thing that was appalling was that the blame game was going on and that made the Citizens Group to say we are going to stay on this matter until action is taken. My summary is that that period of engagement, we considered to be our phase one engagement because that phase was to create awareness that these girls are missing. If people are not realising it, those girls are missing, parents were coming forward to say their children that they sent to school, were missing. So surely, the girls were missing. Secondly, if people have got that consciousness that these girls are missing, it was important that the entity that has the power and authority to do something about it, should be compelled to act in order to rescue the girls. That first phase enabled us achieve that awareness creation, both within and without our nation because the rest of the world bought into it. The second thing was the pressure for our government to engage, awaken our government to engage. Now the second phase is where precise action is being taken to ensure our ultimate objective, which is that 219 girls, as validated by the Presidential fact finding committee, to be missing from a secondary school in Chibok, to be rescued. What specific action has our government taken? Personal sacrifice As we are doing this, nobody is paid to do anything. We are simply expressing this sense that we cannot be a society that would move on when 219 human beings that could be saved are out there in the den of terrorists. The rest of the world wondered about us, many people could not believe that as Nigerians, we were just carrying on with 219 children held up in the den of terrorists.