By Oby Ezekwesili
On
April 30, 2014 when diverse citizens gathered to march in solidarity,
no one could have imagined that any out of our 219 Chibok Girls abducted
from their secondary school in April 2014 would remain in captivity of
terrorists 1000 days after the tragedy.
One
recalls pictures of distressed parents supported by local hunters
foraging through the path they were told that the terrorists had hauled
away their daughters. Meanwhile, their government was missing in action
cynically indifferent to the cries for help.
One
of the parents said he was desperate to find his daughter by walking
off into Sambisa Forest before the Nigeria Army prevented them, because
the future of the entire family depended on that daughter finishing
school and taking care of her siblings.
How
can we not be moved by such decisiveness on girls education in a
region that topped both then and now, the chart of poor school
enrollment and worse parity ratio of four boys for every one girl in
school compared to the rest of the country?
Nations
that have bothered to know the value of having all their girls in
school have since discovered the multiple and diverse benefits. More
than ever before in history, the economic health of a country depends
upon the skills, knowledge, and capacities of its people. Research
validates that countries which have made dynamic progress in the last
century, are also the ones that help each of their citizens - male and
female- to acquire the human assets of values, skills, knowledge and
capacities that education bestows.
In
addition to the obvious productivity and income earning benefit to
the girl-child and their families, some of the data that validate a
diverse range of benefits have global relevance. According to UNESCO,
the "Children of mothers with secondary education or higher are twice as
likely to survive beyond age 5 compared to those whose mothers have no
education. Improvements in women’s education explained half of the
reduction in child deaths between 1990 and 2009. A child born to a
mother who can read is 50% more likely to survive past age 5".
We
are products of the values that shaped us. A Value that some of us
imbibed while growing up is that nothing makes a female child inferior
and so nothing should keep them from being educated. Those of our
parents that held strong to such value bequeathed them to us by sending
us to school despite our being female. Like the parents of the 219
ChibokGirls, our parents overcame all barriers that are known to limit
educational opportunities available to girls around the world or even
more specifically, our various regions in Nigeria.
For
the forward thinking parents of the abducted girls, they desired that
their daughters would not be part of the statistics of out-of-school
adolescent girls. A recent report on Girls Education in Nigeria by the
United Kingdom's British Council found that in the North East, 54% of
adolescent girls are out of school.
In
the North West, it is 53%, in the North Central, it is 21%, in the South
South it is 9%, in the South West 6% and in the south-east, it is 4%.
The ChibokGirls parents understood that at an individual and family
level, the benefits of offering education to their daughters outweighed
the associated social, cultural, religious, physical risks and economic
constraints.
What they did not imagine
as part of that calculus was that the physical risk to life for those
who dared to show up in their Chibok school has risen substantially to
certainty. Boko Haram terrorists are driven by the hideous determination
to make knowledge abominable thus challenging our civilization.
None
of our ChibokGirls parents could however have imagined that neither
their own government nor those of the rest of the world would defend the
dignity of endangered lives of their children if anything like
abduction happened. None of those parents could have imagined that the
lives of their daughters would not be protected by the Nigerian
nation-state which has a constitutional duty of providing for the
security and welfare of citizens- especially its young ones.
None
of those parents could have thought that having their daughters show up
from their various schools in that local government to take their
certificate examination with peers in that Government Secondary School
Chibok, would become a fatal choice between being educated or staying
alive.
Doubly tragic is that as we mark
#DAY1000 since the worst nightmare of those Chibok Parents materialized,
two successive governments have completely failed to be as bold as the
parents of our missing ChibokGirls. From the initial self-preserving
coldness, indifference, mockery and tentativeness of the immediate past
administration to the "cannot-be-taken-for-their-word" hubris,
lethargy and inertia of the current one, any discerning observer can see
a common thread. It is the same we-don’t-give-a-damn attitude that is
making their successors who assumed office on the back of a strong
promise to commit their utmost to rescuing the girls within six
months in office; to repeat history.
What
is the cause of this empathy-deficit toward citizens by those that
govern, regardless of their political symbol and hue? The disconcerting
answer is that among our political class, citizens - whether dead or
alive - have no bearing on the incentives that drive the quest for the
right to govern them.
Unlike those
countries where leaders set their country Development vision on their
citizens' values, knowledge, skills and capacities, our own "rulers"
place their stewardship quest not on the lives of citizens but on the
certainty that oil will flow. Oil will flow and the public purse will
flourish whether a citizen dies or is missing.
The
logic is simple: As long as the proceeds from oil are guaranteed, the
nation can afford to leave its children with terrorists for any length
of time. For as long as oil flows and with that, the proceeds, the
cutting short of any Nigerian life has no effect on the country. It
therefore has not mattered as much to any of the two successive
Governments of Nigeria that losing our ChibokGirls is a loss to our
national stock of human capital. That our Governments prolonged the time
it is taking to give justice to children who were abducted in the
course of their search for knowledge is a statement on the things we
value.
Should any think this assertion
to be farfetched, all they need do, is, compare the swiftness with
which our governments -regardless of which political crew run it-
responds to any threat to the flow of oil in the Niger Delta. For our
governments, the cynicism towards citizens- who with a certain measure
of education are converted to human capital- is that they are of less
value than a barrel of oil.
This is
where the parents of our ChibokGirls have more than a lot to teach our
political leaders. These parents may not have any "political clout" -
part of the reason that many adduce for the way their daughters have
been neglected by our government-- but they know something that our
political rulers are yet to grasp: No commodity but our human beings
like Chibok Girls, other abducted citizens, hundreds of Nigerians
needlessly killed in distressed conditions in the North East, Mainland
and South Kaduna, Agatu, Aba, Enugu, Onitsha, Jos, Keffi, Abuja, Lagos
and such other places, can guarantee us the swift passage to economic
development.
The slight redeeming
prospect of the President Muhammadu Buhari led government as far as the
specific matter of ChibokGirls rescue goes, is that in the last three
months, it has managed to bring back 24 of them mostly through
negotiation with their terrorist abductors. For our freed school girls
and their peers in all the internally dislocated peoples' camps in the
North East, it is the duty of the Government's - Federal and State- to
place a premium on their education and skills acquisition to ensure that
Nigeria speeds up the accumulation of our human development scores. The
education of the girl-child benefits not only the girls and their
families but their communities, states and nations.
Following
its inauguration in May 2015, the administration was trapped in more
than 15 months of numbing indecisiveness on how to rescue our
ChibokGirls, whether through military option or by negotiation with the
terrorists. Twenty one of them were eventually released on 13 October
2016 to our Government by the terrorists and embraced by their
exuberantly joyous parents. Just a few days ago, another one of the
girls returned, having been accidentally found among terrorists and
their victims that the Nigerian Army captured. She returned after 997
days in the stronghold of terrorists clutching an innocent baby, rather
than the certificate her parents hoped for when they took a risk to
send her to school.
The tragic irony is
that one of the reasons parents send their girl-children to school is to
help delay marriage and child bearing while they acquire life skills
for a better life. Rukiya Abubarka Gali's parents while rejoicing at the
return of their daughter yesterday, must be regretfully wondering like
not a few other parents, whether it was worth it after all, to have made
the choice for knowledge for their daughter.
That
DAY1000 is upon us with still more than 80% of our Chibok Girls still
captives of terrorists, the only person that can assuage their deep
regret is the President and the Federal Government of Nigeria. The way
it can do this is to ensure that not one more day goes beyond the one
thousand days of suffering of our young daughters. This Federal
Government must realize that the more it makes promises and fails to
immediately back them with decisiveness and results-focused actions, it
risks completely eroding its fast depleting stock of credibility and
goodwill.
The inability and perhaps
unwillingness to learn from mistakes is reason this Federal Government
has again relapsed into inertia, lethargy, contradictions and silence on
the status of its public pledge last October that another 83 of our
girls would be back "soonest". Our ChibokGirls have always been a symbol
of several other victims without identity that are captives of our
common enemies or those whose lives were wasted needlessly across
the country. Now is the time for our President to find the courage to
accord the highest value to the Nigerian life regardless of their
region, religion, ideology, political persuasion, social and economic
status above any other thing in this country.
We
must not allow more deaths over and above 18 of the brave mothers and
fathers who sent their girls to school. The hope of those deceased
parents and the ones alive was that their girls would go on to become
part of our more enduring capital. They did so, trusting that their
Government cares about the dignity of life. It is time for the remaining
195 daughters of these courageous parents who voted for girl-child
education to return. 1000 days are already too long. Mr President, we
want more results! It is time to bring back home our girls now. And
alive!!
No comments:
Post a Comment