- 1,778 released, 160 missing, 14 die in 38 seizures
- Danger looms as 21 freed girls return with 34 children from Boko Haram enclave
- Kidnapping becoming major criminal enterprise – Experts
Timothy Agbor,
Festus Okoromadu And Bright Jacob
A total of 1,952 students have been abducted by bandits in 38 operations in 17 states in Nigeria, 10 years after nearly 300 girls were kidnapped from a school in the North East Nigerian town of Chibok by terrorist group, Boko Haram.
Out of the figure, 1,778 kidnapped students have been released, 160 are still missing while 14 died in captivity.
According to figures released by BringBackOurGirls, a group of citizens advocating for speedy and effective search and rescue of all abducted girls and for a rapid containment and quelling of insurgency in Nigeria, 48 parents also died within the period.
Although the advocacy group said the numbers were approximate figures, it revealed that the 38 abductions took place in Abia, Borno, Cross River, Delta, Ekiti, Enugu, Kaduna, Katsina, Kebbi, Lagos, Nasarawa, Niger, Ogun, Plateau, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara States.
Below is the timeline of some of the schoolchildren abductions in Nigeria since 2014.
April 14, 2014 — Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok.
January 14, 2017 – Three students, three staff kidnapped from the Nigerian Turkish International College, in Ogun State.
May 26, 2017 — Igbonla Model College, Lagos.
February 19, 2018 — Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi.
December 11, 2020 — Government Science Secondary School, Kankara.
December 20, 2020 — Islamic School, Mahuta.
February 17, 2021 — Government Science College, Kagara.
February 26, 2021 — Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe.
March 12, 2021 — Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka.
April 21, 2021 — Greenfield University, Kaduna.
May 30, 2021 — Salihu Tanko Islamic School, Niger.
June 11, 2021 — Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic, Kaduna.
June 17, 2021 — Federal Government College, Birnin Kebbi.
January 20, 2023 — LGEA Primary School, Nasarawa
January 30, 2024 — Apostolic Faith School, Ekiti.
March 7, 2024 — Government Secondary School, Kuriga.
March 9, 2024 — Tsangaya School, Sokoto
“It was further gathered that the girls have given birth to numerous children in the Boko Haram enclave and that there were fears that they might grow up and take up the deadly mission of their fathers.”
BringBackOurGirls regretted that a third of the abducted Chibok girls were still being held and mass kidnappings have become a lucrative industry for criminal gangs across the country.
The Chibok girls were kidnapped on April 14, 2014.
Raiding a government girls’ secondary school that night, terrorists forced the teenage girls onto trucks and drove them away through bush paths to a 128,000-acre forest.
Of the 276 abducted girls, those who have regained freedom included 57 who jumped off the trucks and 128 others freed after negotiations with Boko Haram or found in neighbouring countries.
The most recent rescue happened last year with the return of five girls who were found with seven children they had given birth to during captivity.
Overall, 21 of the freed girls returned with 34 children, according to a report by Murtala Muhammed Foundation, a gender and policy advocacy non-profit in Lagos.
Stakeholders have expressed worry over the continuous cohabitation with insurgents, saying “Nigeria has failed the Chibok girls.”
Security experts also disclosed that the terrorists married most of the girls and gave out others to their interested allies.
It was further gathered that the girls have given birth to numerous children in the Boko Haram enclave and that there were fears that they might grow up and take up the deadly mission of their fathers.
Experts warned of the danger of allowing the demography of terrorists to increase, saying it would metamorphose into a large-scale disaster for the country.
A former Director of the Department of State Services, Akin Adeyi, lamented that the more children the abductees had in their captivity, the more challenges the nation would contend with in the area of security.
The expert pointed out that the government had not shown capacity to address lingering problems of insecurity, expressing worry that the more the government grew cold to tackling the menace, the more defiant the marauders would become.
While appealing to government and Service Chiefs to be up and doing in the area of crime detection and prevention, Adeyi advised police and other security agencies against preoccupying their minds with investigation after crimes; rather, they should be proactive by preventing tragic and criminal occurrences from happening.
He stressed the need for the government to ensure that victims of kidnappings were rescued and that the baby boom in abductors’ enclaves be checked and halted.
“These terrorists dare the government. There was a time a group of people threatened that they would kidnap former President Muhammadu Buhari. For a group to go to that extent, it means they have the number and weapons. And they did something that was close to that when his (Buhari) convoy was moving towards Katsina, shortly after their departure from Abuja; they were attacked. You know those people (terrorists) were illiterates, they might have thought Mr. President was in that convoy.
“So, 10 years is a very long time. And that goes to show that we don’t have a culture of prevention. We don’t have a culture of detection. Maybe our emphasis is too much on investigation. And that investigation, the dangerous thing is that we are abandoning that too. There are three principles to this: Detection, Prevention and Investigation. If you look at it, especially from the Police angle, the Police in Nigeria have abandoned two major parts of those three principles. They have abandoned detection and they have abandoned prevention. They have concentrated so much on investigation.
They wait in their offices for it to happen and then they will say they are investigating. It should be a shame to the Inspector General of Police, whoever was the Inspector General at the particular time and the Commissioner of Police,” Adeyi stated.
Another security expert, Amitolu Shittu, has argued that terrorists, bandits and other attackers have been capitalising on the “weakness of the government and security agencies.”
He expressed the fear that the growing children of the Chibok girls were a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
Shittu, a former Field Commander of Amotekun in Osun State, said, “It (Chibok girls saga) is an unfortunate incident that threw the country into a bad global record in the Guinness Book of Record and in the history of the world and in human existence. Therefore, the whole world condemned the abduction as barbaric. The then President underrated the capacity of marauders who took advantage of the weakness on the part of the government to unleash terror on innocent girls, took them away and eventually married them off to bandits.
“Many of them have been secretly reunited with their families but it was not made public. Some of them have given birth to more than four children.
They were tactically reunited with their families while some have died and buried in that forest. It was a very bad story. If we keep showcasing these entire bad occurrences to the world, we won’t be taken seriously.
“The abduction of the Chibok girls, I think about a hundred have been returned with their families. The number was so scary and people imagined how and where they kept the huge number of girls they captured, numbering over 400. Even if they survived the hardship, which hospital will treat them? During the pregnancy periods, who took care of them? The criminals have been giving our country a very bad image.
“The Dapchi girls were captured and recovered because of the negotiation that the government did.
“Ten years is a lot. It means those who were captured and impregnated almost immediately, some of their children would have been nine years old by now and that points to the fact that eight years to come, nobody knows what will happen.”
The National Secretary of the All Progressives Congress, Ajibola Basiru, said the Chibok girls might have been indoctrinated by the Boko Haram insurgents and would not want to be rescued.
Basiru, a former spokesperson of the Nigerian Senate, suggested the use of technology for the tackling of insecurity in the country.
When asked about the strategy the government could deploy in rescuing the kidnapped girls, Basiru, a lawyer, said, “You talk about the strategy that is being done in terms of getting Chibok girls rescued, you see, there are a lot of dimensions to it. People have been taken away for 10 years; you don’t know what can happen.
“I read a book about indoctrination of captives by terrorists, some of these people that you said are captured even if you say they want to come back, they might have been indoctrinated and not want to come back. They will see you as the devil (if you want them to be rescued). So, that is a very complicated matter but what we need to do is that we believe that we should decentralize security, we need to use technology to address our security and with the improved National Identification Number programme that is being done by the NIMC, I believe we will be able to tackle the problem of insecurity.”
Security experts also argued that with the increasing value of ransom being demanded by kidnappers, it is very obvious that kidnapping is now a very lucrative enterprise in the country.
From N5 million demanded by a militant group to release an oil worker in Nigeria’s Delta in 2015, to N10 billion (around $50 million then) demanded by Boko Haram to release some of the 276 captured Chibok girls, and now to N100 million for each victim of the 10 people kidnapped from their homes inside an estate in Abuja recently, kidnapping is, unfortunately, truly enterprising as most of the ransom money is being paid even by the government that either keeps mum or denies such.
All these are pointers to the fact that kidnapping has become a major criminal enterprise in the country as Nigeria was rated No.2 among the top 10 countries with the highest reported incidents of kidnapping by the ‘Top Teny,’ blog, with over 1,800 persons abducted annually, after Iraq, and followed by Pakistan, India and Venezuela.
As well, ReliefWeb estimates that more than 1,680 schoolchildren have been kidnapped since the abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, in 2014; over 821 students were abducted in 2021 alone, while SBM Intelligence calculated that kidnappers collected about N653.7 million in ransom between July 2021 and June 2022 in more than 500 recorded kidnap incidents, with 3,420 persons taken, and 564 killed.
A retired security officer, Bem Hembafan, decried that efforts made so far to tame the ugly trend seemed to have yielded less result, noting that more Nigerians were taking to kidnapping and collecting ransom in millions without being challenged.
Recalling the recent Abuja estate kidnapping incident, the retired security officer, who runs private security for estates in Abuja and in Nasarawa State, blamed the recurring kidnapping on the loopholes and lack of coordination in the nation’s security architecture.
“The assailants only succeeded because there was a compromise somewhere by an insider that resulted in a security breach,” he said, while querying the impact of the many security checkpoints within the capital territory.
According to him, some domestic staff members, who are poorly paid, family members who are neglected, close friends, colleagues and neighbours are easy picks for kidnappers because of a handsome per cent of the ransom promised to them.
Also x-raying the situation, a security expert, Col. Hassan Stan-Labo (retd), said that the present administration had yet to show the political will to tackle insecurity in the country, noting that the current situation was just like the Buhari era.
In his view, a security analyst with SBM Intelligence, Emeka Okoro, said that it would require a multifaceted approach to address insecurity in the country.
According to him, the country needs improved security infrastructure, effective governance, social cohesion, economic development, and peace-building efforts to truly fight insecurity.
A Nigerian in the Diaspora, Darlington Amokeh, also blamed the spate of kidnapping to wrong approach to the fight against insecurity.
The Houston-based medical doctor noted that the United States of America was succeeding in its security to an appreciable level by adopting the right approach and right personnel to any challenge.
“I know that active shooting is a problem here in the US, but the law is dealing with the perpetrators, many are gunned down while shooting and most are in jail.
“The American government is not relenting and Nigeria should also not relent and allow the kidnappers to have a field day, snatching human beings, and collecting huge ransoms.
“Security experts also argued that with the increasing value of ransom being demanded by kidnappers, it is very obvious that kidnapping is now a very lucrative enterprise in the country.”
“There has to be legislation on it and the law should be enforced without fear or favour as it is here,” he noted.
“In the US, the FBI, CIA, and other civil security agencies are the first point of contact. But in Nigeria, you often see soldiers leaving their barracks to settle any issue, even domestic ones that the Police can handle. I think that the government can retrain some of its security agencies in special combats like the US does. These are specially trained to handle specific security challenges and they deliver results. Nigeria can do the same,” Amokeh advised.
He also noted that naming and shaming alleged sponsors of kidnappers was a bad approach in the fight as they still walked the streets freely and even gave out money to the poor and vulnerable.
“You don’t just name and shame. Those alleged to be sponsors of any kind of terrorism are prosecuted over here, if found guilty, their assets are seized, accounts frozen, they are jailed and some killed in an organised way. The government should not be afraid to confront them,” he said.
Another Nigerian in Diaspora, Sam Onikoyi, is of the opinion that Nigeria needs to take good care of the security agencies and recruit more to ensure their commitment and better result in the fight against insecurity.
According to him, Nigeria is grossly under-policed when considering the United Nations recommended Police to People ratio of 1:400, with Nigeria having about 371,000 policemen for its over 200 million people.
“That ratio is grossly inadequate for a country of that population size and that is part of the reasons the Police and other security agencies are easily overwhelmed. One of my relations once had a security issue in Port Harcourt and the Police did not go beyond filling the report. That is not encouraging and it is also part of the reason many of such cases are not reported, including kidnapping and ransom paid,” he said.
To curb the menace, Onikoyi is of the opinion that the government is bigger than anybody and should not pay ransom even secretly, but deal with the kidnappers as terrorists they are.
He also suggested that the lawmakers should make kidnapping a crime by enacting strong legislation against it, requiring life imprisonment or death sentence at worst.
