Protests In Nigeria Are Gathering Pace Over The Abduction Of Hundreds Of Schoolgirls

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, carrying posters with slogans reading reading slogans such as ‘Please find our daughters’, ‘Can anyone hear me’ and ‘Rescue our Chibok girls’ to protest against the government’s seeming reluctance to save the 200-plus schoolgirls who were kidnapped by terrorists. Though a fortnight has passed since the girls were taken out of their school in Chibok at gunpoint, rounded up onto buses and driven off into the Sambisa forest in the north-east of the country by a group believed to be affiliated with Boko Haram, a terrorist cell, they are still yet to be found. And government efforts to help families locate their daughters have been minimal.

The authorities have been so slack to find out what’s happened to the girls – presumably because they are in a very volatile part of the country that is ruled by the unruly Boko Haram – that parents have ventured into the forest themselves to try and rescue them. ‘We were more than two, three days in the bush, looking for our daughters,’ one father, whose 18-year-old daughter is still missing, told The New York Times. ‘But we were told, “If you enter this area, they will bomb you, they will kill you."'

The protests come as reports emerge that the girls, aged between 16 and 18, might have been sold as brides to members of Boko Haram – who are responsible for over 1,500 deaths this year alone – for as little as $12 (£7.11) each. ‘We have heard from members of the forest community where they took the girls,’ Samson Dewah, a parent of one of the missing girls, told The Guardian. ‘They said there had been mass marriages and the girls are being shared out as wives among the Boko Haram militants.’

This has yet to be officially confirmed but, in fact, things are so hazy that the numbers are being constantly disputed. Yesterday we reported, following The Times and The Guardian, that 234 were missing, while the BBCis saying 187. But The New* York Times* puts the figure at 275. The fact there’s been no official recording of the girls missing just goes to show what a mess the situation is.

Boko Haram, who are allegedly using weapons taken from Gaddafi's Libyan compound in 2011, want to have their own state where they can enforce Sharia law. Their name literally means ‘Western education is evil’ and by this, they mean the education of women. It is believed that they kidnapped the Christian girls to punish them for having a right to education.

The Debrief earlier reported that Malala Yousafzai, a women’s and girls' education rights campaigner, recently called for the Nigerian government to do something about the missing girls, saying, ‘I want to make a request to the government of Nigeria that they should take it [the education of girls] seriously, that they should take action, because in the end we will lose a whole generation.’

With pressure building, let's hope the Nigerian government will step up.

Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson

Picture: PA

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.