FG expresses doubt over it

By Emma Emeozor

EXACTLY two years af­ter the abduction of female students of Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, a new video has rekindled hope that the girls may be alive.

This is coming at a time when Chibok parents have been relieving their fears and agony since April 14, 2014 when Boko Haram militants abducted 279 schoolgirls, some of who escaped, leav­ing the number of the hos­tages at 219.

In a video unveiled by CNN and believed to have been made last December as part of negotiations between the Federal Government and Boko Haram,15 of the ab­ducted schoolgirls were in­terviewed.

Although the two minutes clip did not show the man interviewing the girls, the faces of some of the girls were seen. The girls, their hair covered and wearing long, flowing robes, lined up against a dirty yellow wall. They showed no obvious signs of maltreatment.

One of the girls identified herself as Naomi Zakaria, a student of Government Sec­ondary School. She identi­fied herself, while answer­ing questions: “What’s your name? Was that your name at school? Where were you taken from?”

In the video, one by one, each girl calmly stated her name and explained that she was taken from Chibok Gov­ernment Secondary School. As the two-minute clip comes to an end, one of the girls, Naomi Zakaria, makes a final, apparently scripted appeal to whoever is watch­ing, urging the Nigerian au­thorities to help reunite the girls with their families.

“I am speaking on 25 De­cember 2015, on behalf of the all the Chibok girls and we are all well,” she said, stressing the word “all.” Her intonation seems to im­ply that the 15 teens seen in the video have been chosen to represent the group as a whole. “Only the occasional hesitation betrays a flicker of fear and emotion,” CNN reported. The date given by Naomi matches informa­tion embedded in the video, suggesting it was filmed on Christmas Day, though whether that’s true or wheth­er the day was picked delib­erately is unknown.

Some of the parents invit­ed by CNN to see the video could not hold back tears. One of mothers, Rifkatu Ayuba, who caught sight of her now 17-year-old daugh­ter, could not hold back her grief and emotion as she screamed: “My Saratu!”

As she wailed, she moved closer, staring at a laptop screen, the closest she’s been to her child in two years. She was desperate to comfort her little girl, but helpless.

Rifkatu’s daughter, Saratu Ayuba, is one of 15 girls seen in the recording shown to some of the families for the first time at an emotional meeting this week. Wearing a purple abaya, with a pat­terned brown scarf covering her hair, Saratu stares direct­ly into the camera.

Rifkatu would later ex­claim: “I felt like remov­ing her from the screen. If I could, I would have removed her from the screen.”

Reacting, the Federal Government said it has a copy of the video. Minister of Information, Lai Moham­med, explained that it is in negotiations with those who supplied it to secure the girls’ release. He was, however, quick to add that it remains unable to confirm or reject the recording’s authenticity.

Mohammed said there were concerns that the girls did not appear to have changed sufficiently, that they are not as different as one might expect, given the two years that have elapsed since their disappearance.

But even as the Fed­eral Government expresses doubts over the authenticity of the video, a classmate of the girls seen in the footage has confirmed the identity of several of her friends.

The classmate, whose identity was not reveal for her safety, was supposed to be at the school that Sunday night (when the militants struck) to sit exams along with the other girls, but made a last minute decision to go home, from where she could hear the school being at­tacked. She spoke with CNN.

“We ran into the bush and stayed there for a month,” she said. Watching the video, she becomes emotional, ex­claiming: “Oh my God!.” as she recognises a close friend, points out another who was in the same hostel as her, and identifies one of the school’s prefects, a leader in her class.

While she considers her­self one of the “lucky ones,” the teenager said she still has nightmares about the experi­ence. “If I hear something on the news about them, it makes me have bad dreams and I cry,” she confides.