PRESIDENT Buhari Buhari has said he tries to limit his meetings with the families of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls for his own “emotional balance.”
He disclosed this yesterday during an inter- view with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
He said he has met twice with the families but said “I try to imagine my 14-year-old daughter missing for one to two years… a lot of parents would rather see them in their graves than the condition they are in now.”
“It’s tragic,” he added. On a video exclusively obtained by CNN last month that showed some of the missing schoolgirls alive, he said he had not seen the clip and insisted that he would not have shown it to the families even if he had seen it.
“How can we show it to them when we don’t know where they are?” he asked. “If we know where they are then we can organize to secure them. If they are divided into 5, 10 groups all over the region, there’s no way we can spontaneously and simultaneously attack all those locations. The important thing is to get them alive,” he said.
CNN reported last month that Boko Haram had made ransom demands for their release.
However, the president said that his administration is still trying to establish bonafide Boko Haram leadership before entering into talks with them. “When we identify it, we are prepared to talk to them. We can’t just talk to whoever gets a video clip,” he said.
Buhari told Amanpour that billions of dollars designated to fight Boko Haram, were shared among officials who gathered “as if they were going to have lunch and dinner and put the money into their accounts.”
Buhari also defended British Prime Minister David Cameron’s com- ments, caught on video this week, about Nigeria being “fantastically corrupt.”
Buhari insisted that Cameron had nothing to apologize for, as he was merely talking about what he knows.
“I think he’s being honest about it…” he told Amanpour. “I don’t think you can fault him.” Speaking at an anti-corruption conference on Wednesday, Buhari said: “I am not demanding an apology from anybody, I am demanding a return of assets.”
During a conversation with the Queen that was captured on camera on Tuesday, Cameron declared Nigeria and Afghanistan “possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world.”
The comment came as world leaders gathered in London for an anti-corruption summit, which has been largely overshadowed by Cameron’s gaffe.