On the 14th of April 2014, 276 school girls were abducted from their dormitories in a government girls secondary school in Chibok (a Christian community in the mostly Muslim North), Borno State by Boko Haram militants and were subsequently held hostage in Sambisa forest within the same state.
The Boko Haram insurgents, disguised as military personnel, entered the school premises, set fire to the dormitory building and neighbouring homes, and bundled the girls onto trucks. Some of the students escaped by jumping off the vehicles, but the majority were unable to escape and were held in Sambisa for several months, forced to perform hard labour with little food, pressured to convert to Islam, and made to choose between marrying one of their captors or essentially becoming slaves to them.
The Chibok abduction on the night of the 14th was not the first time Islamist militants had targeted schoolchildren, nor has it been the last. Months before, 29 boys were killed at a school in Yobe state. In 2018, Boko Haram kidnapped dozens of girls in Yobe, and in 2020, more than 300 boys were abducted from schools in Katsina state. The 2014 Chibok Girls abduction, however, is one of the largest-scale kidnappings to date, and the idea that an atrocity of this scale could be carried out right under the government’s nose sparked local and international outrage.
11 years after the Chibok abduction, about 90 girls are still missing, government interest has waned, mass abduction by militants is still widespread, insecurity continues to ravage Northern Nigeria, and the released/escaped girls have had difficulty re-integrating into their communities.
At the time of the abduction, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was the Nigerian President under the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and he has since been heavily criticised for his unhurried response and perceived apathy towards the incident, with publications such as the New York Times referring to his response as “shockingly slow and inept,” citing his failure to call a meeting of government officials until more than two weeks after the kidnapping. Former US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton was also unsparing in her response to the Nigerian government’s handling of the incident in its immediate aftermath; “The seizure of the young women…is abominable…the government of Nigeria has been, in my view, somewhat derelict in its responsibility toward protecting boys and girls, men and women in northern Nigeria …”
According to the previous Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, President Jonathan’s administration did nothing for all of 15 days after receiving the abduction reports and failed to contact the Governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, for 19 days. In addition to the Jonathan administration’s slow response, international aid offered by the UK, US, France, and China was swiftly rebuffed. The British Royal Armed Forces’ Operation Turus located the kidnapped girls within the first few weeks of the operation and offered to rescue them, but the Nigerian government declined. This refusal to accept international aid was done for several reasons; Jonathan’s administration believed the abduction was a matter of national security and, as such, should be kept in-house. His administration also believed political rivals staged the abduction.
All in all, no immediate action was taken, leading to the #BringBackOurGirls movement, which received massive global support – by May 7th, BBC World TV was reporting that the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag had been re-tweeted a million times and on the same day, a google search on the hashtag yielded 2.1 billion results. People all over the world were taking to the streets to protest the government’s lack of urgency in the matter. The sheer force of the movement eventually prompted a government response, and a year later, with a national election on the horizon, Jonathan’s administration finally started negotiations with the terrorists.
When President Muhammadu Buhari succeeded PresidentGoodluck Jonathan in 2015, his administration swiftly ordered an investigation into the abduction and its aftermath, pledged to re-organize the military with a focus on dealing with the Boko Haram insurgency and then carried out successful negotiations for the release of first 21 girls in 2016 and then 87 in 2017 in exchange for suspected Boko Haram members, accepting aid from the International Federation of Red Cross, the Switzerland government and international NGOs.
After securing these two releases, however, Buhari’s government became complacent and failed to follow through on promises to safeguard the welfare of the released girls after the fact. The President’s pledge to take care of the girls’ education, health, security, and welfare, which extended to their children, was not fully realised, and several girls still feel let down by the government.
Earlier, between 2016 and 2017, when public interest was high, the government pledged to fund the girls’ studies in “any field of their choice”, but many never received any funds. The girls were offered the American University of Nigeria, an elite private school, as their only choice of school to attend, and many have stated that they cannot afford to continue studying there. Allegedly, as of 2024, the government had paid over 350,000 dollars a year in fees for the girls over the last six years, a scheme former Minister of Women’s Affairs Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye vowed to put a stop to, as the money would be better spent on the girls’ upkeep.
Some of the girls have received financial aid from the government, but the amount, usually around 20,000 naira monthly, is barely enough for one person to survive on, not to mention the children that several girls delivered while in captivity and now have to take care of.
A decade later, the government’s reintegration of the girls into their communities has proven quite problematic. Borno State governor Babagana Umaru Zulum has provided accommodation for the released and escaped girls, but this accommodation allowed them to live with their husbands, their “rehabilitated” captors, whom they had to marry while in captivity. Parents of the girls are outraged, heartbroken, and have accused the governor of approving these “abominable” marriages as a way of appeasing the former militants.
The Chibok abduction saga featured several key figures, many of whom to this day feel the effects of the way the incident played out.
Goodluck Jonathan lost the 2015 presidential elections, an outcome directly linked to his administration’s handling of the 2014 abduction. Alongside the harsh criticism Jonathan faced while in office, Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) explicitly blamed Jonathan’s administration for the state of insecurity and economic crisis they inherited when they came into power. It must be noted, however, that Buhari’s administration did little to improve the situation they “inherited” – Nigeria experienced a rise in insecurity since 2015, according to data from the Nigeria Security Tracker (NST). At least 11,449 violent attacks are reported to have occurred between 2015 and 2022. Despite some progress in Nigeria’s ranking on the Global Terrorism Index—moving from the 4th most terrorism-impacted country in 2017 to the 6th in 2021 and the 8th in 2022—data suggests that while terrorist activities declined in the Northeast, insecurity spread to other parts of the country during Buhari’s tenure.
Kashim Shettima who was the governor of Borno state at the time of the incident has since been accused of undermining Jonathan’s efforts to combat Boko Haram activities in Borno, failing to act on an intelligence report and directive to close schools in remote parts of Borno State and relocate students to the more secure capital of Maiduguri to write their GCE examinations, ultimately creating an opening for the Chibok girls’ abduction is now Nigeria’s Vice President under the President Tinubu led administration.
The released and escaped girls themselves have found it exceedingly difficult to re-integrate into their communities, citing “heartbreaking” suspicion and stigma from community members, with rumors being spread about them, including the notion that they had a “killing mentality,” with their children being shunned as “Boko Haram children.” In the North-East, where Boko Haram’s presence is still very strong, the Chibok returnees face resentment over the publicity of their abduction and are branded “darling abductees.”
Meanwhile, the country is still faced with the lingering effects of the event.
The abduction has resulted in increased mass abductions of school children in the following years, with more than 1,600 students kidnapped and nearly 200 others killed since then. In 2020, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) collected approximately 6 reports of attacks on higher education facilities, students, and academics. In 2021, GCPEA identified approximately 14 reports of attacks on school students, teachers, and personnel, primarily in the country’s Northcentral and Northwestern regions. There has also been an increase in kidnapping for ransom, notwithstanding Nigeria’s ban on ransom payments in 2022.
Insecurity is still rife, and Boko Haram gunmen continue to attack the area surrounding Chibok, with the latest assault occurring late last year, even though there is heavy military presence in the town. Northern Nigeria and the Middle Belt region, especially Borno, Benue, and Plateau, continue to be ravaged by gunmen and insurgents, the latest of the attacks occurring over the past weekend. This overwhelming insecurity has led to an increase in out-of-school numbers in the North – as of 2021, over one million children were afraid to return to school, and in 2020, around 11,500 schools were closed due to attacks, according to Policy Weekly by Nextier.
Negotiations for the release of the girls remaining in captivity seem to have screeched to a halt despite the efforts of parents who continue to press for the abductees’ release.
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