Obasanjo's bombshell! Says some Chibok girls may not return

OBJ

While bemoaning the continued detention of the Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram insurgents, former President Olusegun Obasanjo Thursday declared that some of them may never return.

 In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Hausa Service monitored by SHOWBIZPLUSng, Obasanjo said that perhaps succeeding generations would continue to remember those female students who were abducted by suspected Boko Haram members in April.
  He disclosed that only those girls who would later get pregnant and find it difficult to cater for the babies in the forest who might be released by the insurgents.
  Obasanjo said that he had ways of communicating with the suspected Boko Haram members but the government had not permitted him to do so.
  He noted that the girls might have been separated, and were not kept in the same location.

  He said: “I believe that some of them will never return. We will still be hearing about them many years from now. Some will give birth to children of the Boko Haram members, but if they cannot take care of them in the forest, they may release themselves.”
     A human rights activist, Mallam Sani, who spoke with The Guardian in an interview, explained that Obasanjo recently revived a plan for dialogue with the insurgents’ family members, but the government had not shown any interest.
   According to him, the anti-terrorist laws in the country forbid any individual or group delving into such matters unless the government gives a waiver for such an intervention.
   Meanwhile, students of Government Secondary Schools in Sumaila local government area of Kano on Wednesday night fled the school premises when gunmen invaded a divisional police station sharing a fence with the male boarding school.
   Sumaila is about 75 kilometres away from the Kano metropolis and few metres from Jos, Plateau State.
   An eyewitness told The Guardian that the gunmen attacked the police station around 8:00 p.m. This forced the students to scamper for safety in a nearby bush.
  A   source, who could not ascertain the level of casualty at press time noted that the police station was riddled with bullets.
   But the Kano State Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Magaji Musa Majiya has assured of security of the students at the boarding school in the community.
    In a statement by the PPRO, the police warned users of the school premises for social activities to discontinue them or face sanction.
   Besides, authorities of the police and Chibok Local Council in Borno State, have said that the alleged kidnapping of 30 Fulani women last Thursday at pastoral settlements near Chibok town, where over 200 schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram gunmen on April 14, 2014 could not be substantiated as claimed in some media reports.
     Speaking to journalists yesterday in Maiduguri on the reported abduction of Fulani women, the Borno State Police Commissioner, Tanko Lawal, said that the police could not  substantiate the claims of Fulani community that their wives and daughters had been kidnapped and been  taken away in pickup vans to undisclosed destinations in Sambisa Forest.
  Also, protesters over the abducted Chibok schoolgirls have been asked to direct their grievances to Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State or go to where the girls were kidnapped.
  Making this appeal in Lagos, the Bishop of El-Shaddai Bible Church, Joseph Olanrewaju Obembe, said that the most appropriate venue for all protesters to register their grief was Borno State, where the schoolgirls were kidnapped, not  in Lagos or anywhere else.
   In an interview with The Guardian on the abducted schoolgirls and general insecurity in the country, the former chairman of the Lagos State chapter of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) said if the protesters were genuine, they should ask for police protection.    
   “The abducted girls are not in Aso Villa or Abuja,” he stressed. “We must do things correctly and properly. Our protests should not be misdirected to assume that those abducted girls are in Aso Villa. 
   “The chief security officer of the state, who calls himself governor, constitutionally elected and yet not doing anything in a state where over 200 students were abducted, by now should have resigned.”
  Criticising Shettima for not doing anything tangible as chief security officer of the state, he cited that Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola of Lagos State could not sleep when doctors went on strike sometime ago because of his concern for the citizenry.
Guardian