Nigeria’s government was accused of provoking the terror group Boko Haram into carrying out a mass abduction of schoolgirls by claiming falsely that it had defeated the group.
Dozens of girls from a boarding school in the northern town of Dapchi are still missing after a raid by Boko Haram on Monday, which had echoes of the group’s notorious Chibok kidnapping in 2014.
Monday’s attack was the latest in a two-month upsurge in Boko Haram violence that followed a victorious Christmas Eve address by Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari. He claimed that the group had been crushed in their "last enclave" in northern Nigeria’s vast Sambisa forest.
Yesterday, as relatives of the missing Dapchi schoolgirls awaited news of their daughters, a former intermediary to Boko Haram said the kidnapping appeared to be a calculated challenge to the government’s claims.
"Every time the government declares victory, people feel afraid because they know Boko Haram will launch more kidnaps to show that they haven’t been defeated.," said Shehu Sani, a Nigerian MP and former human rights campaigner, in an interview with The Telegraph. "It just provokes them."
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Mr Sani also cast doubt on claims by the Nigerian authorities that there had in fact been no organised kidnapping attempt in Dapchi.
Officials had initally claimed that the girls had just fled into nearby villages when the gunmen arrived. Police then said that 111 of the 926 were missing, although overnight on Wednesday they claimed to have rescued an unspecified number who had been driven away by the gunmen.
A senior military source in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, told the AFP news agency that the girls from Dapchi were "found… on the border between Yobe and Borno".
"The girls were abandoned with their vehicle. It had broken down and the terrorists panicked because they were under siege by pursuing soldiers," he added.
"The fear is that some of the other girls may have been taken along by the terrorists because the girls were not in a single vehicle. Only those in the broken down vehicle were lucky."
Separately, the Reuters news agency quoted a government official as saying that the Nigerian military had rescued 76 schoolgirls and recovered the bodies of two that were killed, leaving 13 missing. However, the local government of Yobe state said 50 remained unaccounted for.
AFP
With little reliable official information, many relatives continued to fear the worst. Inuwa Mohammed, whose 16-year-old daughter, Falmata, was missing, said: "We don’t know how many of our girls have been found and no parent is sure that his daughter is among them."
Monday’s attack drew comparisons with the 2014 mass kidnapping of more than 200 girls from a similar school in Chibok, in neighbouring Borno state. That brought Boko Haram to world notoriety and cast a harsh light on the Nigerian’s government’s ability to govern the north.
Although the military made impressive gains against the group in the intervening years – chasing it out of the "caliphate" it had declared over much of Borno state – it has never been able to stop it mounting deadly hit-and-run attacks.
Jonathan Dunbar, a senior Africa analyst with Sybilline, a London-based risk consultancy, said: "The problem is that while Boko Haram have lost almost all of the territory formerly under their control, the army has proved unable to provide sustainable security over such a large area, given its limited resources.”
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