Yauri.
Remember the name. The town located in Kebbi State remains sleepy in spite of the presence of a
Federal Government College. But since June 17,2021,the town has lost all sleep with the date going
down as the day the whistle blew to begin a nightmare.
Different dates represent different dreams for different Nigerians with some of those dreams being
nightmares. For the girls who became known the world over as Chibok girls, it was April 14,2014.
For the 59 students brutally roused in the dead of night and rustled to their death at the Federal
Government College Buni Yadi, Yobe State,the date is February 24,2014.
For Fr. Isaac Achi who slept inside his rectory but awoke inside a furnace fired up seven times, the date
is January 15,2023.
For Yauri, June 17,2021 remains etched into its memory. On that day which had started like any other
day, bandits invaded and abducted 80 students from the Federal Government College.
In spite of piecemeal rescues and releases of the victims, as the invisible clock which ominously ticks
towards Nigeria’s doom inevitably closes on the second of the pair of 365 days,11 of the girls remain
captive.
Many of them are said to have become teenage mothers with others newly pregnant to confirm the
horrific theories of sexual slavery that are so popular with the terrorists tormenting Nigeria.
The anguished parents of the girls who have heard only mostly silence from the Nigerian authorities
recently cried out to Nigerians to help them raise 100 million naira so that the demands of the terrorists
could be met and the girls released to them.
It is no rocket science to tell that these anguished parents would be receiving back if ever not the
daughters they knew and loved but shadows, unrecognizably stretched by the specters that stalk
Northern Nigeria. Were familial bonds not so strong, the parents would have as well given up the girls
many of whom have now become inseparably joined to their captors by the new life they carry within
them or have brought forward already.
What more ignominy can a country suffer at the hands of vicious criminals? What more humiliation,
what more indignity does the ‘Giant of Africa’ need to suffer before it rouses itself to confront and
confound its mortal enemies? What more does Nigeria need to see before it challenges and changes the
pattern which is undeniably clear?
Nigeria is a signatory to the Safe School Declaration, but in the last four years, where in Nigeria has
been more unsafe than schools?
The kids ripped off Bethel Baptist Secondary School Chikun in Kaduna State spent months in
captivity.To secure their freedom, the Baptist Convention spent about 250 million naira.
The children from Tegina in Niger State who spent eighty-nine days in captivity were snatched from their
school.
Nigeria is a country where public officers send their children to the safety and tranquility of foreign
schools with public funds while the children of the great unwashed are left to languish in dilapidated
Nigerian schools where they are easy pickings for dysfunction and predators.
Nigeria is a country where criminals who thumb their noses at the redoubtable power of education and
have never known the intoxicating freedom that wells between the four walls of a classroom stampede
their way into schools, slaughter students and abduct others for ransom and sexual slavery.
Nigeria is a country where mad men hold citizens in alternate spaces carved within the country and dare
the government to open its toothless mouth.
For a country so far gone down this route, what way to redemption? What way to restoration? What
way to recovery?
For the long-suffering parents of the girls abducted from Yauri,it has been many long days and nights
without the warmth of their children’s words and weight.For all of them,it has been an unimaginable
fate that fascinates only their tormentors and collaborators.
It speaks to the stark unseriousness of a country that should be doing everything to uphold the rights of
its children, especially its girls, that close to two years have now passed and the girls remain with their
captors some of whom have now become their husbands.
The forced unions in many ways project the horrifying picture that paints a thousand words about
Nigeria at the moment: of disgruntled sections of the country forcibly joined together in a failed
marriage of convenience, and of a country horribly wed to a mountain of varied but vicious
challenges,with the weed of discontent sprouting all over it.
The 2023 general election is at the doorstep of Nigerians these days but will Nigerians pounce like
wounded wolves to seize the day and sculpt the next four years into the shape that best suits them?
Given how staggeringly leadership has failed in Nigeria in the last eight years, have Nigerians learnt
enough brutal lessons to leave their oppressors and tormentors with a few lesions of their own this time
around It is hoped that Nigerians are ready.
The same hope springs eternal for the Yauri girls,the Chibok girls and all those who have tasted captivity
and remain in captivity even now, within their own country. No matter how long the night lasts, dawn
will break. No matter how long their captivity lasts, justice will terminate its journey. No matter how
long and how tight their chains last, rust will find them.
Kene Obiezu,
Twitter:@kenobiezu
