Obiageli Ezekwesili, former Nigerian education minister and World Bank vice president has urged the world to do more to find the missing Chibok girls. She said she believed the girls were safe, despite Boko Haram’s videos claiming to have converted them to Islam and married them off.
“I always see hope. Hope is inexhaustible. The day we stop hoping, we all die,” Ezekwesili told delegates at the Women in the World Summit in the Indian capital, adding that there was no real evidence to suggest the girls would not return home.
“But beyond staying hopeful, what needs to happen is that the leaders of the world need to find their strength. I really do not understand how leaders of the world sat around and watched a renegade group become monsters terrorizing the world.”
Boko Haram six-year insurgency has caused thousands of deaths in Nigeria, seized 276 girls from secondary school dormitories in Chibok in April 2014. Some girls managed to escape but 219 are still missing, despite Ezekwesili’s #bringbackourgirls social media campaign which brought the issue to global attention.
Oby Ezekwesili, who also co-founded the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International, asked how the Nigerian government could spend so much on defence yet fail to stop Boko Haram’s aggression.
“What the national security advisor in my country has to explain is how come there is $6 billion annual investment in defence and security, yet we find ourselves in a situation where a bunch of savages has grown to monstrous proportions and terrorized, not just us, but the rest of the world,” she said.
The Global Terrorism Index said this week that Boko Haram had killed 6,644 people during 2014, more than any other militant group, and that Islamic State, based in Syria and Iraq, followed it, killing 6,073 people last year.
Ezekwesili said she was disappointed with the global response to the Nigerian kidnappings, adding that the recent attacks in Paris showed that terrorism had no borders and demanded every country’s attention.
“Our girls don’t just need my country to act, our girls need the entire world to feel traumatized so that any child anywhere in the world is not put into this kind of danger,” said Ezekwesili, who was on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015.
“These girls were attacked because they wanted education and now are we going to turn our backs on them? We lack the moral credentials to tell any girl child to go to school if we don’t do anything about our Chibok girls.”
