By Com Jasper Azuatalam
I have been thinking and
pondering over this incident, can there be anything worse than it? I honestly
do not believe so. This is a multidimensional tragedy and I have taken the time
to consider some of the dimensions. The assault, the insult, the pain, the
agony, the dehumanization, the abuse, and the desecration of a nation’s sovereignty.
Where do
I start from? I am wondering the kind of pain and agony the parents and
families of these girls are going through. This must be far more than losing a
loved one to death. One can endure the death of a young teenager more than the
abduction of a young teenager by no less a person than the dreaded Boko Haram
sect. No matter who you lose to death, you are bound to recover in time knowing
and seeing that the person is gone and cannot come back, but this issue of
abduction is an everyday death.
In fact,
to the parents/relations of these girls, their daughters/wards die every day
and they are in a state of one who loses a daughter/ward every day, the more
they try to recover, the more they lose again and again. Every day, they wake
up to discover that they have lost a girl. There can hardly be any way to
console someone in this state. Each parent is bereaved every day.
The over
240 girls abducted is equivalent to the loss of 240 girls multiplied by the
number of days the girls have been in abduction. If they were dead, by now, the
parents would have mourned them like we have mourned the thousands killed by
Boko Haram lately. The parents and relations of the victims of the Nyanya bomb
blast can probably eat food now and go to work, but the parents of these
abducted girls would never have an appetite for food or the will to go to work.
How
about the assault and abuse these girls go through every day? Let us not pretend
as if we don't know what Boko Haram abducted these girls for. We all know they
did to have sex tools, cooks and servants. Now Boko Haram has hired maids for
themselves and these are young and innocent girls.
How about
the trauma? Only trained military personnel can be in war camps because of the
harsh conditions; but today, teenage girls are in war camps as slaves, sex
tools and servants. One is left to wonder whether these girls are being fed,
after being stressed, used and exhausted. Even if these girls are given food,
would they have the appetite to eat? Can they ever sleep in Boko Haram camp?
What
about the abuse and contempt to the sovereignty of Nigeria? Terrorists in a
broad day light, under a state of emergency abducted over 240 SS3 students
without a single resistant and took them to a camp that everyone knows, Sambisa
forest. Where is our pride as a nation? Where is our dignity and where is our strength?
Our sovereignty has been desecrated.
These girls must be rescued dead or alive. If we have to mourn them, let us mourn them with pride and not with shame. Boko Haram has declared war against Nigeria and we cannot continue to pretend we are not in war. We most brace up to this war and fight it with everything we have as a nation.
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