Two years ago today, dozens of armed men stormed Government Girls’ Science and Technical College,Dapchi in Yobe State and carried off over a hundred students, mostly girls aged between 11 and 19.
A month later, on March 21, 2018, before the outrage and the conspiracy theorists machinery have been fully cranked up, Boko Haram drove into Dapchi again. They camped for some time, released 101 abductees, including the lone boy among them, gathered the town’s people and preached to them, stopped before a police station to change a punctured tyre and drove out of town while receiving obeisance from the baffled residence of the town.
It was one of the most absurd abductions since the Boko Haram insurgency began and raised many questions that have remained unanswered till date. One student from Dapchi, Leah Sharibu, the only Christian in the group, was not among the returned students. Recently, news broke that she had delivered a child for a Boko Haram commander who took her as a “wife.”
Exactly what role did the government of Nigeria play in the release of the Dapchi girls? How did Boko Haram waltz into town on February 19, 2018, just after soldiers had sneaked out of town to carry out this operation? How, despite the increased military presence after the abductions, did Boko Haram moonwalk back into town to return the girls in a convoy of at least nine vehicles? Exactly how many girls were taken? Is it 110 as the government claimed? Or 105, as the parents’ forum claimed? And did five of the abductees die from suffocation during the abduction? Why is no one mourning those?
What has emerged over the years is that this abduction has had huge ramifications on the lives of the students, especially Leah, who remains in captivity till date, their parents, the Nigerian government and Boko Haram itself.
What most people are unaware of is that the fate of the Dapchi girls, taken by the Maman Nur faction of Boko Haram, otherwise known as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), was not decided by the Nigerian government or by Boko Haram. It was decided by the ISIS leadership in Syria and Iraq, to which ISWAP had pledged allegiance.
The order to return the abductees received from the Middle East created tension within the group when Maman Nur himself clashed with other group members over the ISIS directive and Nur’s reported soft stance towards negotiations with government. The long and short of it was that this culminated in the execution of Mamman Nur, according to reliable sources.
Did the government pay the rumoured “huge ransom” for the return of the girls? Sources with ties to the group said no. With the decision taken by the ISIS high command, the only request Boko Haram made of the government was the right of free passage to return the girls, which explained the sudden disappearance of the heightened security in Dapchi after March 19, 2018.
For the government, the fallout was a loss of face among Nigerians, not that that matters to them. But the fact that they could not get their narrative straight as to why and how they failed to protect the girls in the first place, especially having been voted in on promises of returning the Chibok Girls, is a major indictment. And clearly lessons have not been learned especially considering the recent massacre of travellers by Boko Haram in Auno, after the military had barricaded the road, leaving travelers stranded and exposed while the military, in the Dapchi fashion, melted away into the night.
The whole Dapchi incident showed up the government and the security forces as reactive, coming alive to do damage control only after their mistakes and slips have handed the initiative to an enemy it claimed to have “technically defeated.”
With no clear narrative, two years after, the contradictions spewed by the government continue to fuel conspiracy theories. If the truth emerges, it would show severe error judgment that allowed the abductions to happen, the failed attempts at negotiations, redeemed only by the intervention of the ISIS leadership. It would also show errors in judgment that eventually closed the window of negotiations on Leah Sharibu, who was only “married” off to a Boko Haram fighter about a year ago.
She remains the biggest victim of this sad incident, as are her parents.
It is almost impossible to not say that her country failed her, and hundreds of others abducted by Boko Haram. But two years on, that is the sad reality.
