Okupe: Rescue of Chibok girls difficult

The rescue of the abducted Chibok girls may not be as easy as some Nigerians think, because the girls were “kidnapped in a war situation and held in a war environment”, Doyin Okupe, the special adviser to the president on public affairs, said on Tuesday. 

Speaking at the national information centre in Abuja on Tuesday, Okupe explained that it would have been easier to rescue the girls if they were held in a “peace situation and in a peaceful environment”.

He assured Nigerians that the government was working hard to rescue the girls, but it would not divulge vital information regarding its efforts in freeing them. He stated that the government was protecting the girls by keeping the rescue operation secret.

He noted that the government would continue to give Nigerians updates of its effort to rid the country of insurgency. He emphasised government concern about the plight of the girls in captivity, but said it was better to rescue them abused but alive, rather than dead.

“Certain things we say will jeopardise the safety of the girls. It is better to have an abused child rescued alive than to have a dead child,” he said.

“When people are kidnapped in peaceful situations, like Owerri, if after six weeks you do not get them, then citizens can say what is happening But in the case of the Chibok girls, they have been kidnapped in a war situation and in a war environment.

“So the search for the girls, of necessity, improves the efforts to decapitate and downgrade the effectiveness of the insurgency itself. For the last six months, officers have been fighting and efforts have been made to decapitate the insurgents that are holding these girls down.”

He called on the #BringBackOurGirls (#BBOG) group to look at the broad picture of insurgency as affecting all Nigerians and not just a few people.

The group protested at the presidential villa gate to mark six months of the Chibok abduction, so its members were absent at the NIC briefing despite being invited.

Also speaking, Mike Omeri, coordinator of the centre, reeled off some government actions initiated to stem insurgency as: “successful dispatch of troops to carry out land and aerial surveillance and occasional bombardment of terrorists’ locations, in addition to the government’s enlistment of foreign partners to further this cause; and several regional and sub-regional collaborative engagements by many countries with the effective support of the UK, US, France and other nations, which have resulted in strategic alliances to counter insurgency in the sub region”.