There was confusion on Monday in Chibok, Borno state, when parents of abducted schoolgirls at Government Girls Secondary School insisted that 234 girls abducted from the school were still missing.
The Borno state commissioner for education and the principal of the school had claimed that 129 girls were kidnapped when the suspected Boko Haram gunmen stormed their dormitories on April 14.
Of the number, the officials said, 28 initially escaped while another 16 broke free from the abductors days later. The remaining 85 are still missing, they claimed.
However, parents told Borno state Governor, Kashim Shettima, who visited Chibok Monday, in defiance of security warnings, that by their records, 234 of the pupils abducted are yet to be found.
That discrepancy in number was not resolved until the governor left the school Monday evening.
The claim by the parents has now thickened the confusion about the Nigerian government’s effort to find and rescue the abducted schoolgirls.
The Nigerian military had claimed on April 16 that it freed majority of the girls.
The spokesperson of the Defence Headquarters, DHQ, Chris Olukolade, had said 107 of the girls (then believed to be missing) were freed in addition to those who initially escaped from their abductors.
Olukolade claimed that following the rescue, only eight of the girls were still held captive by the insurgents. But shortly after his statement was published, the principal of the affected school, Asabe Kwambura, as well as officials of the Borno state government, said the claims were untrue and that majority of the girls were still missing.
“There is nothing in the military statement that is true about our abducted girls,” Kwambura had said. “Up till now we are still waiting and praying for the safe return of the students; all I know is that we have only 14 of them, and the security people especially the Vigilante and the well meaning volunteers of Gwoza are still out searching for them.”
Kwabura told the BBC Hausa service on Monday that about 40 fled their captors, insisting that “None of these girls was rescued by the military; they managed to escape on their own from their abductors.”
Before visiting Chibok on Monday, Shettima said that eight more girls had escaped over the weekend, meaning a total 52 had fled.
One of the parents, Shettima Haruna, told Shettima that they had been having sleepless nights since the incident happened, adding that at a time, they summoned courage to visit Sambisa Forest to search for the missing girls.
“We want to seize this opportunity to thank you (governor) for the visit and for identifying with us in this sorrowful moment; but we want to emphasise that we are not happy with this development. In as much as we continue to pray for the safe return of our daughters, we are appealing to the government and security operatives to please intensify the search for our missing innocent children,” Haruna said.
Another parent, Amos Chiroma said they saw a lot of strange things at the forest while searching for their daughters. “When we were in the bushes of Sambisa, we came across different make -shift camps suspected to be deserted by the insurgents.”
The parents of the abducted girls, who could not hold back tears, appealed to the government to ensure that their abducted girls were freed.
Shettima, who was equally moved to tears, promised that his government would deploy all human and material resources towards rescuing the girls.
“They can burn physical structures but they cannot destroy our souls. Patient is the ultimate solution to the problem and I will ask us to have patience. We will soon get over this,”
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