Jonathan won’t go to village of abducted girls

Abuja — Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan has cancelled his first visit to the village from which more than 200 schoolgirls were abducted by Islamist rebel group Boko Haram a month ago due to security fears, senior government sources said yesterday.
Jonathan was instead due to fly directly from the capital Abuja to Paris yesterday for a regional summit to discuss the Boko Haram insurgency and wider insecurity and will not now make a stop in the north-eastern village of Chibok, said one of the sources.

“The president was planning to go but security advised otherwise on the visit,” said the source of the last-minute decision to cancel the Chibok part of the trip.

Some Nigerians have criticised the government’s initial response to the plight of the girls, who were abducted on April 14, and US officials this week said the government had done too little to adapt to the threat posed by Boko Haram.

Jonathan asked France last week to arrange a security summit with neighbours Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Benin, and officials from the United States, Britain and the European Union to discuss a coordinated response. The summit will take place today.

Jonathan, the former vice-president, assumed the presidency of Africa’s most populous nation in 2010 on the death in office of his predecessor Umaru Yar’Adua and won an election the following year. Nigeria will go to the polls again next year.

In Cape Town, South Africa, a Nigerian teenage girl has described how she was raped by Boko Haram Islamists when the group attacked her home town of Maiduguri in the north-east Bono state, in Nigeria.

In an exclusive interview with eNCA, the 19-year-old, whose real name could not be revealed to protect her identity, said her scarf was used to tie her hands and mouth before one of the group members raped her.

Her sister narrowly escaped the same fate.
The revelation of her ordeal comes as more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls remain missing a month after they were abducted from their school in Chiboko.

The teenager’s father apparently prevented her from writing her final examinations at the same school two months ago as he feared for her safety.

Her friends and classmates are part of the abducted girls and as she said during the interview: “I can imagine how they are suffering without anyone helping.” She added that she was disappointed by the manner in which government had handled the situation.

In Johannesburg, members of the Young Communist League of SA (YCLSA) plan to picket at the Nigerian High Commission in Pretoria on Monday over the kidnapping of over 200 girls in Nigeria.

“The YCLSA will show its support and demand the immediate release of the more than 200 schoolgirls that have been kidnapped,” spokesperson Khaya Xaba said yesterday.

The demonstration was scheduled to begin at 11:00AM on Monday.
In Washington, a top US defence department official on Thursday said Nigeria had been too slow to respond to the threat of Boko Haram but Washington is committed to helping fight the Islamist militants and rescue over 200 girls seized.

US officials have said the effort to retrieve the girls is now a top priority but has been complicated by Nigeria’s early reluctance to accept assistance, and US rules banning aid to foreign forces that have committed human rights abuses.

“In general Nigeria has failed to mount an effective campaign against Boko Haram,” Alice Friend, the Pentagon’s principal director for African Affairs, told a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Africa subcommittee.

“The department has been deeply concerned for some time by how much the government of Nigeria has struggled to keep pace with Boko Haram’s growing capabilities,” Friend said.

Friend said it was troubling that atrocities have been perpetrated by some Nigerian forces during operations against Boko Haram.
Robert Jackson, acting assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, said Washington has urged Nigeria to reform its approach to the group. “When soldiers destroy towns, kill civilians and detain innocent people with impunity, mistrust takes root,” he said.

The US Embassy in Abuja offered help almost immediately after the kidnapping. But it was two weeks before US Secretary of State John Kerry called Jonathan to offer aid, which was accepted on May 4, Jackson said. Friend said US reconnaissance flights started days later.

Nigeria has been reluctant to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist threat at the United Nations, but Jackson said it has changed its position and he expected that designation imminently.

Delaware Senator Chris Coons, the subcommittee chairperson, said that the odds the girls would get home safely were diminishing every day.

“It took too long for the Nigerian government to respond to the girls’ abduction. It took too long for the Nigerian government to accept offers of assistance from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and China, and once accepted, it took too long for that assistance to be fully implemented,” he said.

The US officials said Boko Haram is a regional threat that is becoming international, with ties to al Qaeda. They said the Pentagon and Department of State were developing a “regional response,” including improved security along Nigeria’s borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

“We’ve definitely determined that there are links between al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb and Boko Haram. They have probably provided at least training, perhaps financial support,” Jackson said.

In a related incident, a group of gunmen razed two schools in Bauchi state, northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram gunmen previously attacked a girls’ school, a police spokesperson said on Thursday.

Dozens of gunmen in cars and on motorcycles stormed the neighbouring villages of Shadarki and Yelwan Darazo, setting two primary schools ablaze, one in each village, said officer Haruna Mohammed.

“The attackers came in a group of around 30 and set fire to Shadarki Primary School before proceeding to Yelwan Darazo where they also burnt another primary school and a telecoms mast.”

No one was hurt in the attacks, which happened at about 23:00 on Wednesday when the schools were empty, he added.
None of the gunmen was arrested and Mohammed declined to say if the attackers were from Boko Haram, which has carried out deadly attacks in the area.

Boko Haram, which translates from the Hausa language spoken widely in north Nigeria as “Western education is forbidden”, has destroyed hundreds of schools in the northeast in the past two years. — AFP-Reuters.