President Goodluck Jonathan, yesterday, assured parents of the abducted Chibok girls and all Nigerians that the girls were still alive and his government was doing everything possible to rescue them. The President spoke during a live discussion programme, Kaakaki, on African Independent Television (AIT), monitored in Abuja. This came as a delegation of the Federal Government held a closed-door meeting with relations of the abducted girls in Maiduguri and briefed them about how far the administration had gone in securing their release from captivity.
Speaking during the programme, President Jonathan hinged his optimism on the assumption that had the girls been killed, the terrorists would have publicly displayed their corpses in order to induce fear. In the more than one hour programme, the President, who was appearing on a Nigerian television station for the first time apart from the government-owned Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, admitted that government under-rated the capacity of the Boko Haram sect and this explained why the terrorists were so entrenched.
According to the President, with the increased capacity of the military which has taken possession of more than 65 per cent of the platform needed to prosecute the war, the remaining territories still under the control of the terrorists would soon be recaptured. Speaking on why the girls have not been recovered despite the gains recorded by the military, the president said this was because “reasonable territories are still in the hands of Boko Haram”. His words:
“We promised that we must get the girls. The good story is that they have not killed them because the terrorists, when they kill, they display. They use it to intimidate the whole society. The girls are alive. We will get the girls. Luckily, we are narrowing down the area of their control.
So, we will get them. At the beginning, probably we did not really estimate the capacity of Boko Haram. It is obvious Boko Haram started as a non-violent group led by Yusuf, limited to around Maiduguri area and Yobe. They did not even get to Adamawa.
“Just like every group of youths or young people that is inclined to criminality, they expanded their network and linked up with other terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda in North Africa and other similar brands in the world.
“So, they continued to build their capacity and it got to a point that for you to tackle them in the kind of environment they operate, you need some specialized equipment to use and we don’t manufacture these equipment now. That is why the movement has changed. So, it is not deliberate,” he said.