DUBAI: The former president of Nigeria Olusegun Obasanjo has said that the government has failed to save the kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls by Boko Haram last year. He said the government could have avoided the situation and saved the girls.
Obasanjo said the incompetent government under the rule of President Goodluck Jonathan had not recognised the threat posed by the Boko Haram group.
Obasanjo, who led Nigeria twice between 1999 and 2007, said that President Jonathan took 18 days to contact the governor of the province where the girls were taken. Government’s response had been worse, he added.
Obasanjo was speaking at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai. "If that had happened maybe the girls would have been rescued. "The government did not believe that there had been an abduction for some time,” he said.
Boko Haram kidnapped 270 girls last year. Snatched from the Chibok boarding school in Nigeria, the missing reports of these young girls caused a widespread international protest and demand for the girls to be brought back home.
The kidnapping caused worldwide outcry, leading to public interventions by celebrities including Angelina Jolie and Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot and almost killed by the Taliban in 2012.
A one-time ally of President Jonathan, Obasanjo has been increasingly critical of the Nigerian government, recently tearing up his membership of Jonathan's People's Democratic Party (PDP) live on Nigerian TV.
He said that Boko Haram had grown from a local insurgency to a regional issue, spreading to neighbouring African states, and called all the African nations to combat it.
"It has become a regional issue and we have to deal with it regionally," said Obasanjo.
Boko Haram is now under siege by Nigerian and other African troops. If the insurgents are pushed back, hundreds more children like these could soon be found.
The group "forcibly converts the Christian women and girls they capture to Islam and often coerces them and other female abductees into marriage", Watchlist's 2014 report said.
According to Human Rights Watch, Boko Haram has allegedly recruited boys as young as 12 to fight for the group.