A northern group under the aegis of Arewa Coalition for Save The Child Initiative has called on President Goodluck Jonathan to put on hold, the planned visit of polio eradication advocate, Bill Gates, to Nigeria.
In a petition to Jonathan, the group expressed fear that the intended publicity and fanfare that would accompany the visit of Gates will endanger the lives of more polio workers in the North.
It will be recalled that suspected Boko Haram insurgents, earlier in the year, attacked some health workers on polio immunization, killing some of them in Kano.
Coordinator of the coalition, Mohammed Dahiru, argued in the petition that though, the planned visit was with good intention but the timing was wrong, and, therefore, asked Mr President to “cancel this visit because it may heighten tension and create fear amongst the administrators of the vaccines on children.”
“You would recall that in February this year ten health workers on polio immunization round were shot dead in Kano while three were killed in Borno State. The dreaded Boko Haram sect issued a statement claiming and justifying this irresponsible act”, Dahiru told the president.
“Subsequently the exercise was suspended for one month. These reversed the drive, gains and successes recorded in previous years. It was a major setback. Besides, Boko Haram, in claiming responsibility for the attack on the revered Emir of Kano also cited, among other reasons, his support for immunization of children in his emirate. Thank Almighty Allah, the monarch survived.
“Thereafter, Borno and Yobe states have witnessed attacks on schools and the killing of children therein, highway ambush and massive killings, isolated but deadly attacks on villages and boarder settlements. There are volumes of cases though the security forces have tried to contain and repel some.
“All these have ripple effects on immunization and the eradication of polio in the country.
“The emerging scenario now calls for a change of tactics. And this is where we differ on the planned visit of Bill Gates to Nigeria.
“We acknowledge the enormous contributions of Bill Gates to the eradication of polio and other diseases in Nigeria, but we his planned visit on a polio mission with its attendant publicity and hype may negate the gains achieved through unpublicised approach than fanfare and drum-beat,” the petition read.
The about 300 students abducted on April 14 from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State are passing through hard times, with some of them being raped up to 15 times a day, one of those who escaped has disclosed.
According to a report published today by the British newspaper Daily Mirror, “Families of the schoolgirls, aged from 15 to 18, are certain their daughters are now being used as sex slaves by an extreme sect that has killed 1,500 people since the start of this year alone.
“They are captives in the wild Sambisa Forest in north-east Nigeria where Boko Haram has a heavily armed camp of bunkers, tunnels, ramshackle buildings and tents.
“One girl who recently escaped following an earlier kidnapping said she was prized as a terror leader’s wife because she had been a virgin. She said young female captives were raped up to 15 times a day, forced to convert to Islam and had their throats cut if they refused.”
The paper reports that “under President Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian government appears to have done little except issue an entirely false claim that most of the girls had been rescued by defence forces.”
It quotes Mma Odi, executive director of the Nigerian charity Baobab Women’s Human Rights, as saying: “It is a very bad situation for those girls. The men went to the school for no other reason than to make them their sex objects. The men will have reduced them to sex slaves, raping them over and over again. And any girl who tries to resist will be shot by them. They have no conscience.
“The conditions will be terrible and it seems like the government has just abandoned them because they are girls and they are poor. If they were the sons of the rich, the government would act.
“Their abductors are not human beings and if the girls get out they will no longer be normal. They will have to have years of counselling to recover.”
Also indicting the Nigerian military and the Jonathan administration, Professor Hauwa Biu, a women’s rights campaigner based at the University of Maiduguri, told Mirror: “They claim they are on top of the situation, that they are in the bush, but they are not there. If the government had acted straight away then they could have followed the gunmen’s footsteps or tyre tracks, but over the past weeks rain and leaves have fallen, covering them up.
“Meanwhile, nobody knows what kind of conditions they will be living in the camp.
“I cannot think what these girls must be going through.
“I have been told that the men feed them and treat them quite well, but we also know that other girls kidnapped have been highly molested.
“If the government had just acted straight away they could have saved these girls.”
The number of stolen girls has yet to become clear. It was previously put at over 100 but yesterday the Nigerian police said 223 girls are still missing after 53 managed to escape. Mirror, however, insists that 329 girls were abducted and that 276 are still missing.
•Photo shows four of the abducted girls who managed to escape.
ABUJA/MAIDUGURI (Reuters) – Dozens of protesters gathered outside Nigeria’s parliament on Wednesday called on security forces to search harder for 200 schoolgirls abducted by Islamist militants in the war-ravaged northeast over two weeks ago.
Scores of suspected Boko Haram gunmen stormed an all-girls secondary school in the village of Chibok, in Borno state, on April 14, packing the teenagers onto trucks and disappearing into a remote, hilly area along the Cameroon border.
The demonstrators, including pregnant women, relatives of the girls and civil servants, waved banners saying “Bring Back Our Girls”, the somber mood of their rally accentuated by torrential rain that drenched everyone.
“If 230 girls can go missing for this long and nobody knows how to find them, then something’s very wrong with our country,” said Tokumbo Adebanjo, 45, a travel agent and mother.
“I feel the pain of those other mothers. Obviously the government are not doing their job.”
Boko Haram rebels have killed thousands in the past year.
The scale and brutality of the school attack shocked a nation already long used to hearing about atrocities in an increasingly bloody, five-year-old Islamist insurgency.
The abduction has also become a symbol of the military’s impotence in protecting civilians against Islamist insurgents whose attacks appear to be getting less discriminating.
President Goodluck Jonathan has said security forces are doing all they can to find the girls, aged between 15 and 18.
“All the girls must be brought back alive in the shortest time possible and only then will we believe them,” Lawan Aban, a lawyer, who has two nieces and a sister missing.
“We have lost faith in the Nigerian authorities.”
The demonstrators began their march outside the Hilton Abuja, one of Africa’s most expensive hotels, where in a week’s time Nigeria will be hosting the World Economic Forum (WEF) under tight security, to be maintained by 6,000 soldiers.
These four students were among those who managed to escape after being abducted
BOMB ATTACK IN ABUJA ON SAME DAY
On the day the schoolgirls were seized, a bomb blast also blamed on Boko Haram killed 75 people on the edge of the capital Abuja, the first attack on the city in two years.
“The Chibok community has been wiped out by Boko Haram,” Tsambido Hosea, whose daughter is among the kidnapped, said at the gates of the national assembly. “We are in agony.”
Britain’s foreign office confirmed on Tuesday it had offered support to Nigeria to help find the girls, but gave no details of what it might do – or whether the offer had been accepted.
Boko Haram’s struggle to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in the north has become the main security threat to Africa’s top energy producer and threatens to overshadow its investor appeal as a dynamic economy, now Africa’s biggest, and consumer market.
“There is no doubt our nation is at war,” Senate President David Mark told parliament on Tuesday, calling for Nigerians to unite against the Islamists.
As speculation about the girls’ whereabouts grew, Senator Ahmad Zannah from Borno state said in parliament on Tuesday that the girls had been taken as “wives” by Boko Haram commanders – a grim echo of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which abducted thousands of girls from central Africa for the same purpose.
A military source involved in the hunt for the girls said they were believed to be in the Sambisa forest, a known Boko Haram base. Halilu Chibok, whose daughter is among the rebels, said his wife cried all the time and could no longer eat after hearing her daughter may have been married to a militant.
“Why can’t the government invite other countries to help?” the chairman of the school’s parents association, Dumona Mpur, said by telephone from Chibok, which he said was half-deserted.
“If the world can search for a missing Malaysian (airliner), why can’t the president ask them to help look for these children?”
Parents of the 230 schoolgirls abducted in north-eastern Nigeria have marched to plead for more help to find their daughters, residents in the town of Chibok have told the BBC.
The girls were taken from their school in Chibok by suspected Islamist militants more than two weeks ago.
One parent, who asked not to be named, said they were grateful for the support of Nigerians, as other marches are held to put pressure on the authorities.
“We want to see more effort,” she said.
The Islamist group Boko Haram has not made any response to the accusation that its fighters abducted the girls in the middle of the night on 14 April 2014.
“Nobody is saying GEJ [President Jonathan] should grab a gun and go into Sambisa forest. All we are asking him is to show concern”
The group, whose name means “Western education is forbidden” in the local Hausa language, has staged a wave of attacks in northern Nigeria in recent years, with an estimated 1,500 killed in the violence and subsequent security crackdown this year alone.
‘Discreet’ mission
On Wednesday, several hundred people, mainly women, dressed in red braved heavy rain to march to the National Assembly in the capital, Abuja, to hand over a letter to complain that the government was not doing enough to secure the release of the girls.
“We thank the women for their support,” the parent in Chibok told the BBC Hausa service, saying such marches might push the government to make more of an effort to locate the girls.
“We are pleading for others who are outside… to please come and help us, because the burden is too much for us parents,” she said.
As she spoke, crying and wailing could be heard from others marching through Chibok.
She said that she was desperate to know what had happened to her daughter and that a dead body was better than no body at all.
Earlier, Nigeria’s Interior Minister Abba Moro told the BBC that he understood the “outpouring of emotions”, but the government could not divulge details of what it was doing to secure the release of the girls.
It had to act in a “discreet” way because the militants had threatened to kill the girls if “certain steps” were taken, he said.
He accused opposition parties of politicising the crisis and said they should work with the government rather than criticise it.
Following the march in Abuja, more than 20 senators requested a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan. They met on Wednesday night but no details of their discussions are known.
Swathes of north-eastern Nigeria are, in effect, off limits to the military, allowing the militants to move the girls towards, or perhaps even across, the country’s borders with impunity, says the BBC’s Will Ross in Abuja.
Kate bowls at the Duke while William looks to smash the delivery
William and Kate enjoy a spot of cricket in an event as part of the build-up to the 2015 Cricket World Cup. However, the Duke is in no mood to mess around as he clubs his wife’s friendly delivery.
The Royal Couple with the Cricket World Cup
Catherine Duchess of Cambridge, wearing her red Luisa Spagnoli suit, and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge inspect the Cricket World Cup Trophy during the countdown for the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Photographs of the vehicle are taken
A man drove his car off a cliff near Roedean in East Sussex and walked away unscathed despite falling 80 feet in the plunge.
Chief Superintendent Nev Kemp tweeted shortly after the event: “Incredibly a man escaped without serious injury after his car went over the cliff near Roedean just after midnight and ended up in the sea.”
Emergency services were quickly on the scene and hauled the man to safety using ropes.
A Newhaven Coastguard spokesperson said: “A second ladder was installed to use as a slipway and the casualty was secured into Newhaven Coastguard’s rescue stretcher and then using some of our cliff rescue equipment we were able to slide the stretcher up the ladders.
“With nine members of various agencies on the three ropes and two of the Newhaven team at the top of the ladder we were able to bring the casualty up from the beach where they were handed into the care of paramedics.
After a brief search of the surrounding water the Brighton and Newhaven lifeboat crews concluded there was only one person in the car.
The Duchess of Cambridge was amused to meet a semi-naked Toa warrior in Wellington
The Duke of Cambridge also joined in with the local custom.
The stylish mom wore a bright red Catherine Walker coat and Gina Foster pillbox hat for the trip, while her son looked adorable in an all-white ensemble.
ACE INFO 