By Rafiu Ajakaye
LAGOS
One year ago today, Boko Haram militants stormed a sleepy town in Nigeria's restive Borno State and abducted scores of girls from their dormitory.
Their families are still waiting in agony for their rescue.
"We are extremely sad. We are depressed to see that, one year after, our daughter is not back," Reverend Enoch Mark, a father of one of the missing girls and the chairman of the local parents' association, told The Anadolu Agency.
"Our daughters could have been rescued. But the truth is that this government has never treated this issue with any urgency right from the day our daughters were abducted," he said.
"For 11 days after the abduction, there was no response from the government," Mark fumed.
On the night of April 14, 2014, 276 schoolgirls were abducted from the town of Chibok.
Only 57 of them have since escaped captivity, while 219 are still thought to be held by Boko Haram.
The Nigerian government, aided by some foreign governments, has been leading a search mission for the girls, along with general counterinsurgency operations in the restive region.
"We reported to the military about the girls still being very close to Chibok at the time, and the need for troops to act quickly – but they refused to help us rescue our girls," Mark recalled.
"The government has refused to help us. If they had acted with the required urgency, our daughters could have been saved," he insisted.
Mark recalled that Nigeria's defense chief had once come out openly and said that the government knew the girls' whereabouts.
"If they knew the whereabouts of our daughters, why has it taken them forever to bring them back and save us this agony?" Mark asked.
"They have continued to tell one lie after another. We have lost confidence in this government," he said.
Samuel Yaga, whose daughter Sarah is among the abducted girls, echoed these sentiments.
"The government has simply moved on," he told AA. "Because we are poor people, the government does not care about us."
Yaga believes the only thing that has kept the issue in the media is the high-profile BringBackOurGirls' campaign.
"If not for them [the campaign], the government prefers to move on without the 219 girls, and this is wicked," he said. "Our wives cry every day. The agony is unbearable."
The BringBackOurGirls' coalition is organizing a rally on Tuesday in capital Abuja to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the mass abduction and rekindle global sympathy for the girls and their families.
Hopes
Having lost confidence in the outgoing government, the parents pray that the incoming administration of President-elect Muhammadu Buhari will be more effective.
"By the grace of God, we have confidence in Buhari helping us," Mark told AA, citing the retired general's achievements.
"In 1984, when the Maitatsine crisis broke out in Yola [in Adamawa State], Gen. Buhari wiped them off the map within a very short period," said Mark.
Maitatsine – a religious group whose name literally means the "one who damns" – waged an insurgency against the Nigerian state in the 1970s.
The group was decimated after its leader, Mohammed Marwa – nicknamed "Maitatsine" – died in 1980.
"I am very confident that Gen. Buhari will handle the Boko Haram crisis within a very short period," Mark told AA.
"He is a man of determination who respects his words. I'm sure his promise to tackle militancy and corruption will come to pass. We hope he will bring our daughters back," added the father.
But President-elect Buhari did not say much to comfort the families of the missing girls.
"We do not know if the Chibok girls can be rescued. Their whereabouts remain unknown," he said in a statement marking the anniversary.
"As much as I wish to, I cannot promise that we can find them," Buhari admitted.
"But I say to every parent, family member and friend of the children: my government will do everything in its power to bring them home," he said.
Mike Omeri, spokesman for the government's counterinsurgency operations in the northeast, insisted that the authorities remained committed to rescuing the schoolgirls.
"Since the abduction, sad as it is, the government of Nigeria has stepped up the counterinsurgency operations," he told AA.
"It has also rebuilt its armed forces towards the rescue of the girls and the fight against terrorism," he said.
"The search for the girls has not been called off. The search is still ongoing," insisted Omeri, who is also coordinator of the National Information Center on counterinsurgency operations.
He asserted that most Boko Haram strongholds had been captured by the military and that over 80 percent of territories earlier held by the militant group had been liberated.
"We are not abandoning the girls. We are not calling off the search until the girls are brought back," Omeri told AA.
Now in its sixth year, Nigeria's Boko Haram insurgency has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced over one million people from the country's northeast, where the insurgents have been the most ruthless.
