Capitalizing on a rare victory, the Nigerian government
publicly displayed the more than 300 boys who had been released, and insisted
it had not paid ransom.
 |
| After being freed from their captors, the schoolboys were taken to the governor’s house to meet with the news media in Katsina, Nigeria, on Friday.Credit...Sunday Alamba/Associated Press |
Hundreds of boys kidnapped last week from their boarding
school in northwest Nigeria were freed on Thursday night after six days in
captivity. But they had some public relations to do for the government before
they could go home.
Cameras rolled on Friday as they were led barefoot by
soldiers carrying rifles and wearing balaclavas through the manicured grounds
of the governor’s house in Katsina, 80 miles south of Kankara, the town where
they had been studying.
Looking dazed, and still wearing their dusty clothes, they
were packed into a conference room, some crouching on the floor, others dwarfed
by big leather chairs. Television reporters thrust microphones at them.
Then they were given new clothes to change into and taken to
meet Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari.
“You children are very lucky,” he told them.
Kidnapped
by gunmen in a Dec. 11 attack on the Government Science Secondary
School in Kankara, a town in the country’s northwest, the students had been
through a terrifying, exhausting ordeal.
The kidnappers beat them, marched them for days through
thickets and gave them very little to eat and drink, they told local
journalists. They were petrified by military jets circling overhead.
Boko Haram, the Islamist group that has terrorized Nigeria’s
northeast, had claimed to be behind the Kankara mass abduction, raising the
worrying prospect that their reach had expanded far beyond their home
territory. Though hundreds of miles away, the attack last week bore a striking
resemblance to the mass kidnappings of schoolgirls carried out by the
group in
Chibok in 2014 and Dapchi
in 2018.
| Some of the rescued boys on a bus
that took them to Katsina on Friday. Credit...Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters
|
One Kankara student was even forced to record a video
message saying that they were being held by “a gang of Abu Shekau” — referring
to Boko Haram’s longtime
leader.
But the government and many of the parents described the
kidnappers not as terrorists but as “bandits,” the local term for gangs of
criminals that stage frequent attacks in the country’s northwest.
And on Friday, so did the boy who had in the video, under
duress, described the kidnappers as Boko Haram members.
“Sincerely speaking, they are not Boko Haram,” the boy,
identified by a family member as Sani Abdulhamid, told a Nigerian
television channel after the release, looking shaken and distracted in a
roomful of his classmates as reporters and officials jostled him.
He said that each day they were fed only once, and given
water twice, but they were constantly beaten. He said gang members beat some of
the smallest boys with big guns. “Tiny, tiny boys,” he said, shaking his head.
“I don’t know how to explain.”
The government insisted it had paid no ransom for the boys’
release. Aminu Masari, the governor of Katsina State, where they were
kidnapped, said: “It was purely negotiation.” His counterpart, the governor in
Zamfara State, where they were released, claimed that he personally persuaded
the kidnappers to release them unharmed.
Some commentators asked caustically whether this meant the
kidnappers had suddenly discovered reserves of magnanimity.
Kidnapping is a growing concern in Nigeria, where gang violence, armed
robbery, terrorism and piracy are rife. More than $18 million was paid out to
kidnappers between 2011 and 2020, according to a report by the Nigerian
consulting firm SB Morgen, which said that kidnap for ransom had accelerated
sharply in the past four years.
And kidnappers no longer target just the rich. Poor villagers are increasingly kidnapped, too, with
ransoms ranging between $1,000 and $150,000. Mass kidnappings are most common
in the north, where the number of victims killed per incident is also much
higher.
As the West African country’s overstretched, underpaid
and often
abusive police force has failed to protect many of its citizens, gangs
have increasingly been able to operate unchecked. And vigilante groups have
formed to protect communities, often exacerbating tension and leading to even
greater insecurity.
The government maintains that it is tackling this.
“Our children should not have to go to school in
trepidation,” said Nigeria’s minister of information, Lai Mohammed, at a news
conference on Friday in Abuja, the capital. “And we will not relent until all
Nigerians can go to bed at night with their two eyes closed.”
Residents of Kankara, and the country’s entire northwest,
likely have more sleepless nights ahead, however. Conflict over land and
grazing rights, fueled by arms flowing across borders, has caused death, disability and displacement there in
recent years.
But for the schoolboys’ parents, their release is a welcome
reprieve.
Many of the parents did not answer calls on Friday evening.
Desperate to see their sons, they had rushed to Government House, the
governor’s official residence in Katsina, where the boys were being marshaled
from one photo op to the next.
But Abdulkadir Musbau, whose 12-year-old son, Abdullahi, was
among the children taken, picked up the phone. He had not been allowed to see
his son, he said. That had to wait until the president was finished talking to
them, and until medical checks had been done. But he had been given a few
minutes with Abdullahi on the phone.
“I was so happy when I spoke to him,” Mr. Musbau said. “It’s
a huge relief for me.”
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