Kidnappings Are "Business As Usual" In Nigeria

 

Your complimentary one-year subscription to DailyChatter is provided by the World Affairs Council of Northern California with the mission of educating and engaging Americans on global issues.

Good Morning, today is March 12, 2021.

NEED TO KNOW NIGERIA Suffer the Children Bandits recently released 279 Nigerian girls kidnapped recently from their school in Zamfara, a state in the country’s northwest. The kidnappers had forced the girls to march in the forest, beating them and threatening to shoot them if they stopped, Sky News wrote. “Alhamdulillah! (God be praised!) It gladdens my heart to announce the release of the abducted students,” Zamfara Governor Bello Matawalle wrote on Twitter, the Associated Press reported. “I enjoin all well-meaning Nigerians to rejoice with us as our daughters are now safe.” These children are safe. For now. Others are not. In this case, officials claimed they did not pay ransoms in exchange for the girls’ freedom. The kidnappers do not appear to be connected to Boko Haram, the Islamic State-affiliated militant group that abducted 276 girls from a school in Chibok in 2014. More than 100 of those girls remain missing. Regardless, one would think that Nigerians would be happy the girls are now free. Instead, a riot broke out soon after officials brought the girls to their parents, Reuters reported. Nigerians are sick and tired of such incidents. Three mass kidnappings have occurred in the region since December. Late last year, gunmen took 300 schoolboys. Most are now free, the BBC reported. Last month, at least 27 students were abducted and later released, Reuters reported. Kidnappings are part of Nigerian life. Variety magazine wrote about how the country’s movie industry, called Nollywood, produces films like “The Milkmaid,” which tells the tale of a sister’s search for her missing, kidnapped sibling, for example. Nigeria’s boarding schools in the remote northern section of the West African nation have become lucrative hunting grounds for armed bands, the New York Times explained. The government has paid $18 million in ransoms from mid-2011 to March 2020 to release victims, according to a Nigerian intelligence report cited in the newspaper. Corrupt government officials have skimmed from those payments, too. A cycle of poverty, violence, kidnapping, ransoms and corruption have gripped northern Nigeria, argued Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Parkinson, who wrote a recent book on the Chibok kidnappings, in an interview with National Public Radio. In an op-ed in USA Today, Parkinson and his co-author, Wall Street Journal Reporter Drew Hinshaw, added that foreign drones, special forces and other expensive resources deployed to find the Chibok girls never worked. Kidnapping is a fast-growing part of the Nigerian economy that doesn’t necessarily have a military solution, in other words. Some think developing the region and providing jobs to these would-be abductors who have taken a page from the militants’ playbook might work. Others say a heavy military presence in the region is the solution. Changing the culture of corruption is an idea tossed into the mix. Regardless, most are sure that the latest kidnappings of children in an isolated part of Nigeria are far from the last.