Mindless killings in Nigeria will highlight the sense of occasion when Thursday marks 500 days in captivity for the 219 girls who were abducted from a school in Chibok, Nigeria.
Sadly, the authorities have done little to secure the release of the schoolgirls. Perhaps, worse still, they have no inkling of their whereabouts. The killings by Boko Haram continue with impunity and the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has not made progress in containing this spiralling internal threat.
In fact, governance is becoming a problem for Buhari as he copes with this uncertainty, a failure by the army to contain it, rampant corruption among administrators, Nigeria’s stuttering economy and a governance deficit.
An 8,700 multi-national task force, which involves Nigeria’s neighbours Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Benin, will deploy against Boko Haram, as it attempts to carve out a hard-line state in the country’s northeast, but the priority must be to immediately free the missing schoolgirls who have simply disappeared into oblivion. This will lift Buhari’s credibility as he prepares on the sidelines for a make-or-break budget that may also affect his goodwill among the people he so easily swayed with promises prior to the elections.
