"NIGERIA:A NATION IN RAPID DECLINE UNDER JONATHAN GOODLUCK"

Nigeria as a nation has the solid military records of restoring peace and tranquility to the war-torn nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and even Congo. But the same Nigeria today is now totally helpless and incapable of defeating a small terrorist group, the Boko Haram in her own domestic yard. The presidency of Jonathan Goodluck has put Nigeria as a nation in a reverse gear and a helpless position today. It is an international ridicule and disgrace that the so called giant of Africa in terms of her enormous human resources, military power and natural resources was defeated by a ragtag terrorist group, the Boko Haram which has now forced this sleeping giant to seek for help from America.

If the so called war against the Boko Haram terrorist group is working in Nigeria as it is claimed publicly by the government of President Jonathan Goodluck. Then I want Nigerians to ponder on these questions:(i). How many terrorists have been arrested and put before the courts of law of Nigeria to date by the government of Jonathan Goodluck? (ii). How many terrorists' operations were ever successfully busted and foiled to date by the Nigerian security agencies? (iii). How many more innocent and helpless Nigerians should die or be kidnapped before something drastic is done by this man in charge of Nigeria against the Boko Haram terrorism?

Official corruption is the number one public enemy in Nigeria today. This is the main reason why the Nigerian government has failed to protect her own citizens from the heinous atrocities of the dreaded terrorist group, the Boko Haram that has operated with maximum impunity in Nigeria and got away with those murders and arsons under the watch and the presidency of Jonathan Goodluck to date.
President Jonathan Goodluck of Nigeria has finally reached the end of the road with his indifferent and passive responses to the unabated heinous crimes of the Boko Haram in Nigeria under his personal watch and his clueless presidency since 2011. This President has continued to publicly pay the lip service to this war on this domestic terrorists in Nigeria that claimed the life of thousands of innocent Nigerian citizens to date. The war on Boko Haram is now international in scope and coverage at the moment, there is no longer any hiding place left for this ineffective President to hide and the chickens have now finally come home to roost in Nigeria.

It is high time for this clueless, helpless, hopeless and passive President Jonathan Goodluck of Nigeria to publicly ask the nations of the world with the needed experiences and documented records of waging successive wars against domestic and international terrorism in their own countries and internationally for help in Nigeria. The Boko Haram terrorist organization has operated successfully with maximum impunity and unabated under the watch and the presidency of this man to date.

"NIGERIA'S STOLEN GIRLS" - NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Three weeks after their horrifying abduction in Nigeria, 276 of the more than 300 girls who were taken from a school by armed militants are still missing, possibly sold into slavery or married off. Nigerian security forces apparently do not know where the girls are and the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, has been shockingly slow and inept at addressing this monstrous crime.

On Tuesday, the United Nations Children’s Fund said Boko Haram, the ruthless Islamist group that claimed responsibility for the kidnappings, abducted more young girls from their homes in the same part of the country in the northeast over the weekend. The group, whose name roughly means “Western education is a sin,” has waged war against Nigeria for five years. Its goal is to destabilize and ultimatelyoverthrow the government. The group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said in a video released on Monday, “I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah.”

This is not the first time Boko Haram has attacked students, killing young men and kidnapping young women. The security situation in Northeast Nigeria has steadily deteriorated. In the first three months of this year, attacks by Boko Haram and reprisals by government security forces have killed at least 1,500 people, more than half of them civilians, according to Amnesty International. Until now, there has been little response to the violence, either in Nigeria or internationally. But the kidnapping of so many young girls, ages 12 to 15, has triggered outrage and ignited a rare antigovernment protest movement in Nigeria.

On Sunday, after weeks of silence, Mr. Jonathan admitted that “this is a trying time for our country,” and he said that Nigerians were justified in their anger against the government and appealed for international help. The reaction of Mr. Jonathan’s wife, Patience, was stunningly callous; according to state news media, she told one of the protest leaders, “You are playing games. Don’t use schoolchildren and women for demonstrations again.”

Boko Haram’s claim that it follows Islamic teachings is nonsense. A pre-eminent Islamic theological institute, Al-Azhar in Egypt, denounced the abductions, saying it “completely contradicts the teachings of Islam and its tolerant principles.” Although Boko Haram is believed to number no more than a few hundred men, Nigerian security forces have been unable to defeat them.

Mr. Jonathan, who leads a corrupt government that has little credibility, initially played down the group’s threat and claimed security forces were in control. It wasn’t until Sunday, more than two weeks after the kidnappings, that he called a meeting of government officials, including the leader of the girls’ school, to discuss the incident. There is no doubt the intelligence and investigation help President Obama offered on Monday is needed.

The kidnappings occurred just as President Jonathan is about to hold the World Economic Forum on Africa, with 6,000 troops deployed for security. That show of force may keep the delegates safe, but Nigeria’s deeply troubled government cannot protect its people, attract investment and lead the country to its full potential if it cannot contain a virulent insurgency.

"NIGERIA'S STOLEN GIRLS" - THE NEW YORKER

I thought it was the end of my life,” Deborah Sanya told me by phone on Monday from Chibok, a tiny town of farmers in northeastern Nigeria. “There were many, many of them.” Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group, kidnapped Sanya and at least two hundred of her classmates from a girls’ secondary school in Chibok more than two weeks ago. Sanya, along with two friends, escaped. So did forty others. The rest have vanished, and their families have not heard any word of them since.

Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns around Chibok, in the state of Borno, had been shuttered. Boko Haram attacks at other schools—like a recent massacre of fifty-nine schoolboys in neighboring Yobe state—had prompted the mass closure. But local education officials decided to briefly reopen the Chibok school for exams. On the night of the abduction, militants showed up at the boarding school dressed in Nigerian military uniforms. They told the girls that they were there to take them to safety. “They said, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you,’ ” Sanya told me. The men took food and other supplies from the school and then set the building on fire. They herded the girls into trucks and onto motorcycles. At first, the girls, while alarmed and nervous, believed that they were in safe hands. When the men started shooting their guns into the air and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Sanya told me, she realized that the men were not who they said they were. She started begging God for help; she watched several girls jump out of the truck that they were in.

It was noon when her group reached the terrorists’ camp. She had been taken not far from Chibok, a couple of remote villages away in the bush. The militants forced her classmates to cook; Sanya couldn’t eat. Two hours later, she pulled two friends close and told them that they should run. One of them hesitated, and said that they should wait to escape at night. Sanya insisted, and they fled behind some trees. The guards spotted them and called out for them to return, but the girls kept running. They reached a village late at night, slept at a friendly stranger’s home, and, the next day, called their families.

Sanya could not tell me more after that. She is not well. Her cousins and her close friends are still missing, and she is trying to understand how she is alive and back home. All she can do now, she said, is pray and fast, then pray and fast again.

The day after the abduction, the Nigerian military claimed that it had rescued nearly all of the girls. A day later, the military retracted its claim; it had not actually rescued any of the girls. And the number that the government said was missing, just over a hundred, was less than half the number that parents and school officials counted: according to their tally, two hundred and thirty-four girls were taken.

In the wake of the military’s failure, parents banded together and raised money to send several of their number into the forest to search for the girls. The group came across villagers who persuaded the parents to turn back. They told the parents that they had seen the girls nearby, but the insurgents were too well armed. Many of the parents had just bows and arrows.

***

The circumstances of the kidnapping, and the military’s deception, especially, have exposed a deeply troubling aspect of Nigeria’s leadership: when it comes to Boko Haram, the government cannot be trusted. Children have been killed, along with their families, in numerous Boko Haram bombings and massacres over the past five years. (More than fifteen hundred people have been killed so far this year.) State schools and remote villages in the north have borne the brunt of Boko Haram’s violence this year. The group is believed to be at least partly waging a campaign against secular values. The kidnapped girls were both Christian and Muslim; their only offense, it seems, was attending school.

Last June, I visited Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and the birthplace of Boko Haram, to report on the insurgency and the Nigerian government’s counteroffensive, a security operation that placed three northeastern states, including Borno and Yobe, under a state of emergency as troops launched attacks on terrorist hideouts and camps. The military cut phone lines and Internet access, and, while residents were glad for the intervention, there was a sense of living in the dark. Gunshots, a bomb blast: was it Boko Haram or a military attack? Were the hundreds of men disappeared by the military actually terrorists—even the young boys? And was the government, as it claimed, really winning the war?

The military has restored phone lines in Borno. But the sole airline that flew to Maiduguri cancelled the route at the end of last year. The road to Chibok is so hazardous that Borno’s governor visited the town with a heavy military escort. Much of the northeast is now physically isolated. What is happening there that we cannot see?

Nigerians in the rest of the country had, until recently, been able to ignore the deaths. The general mood has been one of weary apathy—from a government waging a heavy-handed crackdown on northerners to civilians far removed from the chaos. That mood may finally change.

***

Sanya’s father, a primary-school teacher named Ishaya Sanya, is struggling with conflicting emotions: gratitude that his daughter has returned to him; guilt that the daughters of his siblings, friends, and neighbors are still somewhere in the bush; and an angry frustration that there seemed to be no effort to rescue the girls.

“We don’t know where they are up until now, and we have not heard anything from the government,” he told me. “Every house in Chibok has been affected by the kidnapping.” The only information that the families had been able to gather about the kidnapped girls, he went on, was from the girls who had escaped.

He remembers the exact time that Deborah appeared in front of him after her escape—4:30P.M.—and how he felt: “very happy.” But his despair soon returned. “Our area has been affected very seriously,” he told me. Parents had fallen physically ill, and some were “going mad.”

The military’s current plans are unclear; the Chibok parents hope that it is acting swiftly and cautiously. There is worry, too, that a rescue operation could result in the deaths of many of the girls; this happened during a previous attempted rescue, of two Western engineers kidnapped by Boko Haram. Last week, a military spokesman, Brigadier-General Chris Olukolade, said only that the search for the girls had “intensified.”

In the meantime, as in so many other ways in Nigeria, each community has to fend for itself. For a while after the abduction, girls trickled back into town—some rolled off trucks, some snuck away while fetching water. That trickle has stopped. “Nobody rescued them,” a government official in Chibok said of the girls who made it back. “I want you to stress this point. Nobody rescued them. They escaped on their accord. This is painful.”

A pastor in Chibok whose daughter is missing told me that he set out with friends on the morning after the abduction to find the girls. “I was forced to come home empty-handed,” he told me by phone. “I just don’t know what the federal government is doing about it. And there is no security here that will defend us. You have to do what you can do to escape for your life.”

I asked the pastor about rumors that Boko Haram has taken the girls outside of Nigeria’s borders, into Cameroon and Chad, and forcibly married them. He paused, and then said, “How will I be happy? How will I be happy?” - By Alexis Okeowo.