Govt Shouldn’t Allow Terrorists Determine Our Criminal Justice System – Ezekwesili

Former minister of education, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, is a woman famous for her commitment to good governance, which gained her the alias ‘Madam Due Process’ during former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, where she served in different capacities. Ezekwesili, who is currently a forerunner of the #Bringbackourgirls campaign, in this interview with Catherine Agbo, speaks on the possible plight of the girls and why the government must see to it that they are rescued and alive too.

It’s been over one month since the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls, which has been mired in controversy and many contradictory accounts by stakeholders. What’s your take on the entire saga?
Plenty of pain, plenty of disappointment, in the sense that we failed these girls as a result of initial indifference to their plight. They were victims of some politics between the federal government and the state government and the primary responsibility of government as enshrined in the 1999 Constitution, Chapter 2 was not provided for these girls. And so, 37 days after, we still do not know what their fate is, other than the tiny ray of hope of seeing that video that showed us all that they are alive and parents could identify their children. One realised that we can’t walk away from this issue, we need to come to closure quickly and the closure is the rescue of the girls, bringing them back alive.

You started the #Bringbackourgirls campaign, which has become a global campaign. You also mentioned that the federal government showed some initial indifference to the plight of the girls. Was the campaign the result of that?
My campaign was actually immediate, in the sense that it was on April 14 that the first Nyanya bomb blast occurred in the morning. That Nyanya bombing evoked in me a sense that we were repeating the same pattern. That every time a tragedy happens, we all console the families and empathise by saying oh we pray for them, we comfort them, but were we all just going to keep saying that and were we all going to be listening to the government release a press statement on yet another tragedy? So, the Nyanya tragedy was like a tipping point moment, when I tweeted that citizens are not helpless, citizens are not powerless. Surely we as citizens must have a voice in what the situation is in our country, especially with regards to the terrorist acts and the government’s efforts at stemming them. So I tweeted to those who follow me on Twitter and I said that with a bombing for the umpteenth time, I feel that we as citizens must be part of the conversation on our counter terrorism efforts. If you have an idea of a citizen solution to end terrorism, tweet at me. And as soon as I tweeted that, from all ends, people were tweeting their ideas of solutions until the next morning. Then another piece of news came. Apparently still on the 14th, but close to midnight, this tragedy had happened in Chibok, Borno State; terrorists had raided Chibok and had taken away girls. It made the frustration that led me to ask citizens to proffer solutions even more relevant and so I continued engaging the people who were tweeting at me and by the 16th, we had over a thousand solutions that citizens had tweeted on that matter. We began to wait for news about the girls and I went on asking, probing and asking what information we had on the girls and at some point, I even tweeted at the army headquarters handle and asked what information we had. After a while, there was a press release from them saying that all but eight of the girls had been rescued, but Nigerians were saying that wasn’t possible. There was cynicism and I actually said to the people who were being cynical that has our society broken down so much that we cannot even believe what our military is saying to us? I said I would rather stand with what they have said until I hear anything contrary. I ended up being the one who was wrong because afterwards, we heard that it was actually not so and the military apologised and said it got wrong information and we were back to square one and started the conversation about how many girls were actually missing. Day followed day and there was no coherent or credible information as to the state of these girls and where exactly anyone thought they were and what was being done to rescue them. All we heard was that Chibok people were beginning to send hunters into the famous Sambisa forest and it was all sounding so bizarre. There was something not really clear and I kept on the issue, using my daily tweets to focus on the issue of the girls. By the 23rd, I was a key participant at the launch of Port Harcourt as the UNESCO World Book Capital and I discussed with Koko Kalango, who was the project director, that we should have a segment on the programme where after the keynote address, we would ask the audience to stand in solidarity with the Chibok girls and to call for a search and rescue operation that will deliver them back home. The keynote speaker at the event was Prof. Wole Soyinka. We had no idea what his speech would be about, but when he started speaking, he spoke about terrorism, Islam and zeroed in on the issue of the abducted girls and he made reference to the Bring Back the Book campaign. We were preparing to call on the audience to stand in solidarity with the girls and here was Prof. Soyinka focusing on the matter already and making a connection between books and the girls. God had guided us right, because it would have been terrible to end the event without doing anything to stand with them, when they were taken away from a school premises. As soon as Prof. Soyinka finished his address, we went up and called on the audience to stand with us and declare, ‘Bring back our daughters, bring back our girls’. And a young man that was listening at home tweeted, saying, ‘Oby Ezekwesili calls on us bring back our daughters, bring back our girls’. I didn’t know he had done that, but I normally tweet my events and as soon as I went back to my seat, I tweeted and I said, ‘Here in Port Harcourt the audience has risen with us to call out, bring back our daughters, bring back our girls’. I re-tweeted the young lawyer’s tweet and I continued with my call out to people. And the re-tweeting just took off and from that point, my handle became about the Chibok girls and that carried on. In the meantime, a protégé of mine, Hadiza Bala Usman, was worried that there was nothing happening to call attention to the plight of the girls. She sent emails to me and many others, saying it would be great if women could go out and make a protest march to call attention to their plight and I said I would be part of it. And that was how on the 30th, we had the first march by women, joined by some men and that day marked the beginning of our advocacy on the ground and it became known as Abuja family for Bring Back our Girls. The march took us to the National Assembly where we engaged them and expressed our disappointment that many days following the abduction of the girls, there had been nothing credible in terms of information on the rescue operation that had been put in place and we felt that there was indifference to their plight. The National Assembly leadership, including the Senate president and the speaker came out in the rain with us and we engaged them on the matter of the welfare, protection, security and lives of our daughters that had been taken away by evil workers. That was the beginning.

There is the view in some quarters that the campaign is misdirected, as the call should be on the insurgents to release the girls and not on the president to bring them back. Your take?
The constitution of the federal republic does not recognise anything called Boko Haram. The constitution recognises government. If people start screaming ‘Boko Haram release our girls’, who would they be addressing? These are vicious people and that’s why governance is about having monopoly of the coercive apparatus. You could do that moral persuasion that the kidnappers holding the girls should please release them, but the kidnappers are mentally deranged, which is why government has the control of the security apparatus and is deposited with the responsibility of the security of life and property. Do you wake up in the morning asking Boko Haram to provide your security? I don’t understand the argument. The most important authority in any nation is the government. When the 9/11 attack occurred in America, did we ever hear them saying to Al-Qaeda don’t do this or that? They simply demanded of their government, congress, the executive, to do everything to safeguard the integrity of the American territory. If there is beginning to be insinuations that this conversation about bring back the girls has become political, it tells you why there was the indifference. I don’t understand what is political about the fact that people like us should stay in a society where over 200 of our girls are missing and we actually decided that the conversation that should be about rescuing our girl is instead turned into a political conversation. Those who are politicians should busy themselves with their politics. I am not a politician and I’ve never been one. I’m a mother and together with other mothers, we find it totally reprehensible that these girls should be the victims of this politicisation that these people are talking about. For me, it is a statement of the values of our society that we could have just turned away from this matter and acted as if everything were normal and carried on with our lives. Oh no, it would have been a terrible statement, a tragic statement. This idea of trying to cast the story in some light, I’m not going to get into it. It’s unfair to the girls, a terrible thing to come from the quarters it is coming from, a dereliction of duty and a wicked act for anyone to turn these girls into pawns for political quarrels. They should have their political quarrels, but as for me and the women that have been persistent in demanding that these girls be brought back, we are not persuaded by any attempt at trying to colour a very altruistic advocacy that goes to the heart of our common bond and humanity. I have no reason to defend what I’m doing with other women; it is at the core of our humanity.

- Leadership

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