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Photo Credit:State House Photo/Sunday Aghaeze
peculiarly Nigerian type of frenzy happened last week. The event was
triggered by a report that a young woman named Amina Ali Nkeki, one of
the more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls abducted the night of April 14,
2014, had been rescued. The initial reports disclosed that a vigilante group
rescued Amina last Tuesday as she wandered along the edges of Sambisa
Forest in the company of a man who claimed to be her husband, but was
suspected to be a Boko Haram insurgent, and a four-month baby in her arms.
From there, it was brouhaha all the way. Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno
State feted the 19-year-old mother. Then, a day later, President Muhammadu
Buhari welcomed Amina and her baby to Aso Rock, his official residence. The
misfortunate woman was cast in a dizzying drama that featured photo-ops,
speeches, and global media coverage. The president cradled Amina’s baby in his
arms as he and others beamed for the cameras. Speaking on behalf of the
Nigerian state, the president promised that Amina would receive the best
physical, psychological and emotional healthcare Nigeria can provide.
You’d think, watching all the excitement, that all 219 schoolgirls, not just one,
had been spirited from their abductors. But that was the one narrative, thumbed
with the imprimatur of the Nigerian state. There was an album of counter-
narratives, running the gamut from those who insisted that the whole thing was
an abject hoax, a stage-managed political theater, to those who believe that the
abduction saga never happened in the first place.
Last Thursday, two days after Amina’s rescue, the Nigerian military announced
a second rescue, of a youngster named Serah Luka. For a moment, it appeared
there was some momentum, Nigeria on the cusp of finding and liberating the
200 odd victims who remain unaccounted for.
But the second success story turned out a dud. Chibok parents as well as
activists who pressed former President Goodluck Jonathan—and are pressing
Mr. Buhari—to bring back the schoolgirls questioned the military’s claim that
Serah was one of the schoolgirls. Neither her name nor image was on the roster
of the missing schoolgirls.
Whether it was an honest mistake or a calculated fib, the misidentification of
Serah as one of the Chibok schoolgirls further fueled conspiracy theories. Some
critics saw the first and second rescues as politically orchestrated maneuvers, a
plot by the Buhari administration and its champions to deflect attention from
biting economic crises and deepening social misery.
Other doubters wondered why Amina, who was supposed to be sitting certificate
exams at the time of her abduction, was incapable of expressing herself in
English. Her apparent incapacity fed speculations that she was chosen and cast
in a contrived melodrama.
This theory’s currency and traction demonstrate the depth of Nigeria’s
fragmentation. I doubt that a plot as audacious as the feigned abduction of 200
plus schoolgirls could have been pulled off and sustained for more than two
years. One inclines to a different theory. It is possible that Amina is a victim of
an educational system that delivers little or no curricular content. As a Fulbright
lecturer in Nigeria in 2002, I encountered English students whose proficiency in
the language was simply awful. When I asked a student why she had not
switched off her phone, she answered, “I thought I off it.” I asked her to correct
herself, and she answered, “I thought I offed it.” Many a student could not make
a complete sentence without mixing in pidgin.
Nigerian education, like other vital sectors of the country’s life, has been
devastated by decades of neglect, poor funding, and a certain cultural disdain
for learning and enlightenment. Most Nigerians have no praying chance of
receiving good healthcare—unless they have the funds to fly away to
destinations like India, the UK, South Africa, Dubai or the US.
In a perverse sort of way, then, Amina is “lucky” that abduct
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