Obiageli Ezekwesili, one of the figures in BringBackOurGirls movement tells Folashade Adebayo why she has vowed not to rest until the Chibok girls are brought back alive.
If you were part of this government and this happened, would you have resigned?
I would never have been in a government where we would not have treated a matter of 219 girls as the highest priority. So, I certainly would have resigned.
The BringBackOurGirls group has been accused of being funded by the opposition and that some bank accounts have been traced to some members of the group. What is your reaction to this?
It is outright falsehood. You would have expected that having said that, next thing to do would have been to publish everything that they have. It’s all falsehood and that is one of the reasons we at citizens advocacy were shocked by the way our government that has the responsibility for citizens reacted to citizens’ agitation on behalf of their fellow citizens based on empathy. They began to throw assaults, lies, falsehood, and all kinds of defamation at us. Why would that be the response of government? The BringBackOurGirls campaign group does not need money for its advocacy because the kind of cost that we have is so negligible. We have T-shirts, bottles and badges that say BringBackourGirls, which were all done by members. The amount our members contribute on their own to print these things is so negligible. Some members even volunteer to print and do some T-shirts. We don’t need the finance and we have not taken any finance. How can anybody pay for empathy? How can anybody pay for compassion? The citizens advocacy for these girls is like a wake-up call by the citizens, saying if we are all sitting here and 219 girls are taken from our midst and we all kept quiet, when would it stop? The groups that they sponsored had an expiry date. We didn’t see them after a while. Although they had come to disturb us at the Unity Fountain, and the next thing was that they were fighting for the money that was supposed to have been paid to them. Now, they have disappeared. We are not motivated by anything. There is no politics to this, there is no financial gain and there is no social gain. This is about a set of citizens of this country saying we cannot move on like we have done in the past. When 59 boys were slaughtered at the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi and girls were taken, nothing happened. People moved on and just a few months after that, Buni Yadi was taken over by the terrorists. So, are people just going to keep moving on with this tragedy that happened to fellow citizens, simply because it hasn’t happened to any of us. Well, some citizens of Nigeria are saying we should stop that habit of moving on just because it didn’t happen to us.
Read her full interview with Punch Newspaper HERE.
*NotMyBizThou*
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