Where are our missing gems?

A couple of years ago when the bearded fiery, boastful and tempestuous radical made a video that went viral all over Nigeria, claiming that his organization known as “Boko Haram” would unleash hells fury on the country, very few took him serious and many in the government circles merely described him as a rabble rouser.
That was a mistake that would come back to haunt not only the Nigerian government but particularly the armed forces of Nigeria, once ranked as one of the most formidable in Africa with lots of international peace keeping trophies and a record of rendering technical military assistance to sister nations in the continent and beyond.
All that honor has now turned to ridicule and ash as people now wonder how a ragtag collection of fundamentalist have succeeded in making a mockery of that myth by practically taking the battle right up to the military and scoring valuable points with each attack.
Today in Nigeria, the fear of Boko Haram is slowly but steadily becoming the beginning of wisdom. For the missing 276 Chibok schoolgirls and their parents that lesson might have come a little too late, as they became victims of the daredevil abduction operation of Boko Haram whose ideology totally and vehemently opposes western education.
Dressed in military fatigues the militants stormed the school dormitory that houses the girls and informed the girls that they were on a mission to evacuate them to safety. The apprehensive girls sensing that perhaps the military wanted to move them to a more protective location away from a perceived threat from Boko Haram obliged and went with them. They were then loaded onto trucks and bundled away, according to one of the girls who managed to escape by jumping off the truck with other girls.
“It was while the Boko Haram militants started shouting slogans and celebrating that they realized that they were Boko Haram militants,” she said. Nigerians are fed up of the lack of security, indecision, obvious signs of cluelessness, blatant corruption and endless circle of violence that have enveloped them since the advent of the government of And to make matters worse the Presidency through its media house quickly organized a media chat on May 5 in which the president fielded questions from a select group of media executives and that media parley could best be described as a huge PR disaster judging by comments that followed on various social media sites by Nigerians who accused the president of skirting around issues and of being tactically evasive.
One thing is, however, clear in all these sad and odious disaster that has turned a once promising country fondly regarded as the “Giant of Africa” into a valley of broken promises, where hopes have being constantly betrayed and slain.
The affairs of this country with its tremendous resources both human and capital, is now definitely on autopilot and at the media parley many Nigerians saw or perceived what they think is a leadership that has no answers to the evil machinations of Boko Haram that have descended heavily on its shores.
The president looking combative but weary and perplexed, cut a sorry picture but made an urgent appeal for the international community to assist Nigeria and its military combat Boko Haram and he also said, he will do whatever it takes to bring the girls back home.
At the moment that is the only urgent wish by all Nigerians both at home and in the diaspora that we want the girls back home into the warm embrace of their parents and not in the Sambisa forest where they are allegedly holed up with the militants carved up like stolen loots and divided among the militants as their wives.
The video released after the abduction makes the flesh crawl. Clearly, there is no intent to send the girls home, no ransom demand, just a total taking away with no way out.
Each day and night should be dedicated to praying for their safe return by all well-meaning people from all over the world. The pall of uncertainty looms over the country and the questions are up in the air as a reverberation that won’t stop unless answers are provided to the questions of where our girls are? And when our promising gems will be brought back home. Wherever they are we take solace in the fact that the light of God will radiate and lead their footsteps safely back home. Hope lives on.