In an undated video clip, the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, has blasted the then President Goodluck Jonathan for his failure to rescue Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram.
In April 2014, over 200 schoolgirls were abducted from their school dormitories in Chibok, Borno State.
The mass abduction had drawn both local and global attention, with severe criticism against the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, for the president’s failure to rescue them.
But Mr El-Rufai, who is now the governor of one of the Nigerian states where mass abductions of schoolboys and girls have become the order of the day, accused the then leaders of failure to rescue the girls.
“If one of these girls was Jonathan’s daughter, the story would be different. The only reason why these girls are still in captivity is because they are not the daughters of any important man in Nigeria, and we know it.
“And if you say we are politicizing terrorism, go and rescue the girls; so that I don’t have a reason to politicize it,” Mr El-Rufai said.
Asked whether he was in support of negotiation with the terrorists, the governor said he was in support of every option.
“When you have the lives of your citizens at risk, you should not take any option off the table. You should be flexible, you should listen…”
In its quarterly security report released late April 2021, the Kaduna State government said 323 persons were killed and 949 kidnapped by bandits in the last three months across the state.
According to the report, of all the 323 killings in the period under review, 73.07 per cent occurred in the Central Kaduna district, 21.05 in Southern district and 5.88 in the Northern district.
Also, on kidnapping, 82.4 percent of the 949 cases happened in the Central district while 13.59 per cent occurred in the South and 4 per cent in the North.
