#World News

Parents of Chibok girls heartbroken – again


By Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Ten years after Boko Haram gunmen abducted his daughter from her school in the Nigerian town of Chibok, Yama Bullum feels as if he has lost her once again.

His daughter, Jinkai Yama, was one of 276 girls kidnapped from the secondary school in the early hours of 14 April 2014 by the Islamist fighters.

Fifty-seven of them escaped shortly afterwards. Then between 2016 and 2018 an additional 108 were either rescued by the military or released through negotiations.

Ninety-one others remain missing, but Ms Yama is one of 20 “Chibok girls” rescued over the last two years from Boko Haram hideouts in Sambisa Forest in north-eastern Borno state, the epicentre of the 15-year insurgency.

But her father has been outraged to discover that like some of other recently freed women, she has decided to remain married to one of the fighters who once held her captive.

These couples now reside in the city of Maiduguri – Borno’s capital, 125km (78 miles) north of the remote town of Chibok – in housing organised by the state’s governor Babagana Umaru Zulum.

“I am not happy with what the governor did. The girls managed to come out of the forest and the governor married them off again. Her mother is very angry,” Mr Bullum said.



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