Today is Leah Sharibu’s 22nd birthday.
Anyone who has been following the work of CSW for some time will likely be familiar with some of the details surrounding her case: the fact that this is the eighth consecutive birthday that she has marked as a prisoner of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP); the fact that she was one of 110 girls abducted from the Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi in Nigeria’s Yobe State on 19 February 2018; the fact that she was the sole Christian among them and was therefore denied her freedom because she refused to convert to Islam as a pre-condition for release – even as government negotiations saw all of her surviving classmates returned to their families in March 2018.
Over the past seven years, successive administrations have failed to deliver on official promises to secure Leah’s release, including a personal pledge by former President Muhammadu Buhari made directly to Leah’s mother Rebecca. In January 2022 – over three years ago – Nigeria’s then Chief of Defence Staff General Lucky Irabor assured Nigerian media that there were plans and processes in place ‘to ensure that not just Leah Sharibu but every other person held captive is released.’
And yet she remains in captivity, having been declared a ‘slave for life’, renamed, forcibly ‘married’ to ISWAP fighters, and given birth to three children.
As killing, pillaging and abduction by a proliferation of terrorist factions continues unabated and, in fact, is on the increase across Nigeria, Leah’s case is a damning emblematic indictment of the routine and resolute failure of successive federal administrations to fulfil their primary constitutional obligation to ensure the welfare and security of the citizens, regardless of ethnicity, religion or belief.
As with previous administrations, the current government is yet to secure the release of 82 of the 276 girls who were infamously abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State in April 2014. Like previous administrations, it is also failing to respond effectively to the terrorist violence that has plagued central Nigeria for well over a decade, which has enabled it to spread southwards, and in which some reports suggest nefarious elements within the government and security sectors may have been, or may still be, complicit.
Instead, like its two immediate predecessors, the current government seems more interested in stifling credible challenges to the legitimacy of the elections that brought it to power in 2023, silencing legitimate dissent, undermining key institutions that should underpin Nigeria’s democracy, and relentlessly pursuing the closure of civil space.
It is clear that securing Leah’s release is not a priority for the current government. Therefore, it falls to the international community to ensure that Leah’s case, and indeed the cases of countless others abducted and violated in the remorseless violence currently plaguing Nigeria, do not slip off the radar, and to hold the current administration of Bola Tinubu to account for every day that it continues to allow such egregious injustice to go unaddressed.
By CSW’s Founder President Mervyn Thomas CMG