Dapchi: déjà vu?

When militants last Monday storm-trooped a girls school in Dapchi, Yobe State, displacing the students and their minders and apparently abducting some, it was a virtual reenactment of the nightmare we tangled with not too long go in Nigerian nationhood history.

The militants, suspected to be Boko Haramists, struck under the cover of night at the Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC) in a gang raid for which they deployed explosives and heavy weaponry mounted on trucks, some of which were said to have been camouflaged in military colours. They reportedly fired random shots as they approached the state-run boarding school that caters for girls aged from 11 years, sending students and teachers on the premises fleeing in the dark through jungle paths for safety in nearby habitations. The lucky ones brazed injuries from thistles and thorns, and reportedly in some cases from snakebites, to make it to ‘safety’ and have since returned home. Luckless ones, as it now seems obvious, were made away with by the assailants.

The hapless students and their teachers apparently picked some lessons from the experience of fellow students in Chibok, neighbouring Borno State, where Boko Haramists struck at a girls school in April 2014 and herded the girls into captivity. Facts were severely affronted in ensuing narratives from that calamity, such that the Goodluck Jonathan administration then in the saddle locked down in denial that the incident ever took place. But it is generally known now that 276 girls were trucked off by the Chibok assailants, who reportedly beguiled the girls to come on board for their safety. A handful of the victims subsequently took pluck to jump off the captors’ train; a few more were rescued in military raids, while 100 were released last May by captors in a deal with the present Muhammadu Buhari presidency. It is widely reckoned that 112 Chibok girls yet remain in Boko Haram captivity.

It would seem that other than modest lessons in survival shown by the Dapchi girls to have been learnt from the Chibok saga, very little has been learnt by anybody else. Dapchi, by all contortions, is veritably Chibok déjà vu, and we seem as a nation to been treading the same paths that made up the Chibok mishap. All the more curious, perhaps, is that the attack was reenacted as before in an electioneering year.

Official narratives conflicted wildly on whether the Dapchi girls fled the attack or were napped by the assailants. The line trumpeted initially was that the girls fled to safety in the neighbouring settlements, prompting parents to go in desperate but eventually futile search for their embattled wards. Yobe State Police Commissioner Abdulmaliki Sumonu on Tuesday told the media there was thus far no report of any abduction. In the same vein, the spokesman of Operation Lafiya Dole, Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu, was reported saying: “The information so far received is that the principal of the school had dispersed the students on hearing sporadic shooting before the insurgents arrived on the school premises. Many of the students, some of whom are indigenous, had scurried to safety in different directions… but there were cases of looting of food and provisions.”

‘Other than modest lessons in survival shown by the Dapchi girls to have been learnt from the Chibok saga, very little has been learnt by anybody else’

No one got more mixed up apparently than the Yobe State Government in whose domain the Dapchi attack did occur, with officials approbating and reprobating on the incident. Education Commissioner Mohammed Lamin initially said it was only after a headcount of the students the government would be able to say “whether any girls were taken.” Soon after, he was reported saying 94 students went missing, out of which 48 had returned. Twenty-eight, according to him, returned on Tuesday night while 20 more returned on Wednesday morning.

Spokesman for Yobe State Governor, Abdullahi Bego, issued a statement saying 50 girls were unaccounted for even though the Yobe government, according to him, had “no credible information yet as to whether any of the schoolgirls was taken hostage by the terrorists.” Almost too soon thereafter, he issued another statement saying some girls had been “rescued by gallant officers and men of the Nigerian Army from the terrorists who abducted them…(and) are now in the custody of the Nigerian Army.”

But Yobe Governor Ibrahim Gaidam personally tracked back that claim, as he was reported saying during a visit to Dapchi mid-last week that no girl had been rescued. That, perhaps, informed yet another statement by Bego on Thursday recanting his earlier claim of boisterous rescues by the Army. “We issued the (earlier) statement on the basis of information provided by one of the security agencies that is involved in the fight against Boko Haram, and which we had no reason to doubt. We have now established that the information we relied on to make the statement was not credible,” he said.

Meanwhile, the police have insisted there were no abductions, and yet that as many as 111 girls remained unaccounted for. (Recall that the state government said 50.) Speaking with journalists in Damaturu, the state capital, Police Commissioner Sumonu was quoted saying: “Eight hundred and fifteen out of 926 students were physically seen in the school as at Tuesday. There are reports that more girls have returned to the school after the headcount… I asked the school principal if there were abductions or deaths in the school and she said no. I am unaware of the rumours going around.”

It is noteworthy that President Buhari ordered the apparatchik to swiftly take charge of security in Dapchi. That, by all means, was a big leap from the response of former President Jonathan who danced to Azonto vibes in Kano while his principal officials questioned in 2014 that Chibok ever occurred, even on the heels of the incident. Still, the conflicting narratives from Dapchi too closely mirrored the notorious ‘Na only you waka come?… There is God ooo!’ cynicism that dogged the Chibok incident and muddled public view of the magnitude of the security challenge.

The least we should expect to have been learnt from Chibok is the imperative of harmonising and processing official information and statistical detailing for concerted dissemination. Not only does this assuage public anxiety and reassure persons more directly concerned, like the schoolgirls’ parents, that the government has a firm handle on the threat, it also enhances official transparency and boosts public confidence in remedial capacities of government.

With all its terrible failings, the Jonathan government made a wobbly attempt at going that route with its belated establishment of a National Information Centre over the Chibok affair. But the centre suffered fatal dysfunction from its manning structure. Still, the basic idea seems deserving of consideration in the present circumstance. 

Also, there are indications of gross failure of security intelligence in the ongoing war against Boko Haramists, never mind claims of major counter-insurgency strides by lynchpins of the present administration including the President. The Dapchi assailants, according to reports of residents’ accounts, invaded the town in more than 18 gun trucks mounted with high caliber weapons, and they lasted a couple of hours with their raid before they were repelled by security forces backed by military jets. The point here is: couldn’t effective intelligence have headed off such large-scale attack or, at least, interrupt it much earlier than was the case in Dapchi?

Whatever may have become of the ‘safe schools project’ thrown up by the Chibok incident, one urgent imperative from Dapchi until Boko Haram gets finally and effectively vanquished is to relocate all girls schools in the Northeast from remote zones into metropolises that are far more difficult to invade by insurgents.