Abuja – Some of the schoolgirls abducted by militant group Boko Haram may never return home, Nigeria’s influential former president Olusegun Obasanjo said, in some of the most pessimistic comments yet on their fate from a member of the country’s elite.
Obasanjo said President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration had taken too long to respond to the April mass abduction. Once Jonathan’s mentor and one of his strongest political allies, Obasanjo turned against him last December.
“I believe that some of them will never return. We will still be hearing about them many years from now,” Obasanjo told the BBC’s Hausa-language radio service on Thursday, in comments echoed in an interview with Nigeria’s Premium Times website.
The warning from Obasanjo, who stepped down in 2007 and nurtured Jonathan’s own rise to power, will dismay parents who have now waited 60 days for any news of their daughters, taken from a school in the village of Chibok in northeast Nigeria.
Obasanjo’s criticisms underline divisions within his and Jonathan’s ruling People’s Democratic Party, heightened by the failure of the government and army to rescue the girls and by political jostling ahead of presidential elections due in 2015.
“If you get all of them back, I will consider it a near-miracle … Do you think they (Boko Haram) will hold all of them together up till now? The logistics for them to do that, holding over 200 girls together, is too much,” Obasanjo said, according to Premium Times.
“If the administration had acted quickly, we could have rescued them,” he said…
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