Boksburg Advertiser joins ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign
In a show of solidarity against the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria, the staff members have joined the Twitter campaign aimed at encouraging the return of 276 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls.
Apparently the #BringBackOurGirls campaign began with Nigerian lawyer Ibrahim M Abdullahi, who tweeted the phrase on April 23, and has now reached a global interaction.
Scores of people worldwide have lent their support to the social media campaign urging military intervention to recover the schoolgirls.
It is said that they (the schoolgirls) are in the hands of a very desperate group, which is extremely irrational and difficult to deal with and utterly merciless in the example it has shown in the past.
According to news reports, back on April 14, Islamist militant group Boko Haram stormed the school, which had been re-opened for students to take their final exams.
The group, which opposes “Western” values, such as the education of girls, took the girls and disappeared with them. Families now fear that their loved ones may have been sold into slavery.
Some of the schoolgirls captured by the group have been paraded on video.
The video shows the clearly terrified girls wearing black and grey full-length hijabs and praying in an undisclosed rural location.
Wearing trademark military fatigues and orange bobble hat, Abubaker Shekau, the leader of the Islamic terror group Boko Haram, chuckled and confirmed his prisoners; the vast majority of them Christians had been forced to convert to Islam.
Shekau is reported to have said “they (the girls) would remain as his hostages unless jailed terrorists were freed.
US experts assisting the search for the kidnapped girls are closely examining a new video for clues to the girl’s whereabouts, according to a report.
Nigeria’s government has been criticised for its lack of immediate response to the kidnapping that triggered international outrage. According to a report, it acted after mounting global condemnation at Shekau’s threats to sell the girls as slaves.
However, according to media reports, Nigerian police are offering a more than R4-million reward to anyone who can help them to find the missing children after Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, said he would sell them as slaves.
Thousands of South Africans and the rest of the world have expressed their outrage at the news of the abduction of the schoolgirls by the militant outfit Boko Haram.
Some have even marched on the Nigerian diplomatic headquarters to express their disquiet at the lethargic reaction of the West African country’s government to the kidnappings.
