By OSHALOTO Joseph Tade—
Blank NEWS Online/Nigeria:
Upfront, I sympathize with parents and loved ones of the kidnapped Dapchi schoolgirls. As a Yorùbá man, our sadness over a lost child is deeper than losing them to death. Hence the adage “ọmọ ẹni kú sàn j’ọmọ ẹni nù lọ”. When the whereabouts of one’s child/ren are unknown, the heartache this evokes is simply untold. I can only imagine how distressed the Dapchi iyayes are currently feeling.

Facts however are a stubborn thing. Facts around the objects of our national strength and defense are staggering. They are nagging, too.

From Borno to Zamfara, Benue, Nasarawa via Kogi and elsewhere in the North and South of Nigeria, women hold their heads and cry as their sons and daughters are being molested, raped, kidnapped and killed needlessly.

Our country has been hit times and again by the plague of fundamentalism and banditry that we watched grow – and perhaps nurtured – to very dangerous entities.

How sad that these forces are now clearly many steps ahead of our nationhood. They are ahead of our country’s military and intelligence community.

These are clearly leadership failures that transcend an individual leader, though each of them must bear the statistics of happen during their terms, that say so much about how poorly we have arranged our priorities. It tells of what importance we allocate to the things that really matter; like the sanctity of life, dignity of the human person. The stubborn facts are projecting us as savages. This must be reversed.

Dapchi kidnap will form the latest experiment of our government’s ability and resoluteness to wake up and shake off everything tying us down. Every single one of these schoolgirls represents the delicate but grateful and bright future that must be cared for with every single aspect of our national strength.

The legitimacy and popularity of this administration will be terribly bugged if these girls stay 48 hours longer in the camps of these devils.