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CONTENT
Set in 1,000 acres of lush grassland, the sprawling
campus of the American University of Nigeria
represents everything that the Islamist militants of
Boko Haram oppose. Since opening a decade ago, its
stated aim for its 1,400 students is to provide a US-
standard education for “Nigeria’s and Africa’s future
leaders” – be they Christian or Muslim, male or
female.
Yet among the university’s new autumn intake, one
group of students knows all too well the ruthlessness
with which Boko Haram enforces its mantra that
“Western education is sinful”. The shy, quiet girls on
the university’s new “Chibok Scholarship” are from a
group of 58 who escaped during Boko Haram’s mass
schoolgirl abduction in April, when some 276 female
pupils were snatched from the Chibok Boarding
School.
Since September, the university has enrolled 21 of the
escapees as full-time students for free – in a bold bid
to continue the education that their kidnappers
sought to deny them.
“I feel very excited to have a chance to be part of this
university and to continue my education,” said
Anna, 19, one of the scholarship girls, in an
interview by telephone with The Sunday Telegraph
last week. “I am studying science now and I hope to
become a doctor after graduating.”
Indeed, had Anna remained in Chibok, she might
be contemplating a very different future right now.
For only last Thursday, Boko Haram militants
attacked the town yet again, sending its residents
fleeing into the bush once more and reviving
memories of that dreadful night when so many of
their daughters went missing.
Anna, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym,
is still reluctant to talk about the abduction itself,
during which a number of girls managed to leap
from the trucks that spirited them away. However,
she is well aware how close she came to appearing in
the chilling “class photo” that emerged a month
later, when Boko Haram released video images of her
classmates lined up under a tree at a secret location
in the Nigerian bush.
Since those images were broadcast around the world,
nothing more has been heard from them, and despite
numerous claims of ceasefires and prisoner swaps,
many believe the militants intend to keep them as
bush wives.
“We pray for our friends every day and we hope they
will go back home soon,” she said. “But for myself, I
try to forge ahead and forget about the past.”
In recent weeks, though, forgetting about the threat
from Boko Haram has become rather less easy. The
scholarship girls’ new campus home, which was
founded by Atiku Abubakar, a US-educated former
vice-president, lies on the outskirts of Yola, a city of
300,000 near Nigeria’s mountainous eastern border
with Cameroun. The capital of Adamawa State, it
has so far been spared Boko Haram’s violence, which
has been at its worst in towns like Chibok, some 200
miles further north in neighbouring Borno State.
But over the last two months, Yola’s population has
nearly doubled overnight as hundreds of thousands
of people have fled a major push by Boko Haram
into northern Adamawa. In early November, the
group seized Mubi, a city of 100,000 that is just 100
miles north of Yola, burning down churches,
declaring Sharia law and renaming it as
Madinatul Islam, or “City of Islam” in Arabic.
Such is the influx of people fleeing into Yola that even
the city’s main Catholic Cathedral has become a
temporary shelter. Those camped in its precincts talk
of how Boko Haram gunmen rooted out Christians
from Mubi by asking them to recite parts of the
Koran. Anyone who could not was ordered to flee on
pain of death.
“The Boko Haram guys came into Mubi on
motorbikes and started shooting everywhere,
chanting Allah Akhbar and saying they were here
to impose Sharia,” said Malachy Tizhe, a 53-year-old
college lecturer who is now a refugee in Yola. “They
targeted only the Christians and the Christian shops.
As a man of God, I tell you, it was completely
terrifying.”
For Boko Haram, the latest incursion is just another
bid to expand its empire, which now extends across a
vast swathe of north-east Nigeria that also includes
the city of Bama, north of Chibok, which fell in early
September. The militants now hold sway over an
estimated two million people, and continue to spread
terror elsewhere. Last week, a suicide bomber
disguised in school uniform killed 48 students at a
school in Potiskum on the western edge of their
fiefdom.
The push into Adamawa has gone largely
unreported outside Nigeria, even though its anti-
Christian element has close parallels with Isil’s
campaigns in northern Iraq. It has, however, been
viewed with alarm by Western diplomats, who say it
shows the Nigerian army is still unable to contain
Boko Haram, and that if anything, things are now
worse than they were six months ago, when the
kidnapping of the girls first brought the insurgency
to world attention.
“The overall picture is negative, and it is fair to say
that the Nigerian army has not done particularly
well,” said one Western diplomat.
During the fall of Mubi, for example, there were
widespread reports of soldiers ditching their uniforms
and fleeing. In a sign of their growing confidence,
the insurgents also recently stormed the nearby town
of Vimtim, home to none other than the chief of
Nigeria’s defence staff, Alex Badeh, where they made
a point of ransacking his palatial mansion. It was
seen as a deliberate snub to his widely-reported
claim two weeks before that a ceasefire deal had
been reached.
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