podcast
CNN One Thing
You’ve been overwhelmed with headlines all week – what's worth a closer look? One Thing takes you into the story and helps you make sense of the news everyone's been talking about. Each Sunday, host David Rind interviews one of CNN’s world-class reporters to tell us what they've found – and why it matters. From the team behind CNN 5 Things.
Did #BringBackOurGirls Teach the Wrong Lessons?
CNN One Thing
Apr 28, 2024
10 years ago, hundreds of Chibok schoolgirls in Nigeria were abducted and held hostage by the terrorist group Boko Haram. The quest to rescue them captured the world’s attention, aided by pleas from high-profile figures and a viral hashtag online. But a decade later, those who escaped are still dealing with the fallout and others are left wondering if they will ever see their loved ones again. In this episode, we hear the story of one survivor and look at the state of girls’ education in the country.
Guest: Stephanie Busari, CNN Senior Editor - Africa
Read more here.
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:07
For the last year, Sudan has been plunged into chaos, ripped apart by a brutal civil war. Countless civilians killed more than 8 million people forcibly displaced from their homes. Widespread hunger with other major conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. It has not gotten the attention many say it deserves. But ten years ago this month, news out of Africa was dominating global headlines.
Anchor
00:00:34
On April 14th, in the northern Nigerian village of Chibok, the notorious terror group Boko Haram kidnaped more than 200 schoolgirls. Their crime going to school, trying to get an education to lift themselves and their nation. In the last month, the entire world stood up and took notice.
David Rind
00:00:56
Question is a decade later, was taking notice enough?
David Rind
00:01:04
My guest this week is CNN senior editor Stephanie Busari. She's based in Lagos, Nigeria, and recently she went back to that very school to unpack the complicated legacy of Bring Back Our Girls from CNN. This is One Thing. I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:01:27
Stephanie, where does this story start for you?
Stephanie Busari
00:01:30
So this story starts for me in April 2014. I was living in London at the time and like everyone else, just incredulous that maybe 300 girls were kidnaped from school. And it was quite personal for me because I went to boarding school briefly in Nigeria. I was born in Nigeria and so it really resonated with me.
David Rind
00:01:56
And can you describe for those who don't remember, like kind of what happened?
Stephanie Busari
00:02:01
Sure. In April 2014, 276 schoolgirls in northeast Nigeria, in a town called Chibok, were kidnaped by Boko Haram insurgents.
Vladimir Dutier
00:02:12
On Monday night, approximately 9:30 p.m., a group of armed men arrived in busses in fans and other vehicles and stormed a government girls college.
Stephanie Busari
00:02:23
These insurgents burst into their school and kidnaped them all.
Vladimir Dutier
00:02:28
Apparently, the armed attackers did engage in a shootout with the guards that were there to protect the school.
Stephanie Busari
00:02:35
And against girls having an education, and they really wanted to send a powerful message to the Nigerian government, because Boko Haram had been waging a kind of campaign of terror in the country.
Michael Vause
00:02:50
The calls to bring back our girls are growing louder inside and outside Nigeria. Rallies were held Tuesday in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Also in Washington, President Barack Obama explained how the US will help Nigeria look for the missing girls.
Stephanie Busari
00:03:06
So this kidnaping obviously very shocking. It sparked a global movement called BringBackOurGirls. And at the time it was very high profile. People like the shadow Obama, global celebrities holding up the poster saying bring back our girls.
Michelle Obama
00:03:24
In these girls. Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes and their dreams. And we can only imagine the anguish their parents are feeling right now.
Stephanie Busari
00:03:37
And it was very touching to see. It was a really the first time I'd seen, African Nigerian girls being advocated for on such a global scale.
David Rind
00:03:50
Yeah, I remember it was like one of the first big hashtags that really kind of went viral on social media and kind of like captured a lot of attention. Right?
Stephanie Busari
00:03:58
Absolutely, absolutely. And it really just came out of a movement that started in Nigeria. There was a local group who were protesting, and at one of those protests, someone shouted, bring back our girls! And it just went viral. Like you said, it just captured the imagination of the world because everybody was shocked and outraged, but they didn't really know what to do. And so it was a comforting thing to be able to say, well, you know, I'm thousands of miles away, but I can join. I can send my voice, I can send a tweet to say, bring back these girls. And for several years we did not hear anything about them.
Becky Anderson
00:04:43
A very good evening from the UAE. It is 7:00 here we are tracking new developments out of Nigeria for you this hour in the kidnaping of more than 200 schoolgirls.
Stephanie Busari
00:04:54
But then CNN obtained a proof of life video in 2016. That was the first time we heard anything about them. Then negotiations happened. 107 of them were released. Since that time, no more of them had been freed by government negotiations. So these girls have been escaping, trickling back. Most of them have children with the Boko Haram fighters. They were forced to marry them. And tragically, 82 of them have never come back. So with the backdrop of 82 girls still missing. We went to Chibok.
Stephanie Busari
00:05:35
So Amina, I'm so happy to see you again.
Stephanie Busari
00:05:38
After we went to Chibok with one of the girls who was freed by the government, and we went back to the school and she really felt it was important for her to be there, to kind of name the ghost, to rest on the ghost of her past.
Stephanie Busari
00:05:55
How have you been,.
Amina
00:06:03
I've been good. I'm free so I'm OK.
Stephanie Busari
00:06:03
You're okay. And now your daughter is how old now?
Amina
00:06:07
She's eight years.
Stephanie Busari
00:06:08
She's eight years old.
Stephanie Busari
00:06:10
It was a very poignant journey. You know, she pointed out the areas where they came in. She remembers it so vividly because it's a trauma that will probably live with her for the rest of her life.
Yana Galang
00:06:29
This is my daughter's cloth. Since ten years, I have been keeping hoping that one day she will come.
Stephanie Busari
00:06:39
We also met a mother whose daughter is one of those 82 girls that I I've told you about.
Yana Galang
00:06:47
We always, wash the clothes, fold it, and then keep it.
Stephanie Busari
00:06:52
And this mother. Her name is Yana Galang. She washes her daughter's clothes often in the hope she's clinging desperately to the hope that one day she will come back. You know, she was 17 when she was taken ten years ago. She's now 27.
Stephanie Busari
00:07:08
So do you believe in your heart? That she's alive?
Yana Galang
00:07:11
I believe she's alive. She's my blood. And I believe she's alive.
Stephanie Busari
00:07:16
Yes. And so one day, you're hoping that she'll walk in.
Yana Galang
00:07:20
Yes. One day she will walk among her family, among her siblings, among her brothers. And come and walk me as a mother. And I pray that God would make that for me.
Stephanie Busari
00:07:31
I asked her, do you really believe to believe in your heart that your daughter will come back? And she said yes.
Yana Galang
00:07:37
My appeal to the world that they're there, they just take concern about it. And they know that. That my daughter is still in the bush.
Stephanie Busari
00:07:46
Do you think that, the government has done enough to try to bring them back?
Yana Galang
00:07:51
Actually, what government has been doing is good. They did enough that they tried their best. But for us, that our daughter is still in the hands of the captors. We need their efforts.
Stephanie Busari
00:08:06
She's keeping that hope alive like many of the parents. Many of the parents actually died. Also of heartbreak. The bank died shortly after the kidnapings happened, just because they could not live with the heartbreak of having their daughters stolen. So that Chibok story is one of many layers of tragedy, and it's a story that I stayed on all those ten years because it's just never really left me.
David Rind
00:08:44
For someone like Yana, who I mean, just hearing that she still thinks of her daughter as alive somewhere out there. But is there any way for her to actually know that or get any kind of closure to this situation?
Stephanie Busari
00:09:00
It's difficult. It's difficult. Successive governments have come and gone in that time, and it seems that it's convenient. They want to move on from this story because nobody wants to admit the failures. Nobody wants to admit also that kidnaping is now rampant in Nigeria.
David Rind
00:09:20
This kind of stuff is still happening.
Stephanie Busari
00:09:22
It's still happening.
Amara Walker
00:09:24
For hundreds of Nigerian parents waiting anxiously. There was good news this weekend. 137 schoolchildren kidnaped from Kaduna earlier this month have been rescued by the Nigerian military. The Kidnapers demanded a ransom of over $600,000.
Stephanie Busari
00:09:44
But now some people who are close to the story who have spoken to said the attention, the global attention, ironically, that the Chibok story got is kind of made way for copycat kidnapings where people think that, well, you know, we're going to try to get that kind of attention and get money.
David Rind
00:10:05
Oh that's interesting. So all this attention on them, they think, hey, we can drive up our prices and this kind of becomes more of a cold business calculation rather than some kind of ideological one.
Stephanie Busari
00:10:17
Absolutely. And that's exactly what we're seeing over the past three years, I've covered story after story of mass school kidnapings, and they're just driven by criminal enterprise. And so it's a feeling of governance. It's a feeling of so many, systematic issues. And so Yonas story, unfortunately, is forgotten when it's kind of in the midst of all of these other problems.
David Rind
00:10:48
And we kind of talked about this, how the international community, they have this big outpouring of support and attention. But then, like so many of these things, unfortunately, the world kind of moves on. But of course, for women and girls in these communities, there are struggles and their lives don't just stop once the West stops looking. So what is the state of girls education in Nigeria right now?
Stephanie Busari
00:11:13
So, the state of education, the girls education is two pronged. So you have in the south of the country, which is very stable. Education is very well regarded and considered to be very important. But in the North the barriers were there with poverty. Then you have beliefs of boys education being prioritized over girls, and marriage is prevalent in the north of Nigeria. And so against that backdrop, you had people advocating for girls to be educated and mothers. I talked to someone, on this Chibok trip who said that mothers who were advocating for their daughters to be educated now felt such a terrible sense of guilt, to say, I actually pushed my daughter into this scenario. And now many parents are just saying, you know what? Let's just get them married. Let's just get them married off. So you're having girls as young as 13, 14, 15 being married.
David Rind
00:12:18
They just don't think the danger is worth it to send their kids to school.
Stephanie Busari
00:12:23
It's not worth it. So it's set back. A lot of gains have been made in educating girls, but of course it's not just girls that are being kidnaped anymore, boys and girls all being kidnaped. Higher education, crime rates, secondary. It's just a ruthless industry now where they will take children en masse and they know that it's going to create emotional outbursts, it's going to create an emotional reaction because why would it not? And that gives them the leverage to negotiate for ransom.
David Rind
00:13:03
Thank you so much Stephanie for staying on this. We really appreciate it.
Stephanie Busari
00:13:07
Thank you so much for having me.
David Rind
00:13:13
Not long after Stephanie and I spoke, the Nigerian Army announced it had rescued one of the Chibok schoolgirls, Lydia Simon, more than a decade after being abducted. More than 80 girls, though, are still missing. You can read more of Stephanie's great reporting over at CNN.com. It's part of our ongoing series on gender inequality called As Equals. We'll leave a link in our show notes.
David Rind
00:13:49
One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Festa miele. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Eliza Anyangwe, Julie Zink and Katie Hinman. We'll be back next week. I'll talk to you then.
