CHIBOK GIRLS: FG says PDP’s reaction indecent, inhuman

The Federal Government has condemned the position of a faction of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on the deal leading to the release of another 82 Chibok school girls at the weekend.

The Federal Government had at the weekend announced the release of 82 out of the 195 Chibok schoolgirls, who were still in the custody of Boko Haram, explaining that they were freed in exchange with prisoners of the terrorists group.

However, the Ahmed Makarfi-led faction of the PDP on Sunday, while praising Muhammadu Buhari-led government efforts at rescuing more of the girls, faulted the negotiation with the terrorists, which it said was not the right approach to achieving the objective.

But reacting to PDP’s position in a statement on Monday the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, described the stand of the PDP faction as “indecent, inhuman and ill-timed”.

He added in the statement released by his Special Assistant (SA), Segun Adeyemi, that the ill-advised statement credited to the PDP showed that the PDP, “whose incompetence and cluelessness precipitated the Chibok girls crisis in the first instance, is not wishing and praying for it to end with the safe return of the abducted girls.”

He said, “In his inaugural address, President Muhammadu Buhari said the Administration cannot claim to have defeated Boko Haram without rescuing the Chibok girls. He also said this government will do all it can to rescue them alive.

“If that includes swapping some Boko Haram elements for the girls, so what? Will the PDP rather have the girls stay in perpetual captivity, just to prove a ludicrous point? Didn’t superpower United States engage in negotiations with the Taliban that led to the exchange of five Taliban fighters for US Army Sgt Bowe Bergdahl in 2014? Didn’t Israel release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011?

Read also: Names of 82 released Chibok girls

“A lot of factors come into play when a nation has to decide whether or not to engage in prisoner/hostage swap. None, however, trounces the sanctity attached to human life and the consideration for the pains of the loved ones of those involved.”

Speaking further, Mohammed said that it is clear that the kind of “disdain for human life which the PDP exhibited in its incautious statement is the same reason the poor girls were kidnapped in the first instance, and for which then PDP-controlled Federal Government took what seemed an eternity before even acknowledging the abduction – thus losing critical time for their rescue.

“Since the PDP failed – as it did in everything – to rescue even one of the Chibok girls, the party should hold its peace while this Administration continues to seek the release of all the abducted girls, using every means at its disposal, in addition to working assiduously to end all Boko Haram hostilities.”

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