4th May, 2014
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan on Sunday said that his government is seeking help from US President Barack Obama to overcome the country’s current security challenges.
Nigeria has also approached other world powers, including France, Britain and China, for the same help, Jonathan said in a radio-television live interview in Abuja.
“We are talking to countries we think can help us out… The United States is number one. I have talked to President Obama at least twice” regarding assisting Nigeria with its security challenges, he said.
He did not say when exactly he opened the talks with the US president and other world leaders.
“We will get over our (security) challenge,” he stated.
Jonathan dismissed speculations that his government was negotiating with Boko Haram Islamist extremists, saying that it is faceless group.
“You don’t negotiate with somebody you don’t know… The issue of negotiation has not come up,” he said.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan Sunday vowed that his government will ensure the release of the 223 schoolgirls abducted by suspected Boko Haram Islamists.
“We promise that anywhere the girls are, we will surely get them out,” Jonathan said in a live radio-television media chat in the nation’s capital Abuja, monitored in Lagos.
“This is a trying time for this country… it is painful,” he said, and pleaded for the cooperation of parents, guardians and the local communities in the rescue efforts.
He said that Nigerians were “justified if they expressed their anger against government” over the perceived slowness in rescuing the girls who were kidnapped from their hostel in Chibok town, in northeast Borno state, on April 14.
He assured that the “disappearance” of the girls will not be another world “mystery.”
“Their disappearance cannot be another mystery the world cannot resolve,” he said, in reference to the Malaysian aircraft that has not been found despite the vast multi-national search deployed.