3rd July, 2014
By Gordon Brown
It’s not only the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls that need our help, but every girl that the terrorists are denying an education
Today (yesterday), when Nigeria’s most prominent female leader, finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, addresses UK members of parliament, she will reveal that the search for the 200 schoolgirls – kidnapped 10 weeks ago simply because they wanted an education – is being stepped up with a greater and better-equipped Nigerian army presence to take on the terrorist group Boko Haram in Borno and other northern states. In a debate in the House of Commons, I will ask Britain, the US and other allies to convert generalised offers of help into more practical support with greater air cover, military surveillance and helicopter back-up, to hunt down the terrorists who abducted the girls.
In a new outrage this week, Boko Haram terrorists attacked street markets in the Borno capital of Maiduguri, following a spate of recent bombings that targeted churches, shopping malls, a medical school and a hotel. And the hostage crisis is not now confined to Nigeria, spreading into three other African states: Chad, Niger and Cameroon. I will also ask the UK government to support this week’s plan from Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to co-ordinate international anti-terrorist capability in the fight against Boko Haram and al-Qaida-linked groups.
But the crisis for girls now extends beyond the fate of the abducted girls and the rescue mission. There are currently no plans to reopen hundreds of schools in northern Nigeria, and Borno state schools are considered too vulnerable to terrorist assaults for children to attend. But a few terrorists must never be allowed to blackmail a whole nation. That is why over the past two months I have been working with Nigerian leaders to design a safe schools initiative, the details of which will be launched in London today, to guard and fortify 5,000 schools in the remote areas of northern Nigeria, as a first step to making all Nigerian schools more secure from terrorist incursions.
In the last few weeks, a group of military and civilian experts, including former leaders in anti-terrorism from the Metropolitan police, have visited Nigeria, recommending enhanced security measures. An appeal has been issued by A World at School to raise some of the estimated $100m needed to provide security guards and basic fortifications, along with offering parents access to the best mobile communications to warn them of impending attacks. So far $20m has already been pledged by the Nigerian government; Norway has offered funds; and the Nigerian business community in Britain has pledged an initial £1m. But because current donor contributions are not sufficient to cover the thousands of schools in need of security, I will ask in the commons debate that the UK government allocates more.
I will also show that it is not just in Nigeria that this initiative must take off, but in other countries where terrorist groups are determined to peddle their extreme religious dogma that girls should not be at school. We must do everything in our power to prevent schools, which should be safe havens, becoming theatres of war.
The abductions and threats to a schoolgirl’s right to education come in the wake of a series of violations of girls’ rights being reported globally – rapes and murders of young girls in India, so-called “honour killings” of Pakistan girls who marry against family wishes, genital mutilation of girls in preparation for child marriages across the world; and the ever-present reality that seven million school-age girls are working full time, often in slave labour conditions, many of them trafficked out of their home country when they should be at school, or forced into early marriages against their will. There is a clear pattern to the continued abductions, rape violations, slave conditions and forced marriages. It is an abject failure to take the rights of females seriously.
We must win the struggle for girls’ rights being waged against Boko Haram in Nigeria. On one side there are terrorists, murderers, rapists and cowards, hell bent on justifying their acts of discrimination and depravity against girls in terms of their religious creeds. On the other, defiant, brave-beyond-belief young people, desperately fighting for a future and in need of our support.
In the end there will be only one winner in the battle between discrimination and women’s rights. But the emergency faced by girls in Nigeria today shows why it is now an urgent and inescapable duty on our part to help ensure that victory happens quickly, decisively and without destroying irreparably the lives and dreams of millions of innocent young girls.
•Brown, the last UK prime minister, wrote this article in the UK Guardian newspaper of Wednesday, 2 July, 2014.