simplyolat President Muhammadu Buhari has said meeting
parents of the schoolgirls abducted from
Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno
state, on a regular basis, is not good for his
emotional state .
Lamenting the plight of the parents in an interview
with Chief International Correspondent and host of
CNNi’s nightly global affairs program, Christine
Amanpour, President Buhari said he could not
imagine his own daughter in such situation.
“I saw the families as a group twice. The first time,
they came to visit my wife. The second, they came
as a group to see me, and the less I see them the
better for my own emotional balance,” he said.
“I try to imagine my 14-year-old year old daughter
missing for more than two years. I try to imagine
what condition are they in. A lot of the fathers
would rather see their graves, than imagine them
under such condition.”
He also opposed the idea of showing a proof of life
video to the parents, saying there was no point
raising their hopes when the girls had not been
rescued. During the second anniversary of their
abduction, CNN made public a video of some of the
girls. The video was said to have been sent to
negotiators by their captors. “I have not seen that
video and even if I see it, I will be very careful
about showing it to the family.
There is no point to deliberately raise the hope of
the families if you can’t meet them,” he said. “If we
know where they are, then we can organise to
secure them, but if they have been divided in a
group of five, ten, two all over this region of Lake
Chad commission, that is Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria
and Niger, there is no way we can spontaneously
and simultaneously attack all those locations and
get the girls and the important thing to us is to get
them alive.”