The president promises to visit Chibok only when the remaining abducted girls are freed.
President Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday finally met with the Chibok school girls who escaped from their Boko Haram abductors and reassured them that his administration was doing everything humanly possible to rescue their colleagues and return them safely to their parents.
He also said Chibok or other communities in the North-East ravaged by insurgent activities would be the first beneficiaries of the Victims’ Support Fund, the Presidential Initiative for the North-East, the Safe Schools Initiative and other developmental programmes which the Federal Government was evolving to address the damage, losses, setbacks, economic and social dislocations of the region.
Mr. Jonathan gave the assurance during a meeting with the parents of the abducted girls, some of the girls who escaped from their abductors and leaders of the Chibok community at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
The girls had been abducted April 14.
At the closed-door meeting were the parents of the girls, service chiefs, the Senate President, David Mark, Governors Kashim Shettima of Borno State and Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State as well as some ministers.
The meeting, which began at about 11a.m at the Banquet Hall came about 100 days after the over 200 female secondary students were kidnapped from Government Secondary school, chibok.
Mr. Jonathan had assured the Pakistani teenage girls’ education activist, Malala Yousafzai during her visit to Nigeria last week that he would meet with the girls who escaped and their parents.
The meeting earlier slated for last Tuesday was cancelled at the last minute when government officials went to pick the girls and their parents from Hilton Hotel only to discover they had returned to Chibok.
The president appealed to his guest for patience, understanding and cooperation.
“Anyone who gives you the impression that we are aloof and that we are not doing what we are supposed to do to get the girls out is not being truthful,” Mr. Jonathan stated.
“Our commitment is not just to get the girls out; it is also to rout Boko Haram completely from Nigeria. But we are very, very mindful of the safety of the girls. We want to return them all alive to their parents. If they are killed in any rescue effort, then we have achieved nothing.”
The president said that although he was yet to visit Chibok in the aftermath of the abductions, his heart was constantly with its traumatized parents and people, and his desire was to visit them when their daughters had been freed and they could receive him with smiling faces of joy, rather than with tears of anguish.
He said, “Our duty now is to take all relevant steps to recover our girls alive and our primary interest is getting them out as safely as possible. I will not want to say much, but we are doing everything humanly possible to get the girls out.
“This is not the time for talking much. This is the time for action. We will get to the time that we will tell stories. We will get to the time that we will celebrate and I assure you that, by God’s grace, that time will come soon,” President Jonathan told them.
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