April 14: More than 200 girls are abducted from a school in Chibok Village, Borno State, Northeastern Nigeria.
April 30: The #BringBackOurGirls Movement commences a daily “sit-out” to push for the rescue of the abducted girls
May 2: The President sets up a fact-finding committee, “in view of the inconsistent and contradictory information available to government on the Chibok abduction.”
May 4: The President addresses the nation in a “presidential media chat.” It is the first time he is speaking directly to Nigerians regarding the abduction. Clearly he has been compelled to, because by then local efforts (including by the #BringBackOurGirls Nigeria Movement) have attracted international attention, which has seriously embarrassed the president and his government.
May: Throughout May the President calls for international help, and gets a flood of offers of military and intelligence assistance from around the world. He also attends a high-profile security summits on Boko Haram in Paris (May 17).
Also throughout May the world takes up the #BringBackOurGirls campaign: world leaders, celebrities, ordinary people everywhere pose with banners that read: #BringBackOurGirls
June 20: The presidential fact-finding committee submits its report, confirms that the abductions did indeed happen and that 219 girls are still missing.
June 26: News breaks that the President’s aides have hired an international PR agency to rescue his battered reputation, arising from his government’s poor handling of the crisis.
July 12: Campaigner for girl-child education Malala Yousafzai visits Abuja, Nigeria’s capital and meets, first with five of the girls who escaped (July 13), and then with the President (July 14). She convinces the President to meet with the girls and their parents (No, he hasn’t, even though it’s been three months. His wife on the other hand has caused some of the families to be harassed by the police for embarrassing her husband). The campaigner somehow managed to convince the President to meet with the parents and girls.
July 14: Malala Yousafzai delivers a speech in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, in which she reportedly mentions that President Jonathan has agreed to meet with the parents. Recall that this is 91 days since the abduction took place.
July 15: The meeting with the president, scheduled for this day, fails to hold. The Presidency issues a letter to the Chibok Community saying that they were informed that “the parents needed more time to be organized” and rescheduling the event to Tuesday July 22, 2014
July 16: Doyin Okupe, Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs to the President, apparently unaware of the communication between the Chibok community and the President’s office” rushes to town (using the American PR firm, Levick) to accuse the Bring Back Our Girls Movement of “play[ing] politics with the situation and the grief of the parents and the girls and of manipulate[ing] the victims of terrorism for their own benefit, [and] engaging in […] psychological terrorism.”
He also appears on Channels TV to attack Oby Ezekwesili, one of the leaders of the #BringBackOurGirls movement, accusing her of being the one who ordered the Chibok community to not see the President.
(Okupe has already previously demonstrated an obsession with discrediting the movement, and attacking Mrs. Ezekwesili)
July 16: The Chibok Parents issue a statement absolving the #BringBackOurGirls movement of blame and saying that:
1. There was initially no formal invitation to them from the Presidency. They first heard of the planned meeting with the President from a speech Malala delivered to mark her 17th birthday
2. They needed to better prepare for the meeting, and give a chance to other parents (back home in Chibok, hundreds of miles away from Abuja) to attend.
3. They reached out to Malala’s team to communicate to the President their wishes to meet on a new date.
Thank you for this, Tolu. Could you kindly pdf anything that’s pdf-able? The ephemerality of the Internet and such.