“We are suspecting that Chibok girls are living with the insurgents in bunkers" - Gov Shettima

The Borno State governor, Kassim Shettima,yesterday said that there was every tendency that the female students of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, abducted by members of the Boko Haram sect, in April 2014, were being held in bunkers, inside Sambisa Forest.
The governor, who was represented at the occasion by the Secretary, Borno Elders Forum, Dr Bulama Mala Gubio, while presenting a paper at a two-day post election conference in Abuja, on security and governance, organized by the Savanna Centre, a Non Governmental Organisation, NGO, established by former Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari said;

“We are suspecting that Chibok girls are living with the insurgents in bunkers, I think the military must carry out their operations beyond the surface earth. They (Boko Haram) were also known to have dug tunnels to enable them move from house to house. So, having been left unchallenged for such a long time, such possibility cannot be ruled out which poses serious obstacles within the forest, “the governor added.

“The insurgents used their bases in the Sambisa Forest to launch deadly attacks and make quick retreat to their base which enabled them capture and take over control of all the local government areas bordering Nigeria with Cameroon, Chad and Niger, thus effectively cutting off the three neighbouring countries thereby declaring what they assumed was their independent territory (caliphate).”

“Unless and only if the Sambisa Forest is effectively recovered from the  terrorists shall we think of defeating the Boko Haram and begin to embark on a holistic approach for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the North East. In fact, at several stages the Borno State Government had intervened to reconstruct destroyed schools, health centres, homes, markets and so on, only for the insurgents to attack and destroy them again, “he noted.

The governor also disclosed that Boko Haram killed over 300,000 persons in the region, contrary to the 13,000 dead figure he said, was being bandied by the  media.He disclosed that Borno State alone, has so far lost over 70,000 people in the six-year old insurgency.

He attributed the success of the Boko Haram activities in the North East to what he called “the underfunding of the military”.

Governor Shettima specifically said in spite of the insurgency that ravaged the North East for six years, all the president could do was to send a meager N200 million to Borno State for security, disclosing that the state government, on its own, spent N600 million out of its lean resources and allocations to maintain the same security.

“As a government, we have spent over N600 million but all we have received from the Federal Government is N200 million. The same Federal Government has spent over N2 billion as loan to dancers (entertainers)”, he said

Shettima added that contrary to the claims of the military of successfully liberating the major parts of the North East, a large portion of the area was still being controlled by the insurgents.