FG Berates PDP’s Comment on Freed Chibok Girls, Says Statement Inhuman

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News Monday, May 8th, 2017

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – The Federal Government of Nigeria has described as indecent, inhuman and ill-timed the statement credited to a faction of the PDP criticizing the process that led to the release of the 82 Chibok Girls last weekend.

In a statement issued in Abuja Monday, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, decried that it was patently insensitive for any individual or organization to seek to douse, on the altar of politics, the universal joy that has greeted the release of the 82 girls – the highest number so far freed since their unfortunate abduction under the watch of the PDP over three years ago.

He berated that from the ill-advised statement, it was clear that the PDP, whose incompetence and cluelessness precipitated the Chibok girls crisis in the first instance, was not wishing and praying for it to end with the safe return of the abducted girls.

”In his inaugural address, President Muhammadu Buhari said the Administration cannot claim to have defeated Boko Haram without rescuing the Chibok girls. He also said this government WILL DO ALL IT CAN to rescue them alive.

”If that includes swapping some Boko Haram elements for the girls, so what? Will the PDP rather have the girls stay in perpetual captivity, just to prove a ludicrous point? Didn’t superpower United States engage in negotiations with the Taliban that led to the exchange of five Taliban fighters for US Army – Sgt Bowe Bergdahl in 2014? Didn’t Israel release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011?

”A lot of factors come into play when a nation has to decide whether or not to engage in prisoner/hostage swap. None, however, trounces the sanctity attached to human life and the consideration for the pains of the loved ones of those involved,” Alhaji Mohammed asserted.