Former Minister of Education, Dr Oby Ezekwesili and other key
members of the Bring Back Our Girls Group have responded to
the letter by Defence Spokesperson, Gen Chris Olukolade in
which he accused them of engaging in hate campaign against
him and the military.
In its response dated May 19th, the group stressed that it was
only demanding the military to find the missing Chibok girls
and is in no way engaging in any hate campaign against
them. The group stated that no single individual determines
the direction of the group as their decisions is based on a
collective ideology. The letter reads in part...see it after the
cut...
"We acknowledge receipt of your correspondence dated
14 May 2015 and noted your concerns about our
advocacy movement #BringBackOurGirls which has
since April 30, 2014 been advocating for rescue of the
219 #ChibokGirls abducted 400 days ago at their
school on April 14, 2014. We especially noted the
following four key messages in your letter to our
Movement. We wish to respond to the four key issues
raised in your letter as follows: Our #BringBackOurGirls
movement is a Citizens- led movement with open
membership of all citizens who choose to identify with
the cause of our 219 #ChibokGirls. No one individual
or group of persons within the Movement can
determine the direction or position of our Movement on
the issues we advocate.
This is because, the basis of all our decisions is
Collectivism. Moreover, both our Movement and our
members are guided by a set of Core Values of Hope,
Unity, Motivation, Affability, Nationalism, Integrity,
Transparency, Empathy, Equity, Discipline and Sacrifice
(HUMANITEEDS) in our advocacy. In our public and
private communication, we are also guided by our rule
of highest respect for adherence to the sanctity of facts
or empirical evidence rather than anecdotes. Our
communications- statements, briefs, member
representations – all pass through one of the strongest
internal quality control process to ensure accuracy in
our messages.
Therefore, we wish to strongly assure you that
#BringBackOurGirls has never and will never be
susceptible to the kind of influence of any one or group
of individual(s) engaging in a “hate campaign against
you or our military”. Such act would contradict our
Core Values and our strictly empirical advocacy for the
Government and military to deliver on their duty. Thus,
our singularity of purpose remains the rescue of our
#ChibokGirls and all other abducted victims of the
North East terrorist scourge. We shall continue to be
civil and professional in our advocacy as we have
widely been acclaimed to be since it commenced more
than a year ago.
As a Citizens’ movement, #BringBackOurGirls is a
demand for accountability from especially our Federal
Government which has the constitutional duty for
security of all citizens. In shaping our demand, we rely
on publicly available news from your Directorate as
well as all known credible media platforms. In
furtherance of our civic duty to be eternally vigilant we
launched our Accountability Tools for rigorously
monitoring, organizing and analyzing all news reports
on the counter insurgency war in order to draw out key
issues on which we could engage as citizens with our
Government to help improve the prospects of success
of the military efforts.
As earlier stated be reassured that all our statements
and posts on social media conveying the results of our
Monitoring/Accountability Initiatives have to undergo
stringent quality control processes. It is after these
that they are released with utmost sense of
responsibility and a readiness to defend our position
with evidence. We therefore stand by all our analyses
and assessments as conveyed in our statements. This
explains why, so far, we have never had to recant,
deny, or apologize for any statements we have made in
the more than one year of our advocacy. Nevertheless,
we are open to receiving any specific instances or
episodes of factual inaccuracy resulting from our
monitoring, analysis, assessment, questions, scrutiny
and statements.
We also recall our meeting of the 6th May 2014 with
you and the Chief of Defense Staff team at the Defense
Head Quarters. We had at that meeting agreed that the
military will act in ways consistent with civil-military
relations and democratic accountability by hosting us
to a regular meetings to discuss the progress of your
rescue mission for our girls and more broadly, the
prosecution of the counter-insurgency war. It is
regrettable that subsequently following that agreement,
none of such meetings ever happened again and that
instead, our attempt to participate in your National
Information Center briefings was frustrated and then
prohibited.”the letter read
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