By Benjamin Njoku
Performance poet and journalist, Akeem Lasisi, has called on the Federal Government and other stakeholders to intensify the search for the remaining Chibok Girls in the captivity of Boko Haram.
The award-winning poet does this in his newly released video of ‘Ẹyẹ Ìgbò: For Chibok Girls’, a track off his 2024 album titled ‘Òrèrè: A Gift of Poems’.
The innocent schoolgirls popularly called Chibok Girls were abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok Local Government Area of Borno State, on April 14 2014, making it 11 years after that attack. There were 276 girls in all.
Nigeria has had three Presidents since then; Goodluck Jonathan who was in power in 2014, Muhammadu Buhari and now Bola Tinubu. Efforts made by the successive governments, deploying military might and diplomacy, led to the release of 128 of the victims while the whereabouts of 91 others remain unknown.
In ‘Ẹyẹ Ìgbò: For Chibok Girls’, Lasisi laments the fate of those still in bondage just as he sympathises with their parents and other loved ones who live with the nightmare of their absence.
In the video now on Akeem Lasisi and the Songbirds on YouTube, an affected mother and her two neighbours are seen in a special prayer session for her kidnapped gem, while the poet leads a civilian ‘JTF’ squad into ‘Sambisa’ forest, looking for the captives. An interplay of the sorrowfully chanted ‘ẹyẹ igbo’ song, taken off a Yoruba folklore, and Lasisi’s critical poem establishes the endless painful anticipation the victims’ parents and many other concerned people have for the return of the remaining Chibok Girls. When the album was released last year, Lasisi had said on the track: “I still feel pain like many other concerned people. The best way to feel what the remaining abductees and their parents are going through is to imagine the tragedy happening to one. Imagine having one’s daughter or son – or both in the jaws of terrorists, somewhere in the anonymous bush, not just for a month or a year, but for 10 long years. It is extremely painful.”
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