Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In April last year, 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Nigeria. There was a global outcry and a social media campaign, Bring Back Our Girls, which brought to light the conflict in northern Nigeria but has been otherwise, in my view, ineffective. Some of the girls were forcibly converted and appeared on a horrific Boko Haram video. It is understandable, in that the disappearance of the flight MH370 occurred at the same time, but there was insufficient serious international effort to help find these missing girls, and now we have 500 other women and children who have been kidnapped just in the last few days in northern Nigeria and almost no international outrage. This mass abduction last year was not the first occasion. In April 2013 Boko Haram had already kidnapped another 250 girls. This was the turning point in their method of operation and in their kind of terrorism, which had previously been drive-by shootings and the torching of churches and schools. They are opposed entirely to the population of northern Nigeria receiving an education. Since the April 2013 abduction it is estimated that between 500 to 2,000 women and girls have disappeared, with little action from the Nigerian army. There was a very unimpressive briefing with a lack of passion by the Nigerian High Commissioner here to the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

It seems now that mass kidnappings are the centrepiece of Boko Haram's campaign. The people kidnapped are used as soldiers. The women are used as so-called wives or sex slaves, as bargaining chips as cooks and, now, as suicide bombers. In January this year there was a horrific new development: a 10-year-old girl who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram had explosives strapped to her and was told to march into a market. I do not think she knew what had been strapped to her, and her handlers detonated the explosives, killing 16 people. This horrific organisation is quite willing to use people as cannon fodder like the jihadists who have recently used the poor, deluded Australians—including from my city of Melbourne—as cannon fodder and suicide bombers in northern Iraq. On 7 February this year the Nigerian government announced that elections had been deferred until the end of March. Polls have made it clear that the people of Nigeria are going to boot out this government in protest at the security situation, and since that announcement the Nigerian army seems to have taken a little more action against Boko Haram. The Economist has reported that the hitherto inept Nigerian army is starting to make some progress, taking back about 30 villages from the terrorist group since that announcement in February.

The Nigerian army is cooperating with the armies of Chad and Cameroon and, of course, the Western world is providing considerable international aid to Nigeria. Some of this aid seeks to address problems associated with malnutrition, dirty water and mosquito-borne diseases. This aid bypasses the Nigerian government because of justified Western concerns about corruption. It partially relieves the Nigerian government of having to deal with these issues itself. Thinking that it had been relieved of the need to tackle pressing poverty, President Jonathan did essentially nothing in the month after the girls were kidnapped last year. The kidnapping was initially dismissed as a local issue or, alternatively, that the West had to go and fight Boko Haram. In today's Times of London, Roger Boyes concludes: 'Don't get me wrong, President Jonathan isn't entirely sitting on his hands. He has implemented reforms in agriculture, he has tackled inflation, he has privatised electricity'—there is a lesson for New South Wales!

Whoever wins this weekend's election, the contest is between Jonathan and a former general. They will need to make more urgent and brave actions to change Nigeria. It can be a successful country, but to turn it into one will require—if you will excuse the pun—more than good luck. It needs good leaders. It is good that the West African forces appear to have Boko Haram on the back foot, but we need more international action and less rhetoric if we are really going to put some meaning into that well-meaning international call for bringing back our girls.

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