File photo: Chibok girls
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 today April 14, 2025 the 11th year of the attack.
Nigeria has had three Presidents since then — Goodluck Jonathan who was in power in 2014, Muhammadu Buhari and now Bola Tinubu.
Efforts made by all, deploying military might and diplomacy, led to the release or return of some of the victims but a good number are still being held.
As of April 2024, ‘Premium Times’ reported that, of the 276 girls seized by Boko Haram, 128 had regained freedom in batches over nine years, while the whereabouts of 91 others remain unknown.
Official figures, however, later indicated that 187 had been released.
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 & 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 of 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 pained 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. Imagining 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.”
He, however, noted that producing the track for Chibok girls was a source of relief to him because making a case for such embattled young ones was a debt that whoever had a voice should pay one way or the other.
