Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday said that he could reach out to the Boko Haram sect to release the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls they abducted about two months ago, but regretted that the Federal Government had yet to give him the go-ahead to do so.
Obasanjo, in an interview he granted the Hausa service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) monitored in Kaduna, however, did not say if he had tabled a proposal before the government on his intervention role.
“I have ways of reaching them (Boko Haram) but I have not been given the go ahead”, he added.
The former President, however, expressed reservations that all the schoolgirls would be returned even as he insinuated that the insurgents might free those found to be pregnant or have given birth.
“I believe that some of them will never return. We will still be hearing about them many years from now, some will give birth to children of the Boko Haram members, but if they cannot take care of them in the forest, they may release them”.
He also expressed worry that the girls might have been separated and kept in different locations.
“Do you think they will hold all of them together up till now? The logistics for them to do that, holding over 200 girls together, is too much”, he said.
Mr. Obasanjo’s remarks are likely to unsettle distraught parents, who have endured the past two months without their daughters and have barely received solid information about their whereabouts.
It would be recalled that Obasanjo had tried to negotiate with the insurgents, especially in September 2011 after members of the sect bombed the United Nations headquarters in Abuja.
He flew to Maiduguri, Borno State where he met with relatives of the Boko Haram founder, Mohammed Yusuf, who the police had illegally killed in their custody in 2009.
The meeting, which was facilitated by a prominent northern rights activist, Comrade Shehu Sani, fell through as the Federal Government reportedly rejected the recommendations of the ex-president.
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