The leader of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that abducted hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria six years ago, has claimed responsibility for the mass abduction of students in north-western Katsina state last week.
In an audio tape released on Tuesday, Abubakar Shekau said: “Our brothers were behind the abduction in Katsina.”
Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their school dormitory in Chibok, in north-eastern Borno state, in April 2014 and about 100 are still missing. The group has also taken other schoolchildren as well as thousands of people across north-east Nigeria and has recently expanded into the country’s north-west.
There is doubt over the direct involvement of Boko Haram in the latest mass abduction, however. Shekau’s statement lacked detail, and officials in Katsina have already received ransom demands from a group of bandits that witnesses said were responsible.
One western official working in counter-terrorism in the region said it was possible bandits may have transferred some or all of the kidnapped schoolboys to the extremists in return for money, weapons or other resources.
Across the entire Sahel region, there are close relations between armed criminals, traffickers and Islamist extremists.
More details have emerged of Friday’s attack. Musa Adamu, 18, was sleeping in the school’s dormitory when he heard gunshots.
“The sound got louder, then I ran and jumped out of the window and over the fence of the school and ran along with many others into the forest. We spent the night there, because we were afraid to come back to the school,” he said.
Another student was unable to flee the initial attack and was robbed.
“Two of the gunmen broke into our hostel and asked us to give them our phones. I told them I had no phone, then they collected our money, then broke open our lockers and took our soaps, skin creams, milk and biscuits,” said Hassan Al Bashir.
“The gunmen then started shouting that we should all go outside, but as we were going I sneaked and hid and that was how I escaped them.’’
Samatu Aliyu was forced to march into the forest by the attackers with hundreds of others, but managed to escape and found his way back to Kankara after 36 hours.
“We walked from that night to the morning in the forest without shoes. Most of us had feet that were bleeding and there was nothing to eat. We only drank muddy water, and at some point, they left me behind and turned away, and so I ran and walked back alone,” Aliyu said.
The attack has sparked anger in the largely poor and rural region.
Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, who is from Katsina, condemned the “cowardly … attack on innocent children”.
Jamilu Isah, a resident of Kankara, said the town was “in mourning”.
“Our mothers are still crying everywhere you go in the town. People are not happy. We feel the government has abandoned us … we just want them to bring our boys back,” he said.
Kidnappings for ransom by bandits have become commonplace across much of the north-west in recent years, with frequent ambushes on roads, as well as fatal robberies targeting cattle and food.
Towns close to forests stretching across north-west Nigeria and into Niger have been the most vulnerable to attacks.
According to Amnesty International, 1,126 people were killed by bandits in Nigeria between January and June this year.
While “banditry” encompasses a range of criminal activity, many of the recent large-scale armed attacks are suspected to have been carried out by assailants from the semi-nomadic Fulani community.
The attack in Katsina will put further pressure on Buhari and his government, which have failed to address the endemic insecurity in much of Nigeria.
Successive military efforts have failed to destroy Boko Haram and Shekau has been reported dead on multiple occasions.
“The Buhari administration has not responded to this situation with the urgency, seriousness and tact it requires. Different military operations have been launched, but it’s clear that all of them are understaffed, under-skilled and underfunded,” Bulama Bukarti, an extremism expert and analyst at the Tony Blair Institute, said.
On Friday 11, December, 2020 the animation arm of Hollywood company, Walt Disney, unveiled a list of content it plans to release and projects it will work on in the coming year.
Disney hinted at a collaboration with a pan-African entertainment entity, Kugali Media, founded by creatives from Nigeria and Uganda.
This partnership will birth an adaptation of its comic book titled, Iwájú, a Yoruba term which roughly translates to ‘The Future’. According to the announcement, the animation will be set in Lagos, Nigeria.
Apparently, the comic book was published in 2019 — although we can’t confirm if it’s commercially available in print — and the artists have since been eyeing a Disney adaptation as gathered from a BBC interview.
In the words of one of the authors of Iwájú, “most of what you find out there about Africa is being told by non-Africans, and it was crucial to us that Africans tell their own stories.”
The chapterisation of the sci-fi book touches on and seeks to correct the global perception of Africa as a country instead of a continent. It, thus, brought onboard artists from different parts of the continent to portray their different cultures. Hence, reflecting different African mythologies.
The project is reportedly funded through crowdfunding £25,000 from across the world.
Having eventually gotten Disney’s attention, the production of the book adaptation — currently at the visual development stage — will begin in 2021 and will debut on its streaming service, Disney+ in 2022.
Meanwhile, this is not the first African story pitch to have gotten Disney’s attention. In July 2018, the company announced interest in Sadé, the fairytale story of an African princess that, through the help of newly-developed magical powers, saved her kingdom. However, there has been no further news on the project.
Clearly, Africans delving into animation do not only bring past histories to life — like Nigerian-made Lady Buckit and the Motley Mopsters did — they also go-ahead to bring myths believed to only exist on the continent to global knowledge while displaying their rich and diverse cultures.
If the fear of bringing a Hollywood touch into the movie can be allayed, it would be because of the succinct details reported to be in the comic book. While it has a futuristic theme, inventions portrayed in the book still reflect the adoption of African indigenous tools.
But one significant feature of incredible movie adaptations is the eventual disparity between the movie and the book. Except for bad adaptations, the movie usually comes out to be a much more refined version of the book after it passes through scriptwriting, production and editing.
Although, if Iwájú makes it to Disney+ before public access to the book, the cinematic touch might affect how the book is eventually seen.
Given precedence, the book already seems to be a great source material which Disney has the budget to bring to life.
Worthy of note is the fact that Nigeria’s animation industry is still in its infancy and has been facing a number of challenges. A notable example is the animation project, titled Sadé, which, for undisclosed reasons, did not make it to the big screens.
While this increasing global interest may boost the morale of African scriptwriters, we could also see more renown movie studios working with indigenous filmmakers on globally accepted cinematic content.
Parents in northern Nigeria are desperately waiting for information about their sons after an attack on a boarding school on Friday; more than 300 boys are reported missing. Nigeria's defence ministry says the whereabouts of the so-called bandits are known, and the military is trying to bring the boys back home safely. But there’s anger that the abduction happened at all. Some of the boys who escaped spoke about their ordeal. Al Jazeera’s Barbara Angopa reports.
Older people have suffered in unique ways from the conflict that has raged for almost a decade in Northeast Nigeria, with many starved or slaughtered in their homes or left to languish and die in squalid, unlawful military detention, Amnesty International said in a new report today.
“When Boko Haram has invaded towns and villages, older men and women have often been among the last to flee, leaving them particularly exposed to the armed group’s brutality and repression – amounting to war crimes and likely crimes against humanity. This has included torture, being forced to witness killings and abductions of their children, as well as looting resulting in extreme food insecurity,” said Joanne Mariner, Director of Crisis Response at Amnesty International.
“Nigeria’s military, in turn, has repeatedly shot older people to death in their own homes during raids on villages in Boko Haram-controlled areas. Thousands of older people have been denied dignity in hellish conditions in military detention, with many hundreds of them dying in squalor. These, too, amount to war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity.”
Living under Boko Haram’s repression
Many villages in areas under Boko Haram control are disproportionately populated by older people who are unable to flee or who choose to stay and continue working their land.
In these villages, older people face threats from all sides. Boko Haram loots their property and often restricts older women’s movement, making it harder for families to earn money and feed themselves. Boko Haram also abducts or kills their children and grandchildren, and sometimes tortures or kills the older people themselves.
“Boko Haram… asked why I was still around when others had run away… I told them it was my house and I was not scared of dying. Some of them said instead of killing me, they’d put me in permanent pain. They brought out their knife and stabbed me in my foot, leaving a big gash,” said an 80-year-old woman from a village in Michika local government area (LGA), Adamawa State.
On 28 November 2020, Boko Haram killed at least 43 farmworkers near Koshebe village, in Borno State, mostly with machetes or knives; dozens more civilians from the area remain missing. Amnesty International interviewed a 65-year-old man who was among those captured; he was on a one-week contract for farm labour, as he said the food assistance his family receives in displacement is irregular and insufficient to feed them. Boko Haram spared and released the man, but murdered two of his sons. “Those boys, they’re the ones who help me stay alive,” the man said. Boko Haram had murdered another of his sons five years earlier, during an attack that forced his family to flee their village in Mafa LGA.
Boko Haram’s looting of harvests and livestock, combined with the military’s severe restrictions on aid access, has resulted in extreme food insecurity for older people, with Amnesty International receiving reports of many dying of starvation. In September 2020, the UN Secretary-General indicated that Northeast Nigeria was at risk of famine, with “alarming levels of food insecurity and hunger”.
Attacks on civilians and unlawful detention
In its operations against Boko Haram, Nigeria’s military frequently fails to distinguish combatants from civilians and at times even deliberately targets civilians – a war crime.
Amnesty International found that many older people with limited mobility are unable to flee and have been shot and killed or seriously injured when soldiers spray bullets through houses. Others have burned to death inside their homes when the military torched villages perceived to support Boko Haram.
A man in his late 50s from a village in Bama LGA, Borno State, described a Nigerian military attack on his village: “They came in the night… My father was an older man – more than 75. I said we should run to the bush. He said he couldn’t, he was too old… We came back, around 2 a.m. He had bullets all in his body. We took the body to the farm area, and we buried it there.”
Older people are not spared the military’s widespread unlawful detention of people fleeing Boko Haram areas – even without any evidence that the person was linked to the armed group, much less involved in violence. Amnesty International interviewed 17 older men and nine older women who were unlawfully detained – for periods ranging from four months to more than five years – in unfathomably inhumane conditions in Maiduguri’s infamous Giwa Barracks and other sites.
Severe overcrowding, scarce food and water, extreme heat, infestation by parasites and insects, and lack of access to adequate sanitation and health care are among the litany of violations at Giwa. While there have been improvements in recent years, the conditions remain inhumane and, from 2013 to 2017, were so extreme that they amounted to torture for everyone detained there. Older detainees described how the grossly inadequate sanitation meant they frequently urinated or defecated on themselves – an assault on their basic dignity.
Amnesty International estimates that, in the context of the Boko Haram crisis, at least 10,000 people have died in custody since 2011, many of them in Giwa Barracks. The organization reviewed more than 120 images of corpses brought from the barracks to a local mortuary, and spoke to individuals with insider knowledge who estimated that 15-25% of those who have perished are older men. This is disproportionately high, as older men appear to account for no more than 4% of the population in Northeast Nigeria. In April 2017 alone, 166 corpses were transferred from Giwa to the mortuary.
Displacement and humanitarian response
The report also examines the humanitarian response to the conflict, and calls for older people to be fully included in the design and implementation of humanitarian programmes to assist the war’s displaced. Humanitarian agencies estimate that older people account for around 150,000 of the 2.1 million people displaced by the conflict in Northeast Nigeria.
In displacement camps, the failure to ensure that humanitarian aid is adequate and reaches some of the most at-risk people, including older people, has led to the violation of their human rights.
Amnesty International spoke to older people from 17 camps across Borno State and none of them had received targeted assistance as an older person. They felt invisible or as if they were treated as a “burden”. Some reported having to beg just to have enough food and medicine to survive. Others said they were forced to go without essential medication.
Many older women in particular face further challenges as they care for grandchildren whose parents were killed, abducted, or detained by Boko Haram or the Nigerian military. Gender discrimination and patriarchal norms in Northeast Nigeria pose additional barriers to older women's participation in processes that impact their lives. “Nobody is hearing us, nobody is seeing us,” one older woman told the organization.
Sustained data collection and analysis is the first step towards ensuring inclusion of older people. Nigerian authorities and humanitarian organizations should follow existing standards and practices by systematically engaging older people – including older women, older people with disabilities, and older people living alone – in assessments and programme design.
“All too often, older people have been ignored in aid provision in Northeast Nigeria. Inclusion means respecting the rights of people with different needs and risks, including those associated with ageing. It is time to stop treating older people as an afterthought,” said Osai Ojigho, Director of Amnesty International Nigeria.
Background
International law does not provide a global definition of what constitutes an “older person”. It is often defined as age 60 or older, including in a regional human rights treaty signed by Nigeria, but the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has promoted a context-specific approach, which Amnesty International agrees responds better to individual rights. In the context of Northeast Nigeria, Amnesty International has included people in their 50s, also taking into account their self-identification as an “older person”.
For this report, Amnesty International carried out field and remote research between November 2019 and October 2020, and interviewed 62 older women and 71 older men affected by the conflict. It also interviewed representatives of international and local humanitarian organizations operating in Northeast Nigeria, as well as witnesses to atrocities against older people, hospital staff, and prison staff in a facility where people are detained amid the conflict.
The research for this report builds on close to a decade of Amnesty International’s work on the conflict, including previous reporting on crimes by Boko Haram and by the Nigerian military. Hundreds of Amnesty International interviews from prior research contribute to this report’s analysis, including more than 140 interviews with people formerly detained in Giwa Barracks.
Nigeria may be on the verge of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, the health minister warned Thursday, as another official said the country expects to roll out a vaccine by April next year.
Osagie Ehanire, speaking at a news conference in the capital, Abuja, said 1,843 cases were recorded last week compared with 1,235 two weeks before that.
"We may just be on the verge of a second wave of this pandemic," he said. His comments came a day after South Africa said it had officially entered a second wave.
Ehanire, in a weekly briefing by Nigeria's COVID-19 task force, said the rise in cases was mostly driven by an increase in infections within communities and, to a lesser extent, by travelers entering Nigeria.
He said he had ordered the reopening of all isolation and treatment centers that had been closed because of falling patient numbers.
Nigeria, with a population of about 200 million people, has had more than 71,000 confirmed cases and nearly 1,200 deaths as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Looking ahead to a vaccine, Faisal Shuaib, executive director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), said Nigeria planned to access one through the COVAX initiative backed by the World Health Organization.
"We are on course to access safe and efficacious COVID-19 vaccines in the first quarter of 2021," he said.
The health minister later in the briefing said Nigeria hoped to start with at least 20 million doses from the COVAX facility, initially covering health care workers and vulnerable people who would be most at risk if infected, such as the elderly.
On Thursday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged rich countries that have ordered more COVID-19 vaccines than they need to consider distributing excess doses to Africa.
