A video showing 15 of the 219 schoolgirls held by Boko Haram has added pressure on the Nigerian government to secure their release, after activists accused authorities of mishandling the case in the two years since their mass kidnap.
Weeping parents identified the girls captured by Boko Haram fighters, who want to establish an Islamist state in northeast Nigeria and have waged a seven-year campaign of violence, killing thousands of people and displacing two million.
President Muhammadu Buhari, elected a year ago on a promise to end endemic graft and crush the group, said in December that the government could talk to Boko Haram if credible representatives emerged.
In January he said the government was launching a new investigation into the kidnapping, vowing to return the girls captured at a school in the town of Chibok while taking exams. But little has emerged since then.
In the video, apparently taken in December and given to government officials by Boko Haram as proof of life for the negotiations, a person asks the 15 girls to say their names as they stand quietly in two rows, wearing headscarves.
“I saw all the girls and they are Chibok girls,” Esther Yakubu, a parent of one of the abducted girls who saw the video broadcast by CNN said. “I recognise some of them because we are in the same area with them.”
Yakubu was marching with some 30 other parents and activists to the presidential villa in the capital Abuja to demand the government do more to return the girls.
Police stopped them at the road leading to the villa.
The footage is the first time any of the missing girls have been seen since a previous Boko Haram video in May 2014, when about 100 were seen in Islamic dress reciting the Qur’an.
A total of 276 girls were abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, on April 14, 2014.
Fifty-seven escaped in the immediate aftermath.
Borno state governor Kashim Shettima, on a visit to Chibok, where parents of the missing girls held a vigil and said prayers at the school site, said: “The video ... is of the Chibok girls. It’s good news.”
Witnesses to the kidnapping, Nigerian military and security officials, Western diplomats and counter-terrorism experts blame a series of failings by politicians and the military in dealing with the militants, including a lack of co-ordination.
Information Minister Lai Mohammed told CNN that the government was still reviewing the video.
When asked about efforts to get the girls released he only said: “There are ongoing talks.”
A top government official who declined to be named said an official reaction would only be made once the military had established the video’s authenticity.
Activists said Buhari’s government is not doing enough, urging the state to use the video for clues to find the girls and speak to girls who had managed to flee Boko Haram captivity.
“The incredible wealth of information that victims of terrorists can offer our security forces is being lost in the current undefined and ineffective approach,” Aisha Yesufu of the #BringBackOurGirls group said in a statement.
Buhari has blamed his predecessor Goodluck Jonathan who was slow to react to the abduction.
Under Buhari’s command, Nigerian troops backed up by Chad, Niger and Cameroon have recaptured most of territory held by Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to Islamic State last year.
However, Boko Haram has no unified leadership which makes it difficult for the government to find someone to negotiate with, analysts say.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video circulated last month in which he seemed to suggest he was ailing and Boko Haram was losing its effectiveness. But another video emerged last week saying there would be no surrender.
Fulan Nasrullah, a security analyst, said there was little chance of a breakthrough in the talks between the government and the militants after the failure of previous efforts.
“The government is angry about the leak, as are the insurgents,” he said. “The insurgents are not currently willing to negotiate for the girls following the government’s alleged bad faith in previous negotiations,” he said.
A senior government source told AFP that the government had received a ransom demand last July.
The group asked for €1mn ($1.1mn) for 10 of the girls, the source disclosed.
That lends weight to theories the Chibok girls were split up following the abduction and were being held separately in different locations, complicating any possible talks or rescue bid.
AFP has also seen photographs of five girls that were sent to the government in mid-January this year as part of the same bid for negotiations.
Boko Haram leader Shekau has previously said the girls would be released in exchange for Islamist fighters held in Nigerian custody.
Yesterday’s two-year anniversary was marked across Nigeria with vigils and protest marches, including at the site of the abduction involving many of the missing girls’ parents, wearing black.
Yakubu Nkeki, head of the Abducted Chibok Girls Parents’ group, read a letter to the teenagers, praying for them to be kept “safe and sound, wherever you are and the condition you find yourselves”.
Borno Governor Shettima promised the girls’ swift return.
“We are doing all we can to make sure these girls are found,” he said.
In the commercial hub, Lagos, and in the capital, Abuja, hundreds of protesters from the #BringBackOurGirls movement gathered to renewed calls for the release of the girls and other victims.