Mediator Believes if Negotiations Had Continued, All Kidnapped Chibok Girls Would Be Free Today

When Zannah Bukar Mustapha decided, in 2007, to create a foundation that caters to out-of-school kids, he didn’t foresee himself playing an integral, continuous role within the throes of an insurgency, and being instrumental in the negotiations that led to the release of 103 of the girls.

But he strongly believes more should have been done to sustain negotiations and secure the release of the remaining girls who are said to have refused to return, instead favoring staying with Boko Haram members, some of whom they had been forcefully married to.

“If that process had continued, we should’ve gotten all of them,” Mustapha tells OkayAfrica, adding, “it’s not all about telling them that they should come. Some of them came out on their own and left their husbands but there was now a stigma when they came back. We should have sensitized them on the benefits of coming out to make them feel they can be part of general society.”

"And honestly, if you look at the whole scenario [...] what we have done is not enough. It's not sufficient to bring back all the girls," he adds.

Born and raised in Maiduguri, Mustapha had lived all of his life in the Borno State capital, earning a law degree from the University of Maiduguri and practicing as a sharia court lawyer.

Deeply disturbed by the many children begging on the streets, he decided to quit his job to focus on social work through his foundation. “I started Future Prowess to support orphans and vulnerable children, and I started with 36 orphans,” Mustapha says.

He created a school for the 36 children in his house, with his own children working as educators and co-administrations. His plan was to get them through primary and secondary school, and try to ensure they all get university degrees. However, not too long after, the insurgent threat of Boko Haram would affect those goals in profound ways.

An Islamist jihadist organization, Boko Haram effectively began its insurgency against the Nigerian government in 2009, around the time its founder Mohammed Yusuf was killed. With a name that means “western education is bad,” the sect’s stance was clear, even if its mission was more extensive, as it sought to generally overthrow the Nigerian government. It launched deadly attacks, most notably, the suicide bombings of the Police Headquarters and the United Nations building, both in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. In the northeast region, it targeted churches, mosques, and schools in Nigeria and also in neighboring countries Chad and Niger.

It was under this dark cloud that Mustapha was trying to operate the Future Prowess foundation, made even worse by the fact that Borno state was a Boko Haram hotspot. As the attacks worsened, Mustapha opened the doors of Future Prowess to more children from all sides of the divide.

Children of killed Boko Haram members were in the same classrooms as children of victims and Nigerian soldiers. For Mustapha, this was to ensure Future Prowess was its own kind of utopia to heal the divide and not visit the sins of the fathers on the children.

Future Prowess also extended its efforts to the mothers of the children it catered for, most of them widows. “We brought the widows together by giving them a sort of livelihood through skill acquisitions because it is very pertinent for us to link the home and the school in one place,” Mustapha explains.

Amidst these efforts, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo caught wind of the foundation and paid it a visit, trying to gain a better understanding of what drives Mustapha’s ideology and how it can play a wider role. This was around the time of the mass of kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram.

The kidnapping, along with insecurity issues, was a national topic leading into the 2015 presidential elections, which was won by Muhammadu Buhari, a retired top army general and military dictator from the ‘80s. Under Buhari, the Nigerian army launched several offensive attacks against Boko Haram, but it soon resorted back to negotiations in order to retrieve the kidnapped girls, which is where Mustapha came in handy.

Mustapha took a course in mediation in Switzerland which helped him in the negotiations with the Boko Haram leaders. The initial form of connection was through the mothers of the children being educated by Future Prowess, some of whom knew the wives of Boko Haram members and commanders. In partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), negotiations began to bring back the abducted girls.

“When we started the complete analysis, we were first thinking of building confidence,” Mustapha recalls. “How do we bring confidence for them to accept us, to say they will give us the girls back? We asked for 10 percent of the girls back first, but one thing is that we asked for proof of life. Nobody knew where these girls were as at the time we were going for the mediation.” After some back and forth, 21 of the schoolgirls were released in October 2016.

The second round of negotiations saw the release of 82 of the schoolgirls. The number was meant to be 83, but one of the girls declined to go back home at the point of exchange. “This is one of the periods when I felt dejected,” Mustapha says in a somber tone, adding that it might have been a case of Stockholm Syndrome.

"You have to sit down and get ways to entice them, to bring them back [....] For them, I think it is never too late."

“When I decided to do this mediation, I didn’t do it for the government,” he says. “I told myself, ‘I am doing this thing for the humanitarian reason.’” It’s that conviction that helped Mustapha stay steady while handling the release of the girls and.