President Goodluck Jonathan, yesterday, assured parents of the abducted Chibok girls and all Nigerians that the girls were still alive and that the government was doing everything possible to rescue them.
“We promised that we must get the girls. The good story is that they have not killed them because the terrorists, when they kill, they display. They use it to intimidate the whole society. The girls are alive. We will get the girls,” Jonathan said this during a live discussion programme, Kaakaki, on African Independent Television (AIT), monitored in Abuja.
“Luckily, we are narrowing down the area of their control. So, we will get them. At the beginning, probably we did not really estimate the capacity of Boko Haram. It is obvious Boko Haram started as a non-violent group led by Yusuf, limited to around Maiduguri area and Yobe. They did not even get to Adamawa.
“Just like every group of youths or young people that is inclined to criminality, they expanded their network and linked up with other terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda in North Africa and other similar brands in the world.
“So, they continued to build their capacity and it got to a point that for you to tackle them in the kind of environment they operate, you need some specialized equipment to use and we don’t manufacture these equipment now. That is why the movement has changed. So, it is not deliberate,” he said.
While admitting that the terrorists grew so fast because the government underrated them, President Jonathan said with the increased capacity of the military which has taken possession of more than 65 percent of the platform needed to prosecute the war, the remaining territories still under the control of the terrorists would soon be recaptured.
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