Nigeria's missing girls: Here's what finally sparked outrage after a month

On 15 April, just two days before the South Korea ferry tragedy, close to 276 girls were kidnapped from a school in Nigeria by Islamic terrorists belonging to the group Boko Haram. Other than the usual humdrum news from wire agencies, the kidnapping failed to get any mass media coverage.  There were no Facebook shares, no tweets, nothing of the kind of attention given to, for example, the missing flight MH370. But now, Nigeria’s missing girls have become an important international story, one that has sparked both the US and UK to offer help to the Nigerian government on how to help trace the girls. So what has suddenly changed in the story of the Nigerian girls that has finally woken up the media and even the Twitterati? According to his detailed piece on  Mashable, the outrage is no accident, but “the direct result of a semi-coordinated campaign to make world leaders, the media and readers aware.” [caption id=“attachment_1509189” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Women attend a demonstration calling on government to rescue kidnapped school girls of a government secondary school Chibok, in Lagos. AP[/caption] The report points out the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, which was first used by a former Nigerian government official and Vice President of the World Bank for Africa named Oby Ezekwesil, has now seen close to a million tweets and support from big names like Hillary Clinton. This hashtag took off once news reports broke that Boko Haram planned to sell the girls as slaves, according to Mashable.  Their report is based on data provided to them by Sysomos, which shows that it was only post 30 April, the number of tweets around the hashtag went up massively. The report notes, “Mentions of #BringBackOurGirls spiked that day, according to data provided by Sysomos, as Twitter reacted with fury that the girls were missing — and their story wasn’t being told. It was tweeted 268,616 times on May 1. In total, there have been 916,984 mentions of the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls as of May 5."  The  tweets have crossed 1 million according to this data from Topsy and one can clearly see the spike came only in the beginning of May. Both the US and UK were prompted to offer help to the Nigerian government on how to help trace the girls. UK’s foreign secretary William Hague announced yesterday that UK is offering practical help to Nigeria to help find the girls. He was quoted as saying, “What has happened here… the actions of Boko Haram to use girls as the spoils of war, the spoils of terrorism, is disgusting. It is immoral.” And while both US and UK have offered help, it can’t be ignored that the world has indeed woken up a little too late. As this piece in CNN notes, had such a story taken place in the US, it would have caused mass outrage and a demand for quick forceful action. Additionally, the fact that Boko Haram is a terrorist group that has led many attacks against Christians in Nigeria, should have been cause for concern, given how much the US keeps on harping about tackling terrorism. While tweets and online petitions are much needed for awareness, given that girls are still missing and that the Nigeria military has no clue of their whereabouts, no one can deny that more needs to be done, or even this delayed outrage won’t serve any purpose.