Chibok girls to receive university education

LAGOS: The Nigerian government says 106 Chibok schoolgirls released by Boko Haram insurgents are to set to resume their education.

Twenty-one Chibok girls were released in October and a further 82 were set free recently after government officials and the insurgents negotiated a swop.

Women Affairs and Social Development Minister Jummai Alhassan told some of the girls and their parents in Abuja on Saturday that the girls would be enrolled in schools after their rehabilitation and reintegration programmes were completed by September.

She said the government was talking to the American University of Nigeria in Yola, Adamawa State, about admitting the 106 girls into its foundation programme.

“The American University is supporting the government in respect of the 21 girls released earlier, but we don’t want to give the girls different standards of education.

“The girls are already here together, all of them will go to the American said.

The vice-president in charge of administration at the university, Reginald Briggs, said two of the 24 girls were in year two studying computer science and journalism; two others had been admitted to study accounting; three were undertaking pre-medical degree programmes; and another would study law.

Meanwhile, the freed girls have appealed to the Nigerian government to try to free the remaining girls who are still being held hostage by Boko Haram insurgents in the Sambisa forest.

The leader of the released school girls, Hauwa Ntakai, said: “We have many of our sisters there that are not students at any school and nobody talks about them.

“It is because we were abducted from a school that the government talked to Boko Haram and they released us.”

Alhassan said the government was trying to free the remaining girls and had appealed to Boko Haram leaders to embrace dialogue on releasing hostages and stopping their insurgency in the north-east.