Archbishop’s aide on Boko Haram

ACCORDING TO the ‘ Sunday Times’ the Rev Stephen Davis, a former associate for Archbishop Justin Welby has been in Nigeria for almost a month trying to secure release of the school girls being held hostage by Boko Haram. Davis is a former canon of Coventry Cathedral who now lives in Australia. He worked with Archbishop Welby on international reconciliation efforts in the Niger Delta and is believed to have been recruited for his present task by the Nigerian President.

Reports say that Davis has travelled through the bush, sleeping rough, to hold face-to-face talks with a rebel commander. He is not the only person who has been recruited by the President’s office to negotiate with the rebels. Davis is not working in isolation but has the assistance of a convert to Islam, Aisha Waikil, a lawyer who is said to be a ‘mother figure’ to the rebels. She is from the South of Nigeria but married to a northerner and converted to Islam several years’ ago.

She is a member of a peace deal committee set up by the Nigerian government to hold dialogue with terrorists to end violence.

Archbishop Welby has called for negotiations to end the hostage crisis and he is likely to support the recruitment of his former colleague to help. The two managed to broker a peace between militants and the government in the Niger Delta. During their attempts to do this, the two were frequently blind folded and held at gunpoint.

‘The Sunday Times’ has been in email contact with Davis who has told the newspaper that the girls have been split into several groups making military intervention to rescue them ‘highly improbable’. Contrary to rumours that they have been smuggled out of the country he says that they all remain in Nigeria, most likely in the remote Sambisa forest. He suggested to the newspaper that the release of the girls will probably depend upon the reciprocal release of Boko Haram prisoners, an exchange President Goodluck Jonathan has rejected.

Davis told the ‘Sunday Times’ he was not sure if Archbishop Welby knew of his work but added ‘He retains a strong interest in Nigeria and I understand he has been following this matter’. He also informed the newspaper that he had been to forward military positions and he believed that the Nigerian army was doing all it could in the circumstances.

‘This is a long process of building trust on both sides’, he said. Aisha Waikil claimed that Davis had managed to win the extremists’ trust. ‘ They are very free with him’, she revealed. ‘ He knows how to talk to them’.