By Chinelo Obogo

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On the night of April 14, 2014,  276 female students were abducted from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, by Boko Haram who took them away in trucks and buses. The girls aged 16 to 18 were in their final year in school.
Officials said as the students slept in their dormitories, the terrorists broke into the school, pretending to be guards, and then told the girls to get out and come with them. They engaged the soldiers guarding the school in a lengthy gun battle and then herded the girls onto vehicles.
By the weekend of April, 19–20, the military released a statement which said more than 100 of 129 kidnapped girls had been freed but the statement was later retracted.
On May 2, 2014, according to the police, 53 girls escaped from their abductors.
On May 4, 2014, for the first time, former President Goodluck Jonathan spoke publicly about the kidnapped girls. He said the Federal Government was doing everything to find the girls.
On May 5 2014, a video surfaced in which the Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the kidnappings. He said the girls should not have been in school and, instead, should have been married since girls as young as nine are suitable for marriage.
On October 12, 2014, it was reported that four girls from the original kidnapped group had escaped. They later said they had been held in a camp in Cameroon and were raped every day.
On May 29,  2015, President Buhari, in his inaugural address to the nation, said they could not claim to “have defeated Boko Haram without rescuing the Chibok girls and all other innocent persons held hostage by insurgents.
In December 2015, Buhari said he was willing to negotiate with Boko Haram for the release of the Chibok girls without any preconditions.
In April 2016, Boko Haram released a video showing 15 girls who appeared to be some of the kidnapped Chibok girls. The video was taken in December 2015 and the girls seemed to be well fed.
On May 17, 2016, Amina Ali Nkeki, one of the kidnapped girls was found along with her baby and Mohammad Hayyatu, a suspected Boko Haram terrorist who claimed to be her husband, by the vigilante Civilian Joint Task Force in the Sambisa Forest. On May 21, 2016, Amir Muhammad Abdullahi, who claimed to be the Boko Haram second in command and spoke for several senior militants, offered to surrender so long as they would not be harmed and, in return, they would release hostages, including the Chibok girls.
In August 2016, Boko Haram released a video of what appeared to be about 50 Chibok girls, some of them holding babies, with an armed masked spokesman who demanded the release of its  jailed members in exchange for the girls freedom
By January 5, 2015, daily rallies were held by Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG), a civil rights group led by former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, at the Unity Fountain in Abuja.
On June 12, 2015, after President Buhari was sworn in, he and his wife Aisha Buhari, and the Vice President’s wife Mrs. Dolapo Osinbajo met with the BBOG and some mothers of the abducted Chibok girls. On September 5, 2016, the Police Force restricted the BBOG’s daily protests to their Unity Fountain, Maitama base.
The order came against the background of two protest marches on the Presidential Villa in the last one month that was aborted by the police. A defiant BBOG continued the protests, but were confronted by a new group, #With Buhari I Stand, who opposed them, saying that they(BBOG) were a distraction to the presidency.