Chibok girls one year after: Hope is all we have, Ezekwesili

What is your feeling today as we mark the one year anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok girls?

It is a year that those girls were abducted and they have not been rescued. And so, the depth of disappointment, the frustration and the failure to rescue them cannot be measured.  Personally, there is a very deep sense of failure, that our society failed those girls and their parents. And in failing them, we have failed ourselves especially considering the fact that those girls could not be rescued in the first dates of their abduction. Our common enemies have no right to take any of our children from us and then get away with that heinous act.  We should never have failed those girls.

But what are your hopes?

That is the only thing that has kept us, that word hope. As a people who had held on to hope, it is not possible for us to give up on hope. The event has so much altered our lives as human beings and you can imagine the parents who continuously believe that their girls can be rescued. And because we have been on this journey with them for so long, they begin to tell us that those girls are our girls. We are holding on to hope. We are holding on to hope (she started sobbing).