by Isha Sesay
There has long been consternation in some quarters in Nigeria about CNN’s coverage of Africa’s most populous nation. Some staunchly believe the network has an agenda to portray their country as corrupt, politically unstable, or blighted by terrorism. After being in Nigeria for less than a full day, I already saw clearly that tensions were running high over what had happened in Chibok. Covering this story was going to be far from easy; it would be fraught with challenges every step of the way. Knowing that a difficult path lay ahead didn’t scare me. In fact, quite the opposite—it focused my mind and made me more determined than ever to stand my ground on behalf of the missing girls and their loved ones.
For the next two weeks I hosted my nightly show, CNN NewsCenter, from a cramped hotel balcony in Abuja. Under a flood of lights, I battled heat, an army of flying insects, and countless technical difficulties, as well as a fleet of combative Nigerian officials. I felt like I was climbing into a wrestling ring at the start of each show. I matched the Nigerian government’s belligerence with my own aggression, going after every lie, every half-truth and evasion. These fiery confrontations drew national and international attention, along with no shortage of condemnation of me from some of the rich and powerful in Nigeria. I continued to push for answers all the same, clashing most famously with the Nigerian minister of information, Labaran Maku.
“When did you learn of this attack?” I asked him repeatedly. The minister, attired in flowing lilac robes and matching hat, stuttered, trying to pivot the conversation back to his several-minutes-long argument in which he blamed the local Borno State government for opening the Chibok school in defiance of the federal government’s mandate to keep all schools in Borno closed. Impatiently I pushed, “We have been through this, so let’s move forward to share information with our viewers. When did you learn of this attack?”
From the look on Mr. Maku’s face, his annoyance was peaking; he shuffled and stuttered with discomfort. “As a government it was the following day. . . . As a government at least for a decision to be made it was the following day and this thing was in the middle of the night. And even when this information came, it was very, very hazy. Because the principal was not on ground. She came back the next day and said some eight students were unaccounted for.” He added this last bit while waving his arm to emphasize his frustration.
“Okay,” I replied.
“You know we went through this with you before.”
“Okay,” I repeated.
“And the moment we confirmed this was the case we went into action.”
My head titled to one side and my eyes narrowed. “Not what we heard from people on the ground—” I shot back.
He interrupted me now. “No, we did. No, no, no, no, come on,” he repeated in rapid fire. He refused to pause for breath. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” He held his hand high to stop me midsentence.
I carried on regardless, speaking over him, challenging his version of events with statements I had gathered from people there in Chibok that night, who, I told him, continued to contradict his statements, who said that is not what happened.
He pushed back. “No. No, no.”
I raised my voice. “All we are asking for is the Nigerian government to be transparent with us.”
“No, no, no, no,” Maku continued. “We shouldn’t turn this into a trial of the Nigerian government.”
My eyes flashed and my jaw tightened. I tried to speak slowly and maintain my composure as I searched for the right words. “It is scrutiny of your response,” I replied, with my own hand movements stressing my every word.
“No, no, no,” he practically shouted.
“It is not a trial. It is scrutiny,” I said coldly.
With a producer in Atlanta counting down in my ear to the end of the show, I was forced to bring the interview to a close, which meant further talking over the minister and effectively shutting him down.
When we were finally off the air, I made a halfhearted attempt at small talk with Labaran Maku. He would have nothing to do with my pleasantries. Before I could get a word out, he ripped off his microphone and exited our makeshift studio like a whirling dervish, declaring his fury for me as he hurried toward the hotel elevators.
Tensions rose further when Amnesty International released a report on May 9, claiming the Nigerian military had failed to act on multiple advance warnings about the Boko Haram raid on Chibok’s state-run boarding school. My interviews with other government officials grew increasingly contentious. The senior special assistant on public affairs to the president, Doyin Okupe, started a response to one of my questions with a patronizing, “Listen, sweetheart.”
The comment, made during a live broadcast, placed me in a split-second debate with myself. Should I acknowledge the condescending remark and tackle it head on? I settled on a cold, disdainful glare and the satisfaction of knowing he had exposed himself to everyone around the world.
My choice was confirmed when I checked social media hours later and saw the outraged reaction to his words. His remark spoke to the warped gender dynamic at play in Nigeria. On the one hand, fanatical groups like Boko Haram were doing all they could to prevent girls from being educated, advocating for marriage and domesticity. On another, a senior aide to the president had called an international journalist “sweetheart” on live television. Both positions, I would argue, are part of the same problematic continuum in which females are treated as secondary sexual objects that are subservient to men.
An added dynamic fueled the animosity on display during these encounters. I’d generated a great deal of controversy and ill will during an exclusive CNN sit-down interview I’d done with President Jonathan in the presidential villa back in 2010:
Isha Sesay: There are many who believe that with your decision to compete in the election you are going against the zoning agreement which states that the presidency will rotate between the north and the south every eight years. The late president Yar’Adua was a northerner. He died in his first term. There are those who feel that you are putting personal ambition ahead of the stability and peace of Nigeria. Is that what you are doing?
President Jonathan: Definitely not. The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first? In the first place if this country has agreed the presidency rotates between north and south I would not be the president today. I couldn’t have been if there is an agreement in this country that it rotates between north and south. I couldn’t have been the president the day Yar’Adua died—another northerner would have taken over and I could have continued as the vice-president.
We clashed throughout the conversation.
Before this point, President Jonathan had rejected practically every single in-depth interview request from local Nigerian media. He’d agreed to sit down with me only because it was billed as part of “Eye on Nigeria”—CNN’s special week-long coverage of his country. But when the time finally came, as we sat under the lights, surrounded by cameras and handlers in his home, Jonathan was ill prepared for my pointed and unflinching questioning, and he became increasingly flustered.
The interview had damaged his credibility.
Afterward the president and his supporters exploded in a fit of pique—and labeled me rude, aggressive, and disrespectful to a head of state. The affair established my reputation as a thorn in the side of his administration. So now I was back in the country, challenging Jonathan’s government for its inadequate response to Chibok. I was racking up personal enemies faster than I could keep track.
It was midmorning when I walked into our workspace, and I immediately knew something was very wrong. The CNN production team, now close to a dozen people, looked worried. The tension in the room was unmistakable.
“What’s wrong?”
I discovered that our “fixer”—the local journalist CNN had hired to help with background research and logistics—had quit out of the blue. He’d o
verheard a conversation among a group of powerful Nigerians discussing the possibility of harming the CNN team, and me in particular. He believed the threats were serious, and working with CNN had just become too dangerous for this young man.
Days before, a close friend had called to warn me of possible attempts by certain unnamed forces to doctor video footage that would show me in a compromising sexual situation. He’d learned of the mischievous musings during a conversation with a fellow Nigerian—a well-connected man who was always in the know. Dutifully, I passed on the unconfirmed story to my CNN bosses. Hours later, I found myself paired with Mel, a bodyguard. That had been bad enough. But now, having our fixer drop us out of fear took things to a whole new level. The Atlanta bosses and our security coordinators decided to change our hotel rooms and moved me into one adjoining our workspace. Mel, meanwhile, would sleep in the other room also connected to the working area.
By this point, I’d been in Nigeria for more than a week, and I was beginning to feel under siege. My movements were severely restricted, and I was essentially confined to the workspace and my hotel room. At the end of each workday, while the others on the team wandered down to the hotel bar, I retreated to my room. I locked the door and then checked and double-checked it before eventually climbing into bed and staying awake for most of the night.
I was frightened, but not about to back down from my tough line of questioning.
Then Boko Haram released a video, twenty-seven minutes of footage showing 136 of the missing 219 girls, their first appearance. The girls all sat on the ground, concealed in hijabs and looking distraught. Three members of the group spoke directly to the camera, declaring that they had become Muslims, two of them having converted from Christianity. In the same video, Boko Haram’s leader confirmed the religious conversions of the entire group of 136 girls with great satisfaction. “These girls, these girls you occupy yourselves with. . . . We have indeed liberated them. These girls have become Muslims,” Shekau spoke to the camera.
Seeing the girls’ frightened faces and knowing of the distress these images were causing their loved ones, I hounded government officials for details of the search-and-rescue operations said to be under way. Meanwhile, Chibok parents scanned the faces of the girls who appeared on camera, desperate and praying the whole time for a sighting of their missing children. As for their location, the world believed the girls had been taken to neighboring Cameroon and were no longer in Nigeria at all.
Then another personal safety warning arrived for me, this time from a relative who was in the US diplomatic corps. The advice was straightforward: back off from the aggressive questioning of Nigerian officials—you’re upsetting too many powerful people and Nigeria is a dangerous place.
As the warnings mounted, the Nigerian government continued to clamp down on the flow of information to the media. The continued lack of details inevitably meant public interest would begin to wane. Sure enough, by the middle of the second week, in the absence of fresh, compelling images, interest on the part of my stateside bosses was also on the decline. I was frustrated, but in the absence of new developments, there was little I could do to counter the situation. I was hardly surprised when the bosses began to pull my colleagues out and redeploy them to other stories.
My mother called. Her voice was strained. “You’ve upset too many people and a Nigerian friend just called and told me you’d better leave.”
I muttered under my breath.
“Isha, it’s enough. You’ve done enough. It’s time to go home.” Her tone was stern and unyielding. I sighed from fatigue and frustration. But there wasn’t any point in fighting with her. I was already booked to head back to the United States that weekend. Her mood lightened when I told her.
“It’s good you’re leaving,” she said. “These are bad people you are dealing with and they would not think twice to hurt you.”
Amid all the outrage and threats of violence, I reflected on how much of the rancor was driven by my gender, Africanness, and relative youth. These powerful figures certainly wouldn’t have felt as insulted by the harsh questioning had it come from any of my male colleagues—white or black, regardless of age. If the questioner had been a white woman, age would again have been put to the side, and these Nigerian men would have found it in themselves to bear the sting of her questioning, albeit reluctantly. But a younger, African woman publicly challenging them with temerity and dismissing Nigeria’s enduring cultural norms of male unassailability? Now, that was simply too much to bear. Though my mother agreed with my position wholeheartedly, all she really cared about was the fact that I was leaving.
A few days later, when I finally boarded my flight home, I felt a sweep of different emotions: Relief—I was exiting a high pressure atmosphere and could finally stop looking over my shoulder. But I also felt a tremendous amount of sadness for the girls who were still lost to their loved ones. For all my efforts, we were really no closer to knowing where they were or providing their families with any comfort. I felt like I’d failed.
To make matters worse, in the pit of my stomach I felt the number of people who cared about these hundreds of girls just one month after they disappeared was dwindling rapidly. Though the #BBOG hashtag continued to trend to a degree, its prevalence was waning. A dark mood settled over me while I confronted an ugly truth. I realized the world had a far greater attention span for the disappeared Malaysian airliner MH370, which all signs sadly pointed to being lost forever with 239 people on board, than for nearly 300 black schoolgirls, who were missing but still alive.
Chapter Thirteen
PRISCILLA WATCHED AS CONFUSION SLOWLY SPREAD ACROSS THE faces of her captors. The men were counting the girls again, convinced a mistake had been made the first time they’d counted, which would explain the sudden discrepancy in the numbers. They looked increasingly perplexed and asked each other, “How can there be fewer girls now than when we left for prayers?”
As they painstakingly added up the total once more, Priscilla had already guessed at the truth. Some of her schoolmates had slipped away while they’d been under the supervision of the boy militant. She hadn’t actually seen them leave, but now as she looked about the clearing, it was obvious girls were missing. With the recount done, no one could ignore the truth any longer. In an instant, the men’s tempers were flaring.
“Where are the rest of the girls?” they screamed furiously.
The looks on their faces made it clear—this time they would not accept the groups’ customary silence.
Looking nervously at each other, the teenagers spoke slowly. “Maybe they have gone to ease themselves.”
The men looked unconvinced. Yet to Priscilla’s surprise, they replied, “Okay, let us wait.”
An uneasy quiet took hold as the militants and their captives shifted attention to the surrounding bushes, all of them eager to see if any girls actually emerged. As each minute ticked by, the sense of dread and agitation in the clearing grew. Priscilla had lost track of how long they’d been waiting when the men exploded.
“Where are they?”
“We don’t know where they’ve gone.”
“You must know something! Tell us!”
“We have no idea what happened!”
The girls pleaded with the men to believe them, but the situation quickly spiraled out of control and soon the men’s guns were aimed directly at them. By this point there was little Priscilla and the others could do but pray.
Suddenly the men announced, “Let us go after the missing girls! If not, they will bring us trouble.” And with that, dozens of militants abruptly swung their guns away from the trembling captives and dove into the nearby bushes.
They’d been gone for less than thirty minutes when the bushes all around the clearing started to stir and Priscilla heard the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. She looked up in panic, only to see the search party burst through the tall grass moments later.
“Quickly, pack up!” the men shouted. “Take the girls and
leave immediately, or they will find us here!” The militants were gasping for air. As they spoke, the girls looked around, trying to figure out the source of their alarm.
Hours earlier, when the kidnapped girls had first walked into the clearing, they’d sought relief from the cramped conditions in the vehicles by spreading out across the entire area. Now bands of men moved quickly to gather the scattered clusters into one large group, while other militants loaded up the vehicles with the pot, platters, firewood, and other items used to make lunch. All of them moved with the speed and focus of individuals being pursued. The girls were bewildered. What had the men seen in the bushes? Who was coming? Those questions were swirling in their heads when militants stunned the group with a proposition.
“If you are willing to accept our religion, then go ahead and stand to the side.”
Priscilla felt as if she’d been struck at this first formal attempt to convert the girls to Islam. Her heart beat faster as each girl stood. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . She counted as girls rose and said yes softly to their captors before stepping away from their schoolmates. Priscilla felt their desperation to cling to life, and she felt deep sadness for these wide-eyed girls. In the end, nearly a dozen stood, ready to embrace Islam. The men were far from pleased. “What of the rest of you?” they asked roughly. Then they added, “We are taking the willing converts and we are going to kill the rest of you!”
The girls who remained seated on the forest floor were very afraid, but there was no trace of that fear when they gave the men their answer. “No, we will not.” For Priscilla, whose life had been shaped by the personal tenet “Born a Christian, die a Christian” her no was final. Suddenly, she felt compelled to speak out, and the words were as shocking to Priscilla as they were to her captors. “No one can kill us if God doesn’t want us dead.” Her boldness stunned them all, and for a moment, the men stood around staring at each other and Priscilla—marveling at her audacity. She waited for an outburst of words or bullets in response, but nothing came. Words seemed to fail the insurgents, but eventually their shock became chuckles, before dissolving into full-blown laughter.