Abducted Nigerian schoolgirls freed

Bloomberg

Gunmen in Nigeria freed hundreds of schoolgirls abducted last week in the northern state of Zamfara, the police said.
“They were released in the early hours of this morning,“ state Commissioner of Police Abutu Yaro said by phone on Tuesday.
A total of 279 girls were released, state Governor Bello Matawalle said on BBC Hausa radio. No ransom was paid for their release and none of them was hurt, he said.
Two recessions in four years and surging food prices have spawned a surge in student abductions by criminal gangs demanding ransoms for their return. The kidnappings are adding to growing insecurity in Africa’s biggest oil producer, where the government is struggling to deal with a decade-long insurgency in the northeast and increasing clashes between nomadic herders and crop farmers.
There have been at least five mass school abductions since 2014 in northern Nigeria. Four of them have taken place under the rule of President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general who came to power in 2015 with a pledge to improve safety.
Buhari has vowed to reverse the trend of abductions, while insisting the government won’t pay any ransom for kidnappers to free their victims.
A string of mass abductions is disrupting education in Africa’s most populous country, which already ranks among places with one of the highest number of out-of-school children globally.
“This administration will not succumb to blackmail by bandits who target innocent school students in the expectations of huge ransom payments,” Buhari said.
The abductions are a sign of deteriorating insecurity under Buhari, a retired army general who came to power in 2015 with a pledge to fight an insurgency in the north and improve safety in Africa’s largest economy.

A decade-long insurgency by the extremist group Boko Haram has left hundreds of schools destroyed and teachers dead. At least half of all girls of school-going age aren’t receiving formal teaching in northern Nigeria, and only 53% of all children are in school, according to the United Nations Children’s Agency.
There are 12 million children out of school, most of them are predominantly in the north, according to Peter Hawkins, Unicef’s representative in Nigeria. “The abductions have become purely financial transactions. These people are using children to extort money,” he said.
While the government can deploy force against the bandits behind the attacks, it refrains from doing so for fear of hostages being used as human shields, Buhari said in a statement.