The Federal Government has said that it cannot put a time-line on the rescue of the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram insurgents on April 14, 2014.
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said this in Abuja Wednesday at a one-day roundtable meeting on vulnerable people in Nigeria and in other conflicts in the country, in honour the abducted girls and other victims of internal conflicts in the country.
Osinbajo said President Muhammadu Buhari had always been concerned about how to quickly rescue the missing schoolgirls.
The vice president called for caution and patience, saying security reports received so far indicated that the schoolgirls would be rescued.
“At every security council meeting that I have attended, the president has always been concerned about Chibok girls. He thinks of how this can be done quickly. But it is a very delicate issue, and we cannot say we can deal with it next week.
“Every rescue attempt must take the safety of the girls into consideration. From the security report we get, we will be able to bring back the girls, but we must exercise some caution and patience and not sound as if it can be done but it is not being done,” he said.
The vice president said all that could be done to rescue the girls was being done with the help of international partners.
He noted that the government was also not losing sight of the situation of other vulnerable Nigerians.
“The soft under belly of our system is that we expose the most vulnerable to the harshest conditions. That is why the government has come up with intervention programmes including conditional cash transfer.”
Osinbajo decried that compiling the list of the poorest had been difficult in spite of the assistance from some international agencies.
“That intervention must come from government funding of programmes that enable people to do something for themselves and lift them from poverty,” Osinbajo stated. Daily Trust.