Nigerian poet urges action on Chibok Girls dilemma in new video

Akeem Lasisi, award winning Nigerian performance poet and journalist, has called on the Federal Government and other stakeholders to intensify the search for the remaining Chibok Girls in the captivity of Boko Haram in his newly released video of ‘Ẹyẹ Ìgbò: For Chibok Girls’ .

‘Ẹyẹ Ìgbò: For Chibok Girls’, is a single off his 2024 album titled ‘Òrèrè: A Gift of Poems’.

April 14, 2025, marks 11 years since the schoolgirls popularly called Chibok Girls were abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok Local Government Area of Borno State, on April 14 2014.

Nigeria has had three Presidents since the attack and efforts made throughout these administrations, either by deploying military might and diplomacy, has only led to the release or return of some of the victims but a good number are still being held.

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Reports states that as of April 2024, 128 out of the 276 girls seized by Boko Haram, had regained freedom in batches over nine years, while the whereabouts of 91 others remain unknown. However official figures, indicated that 187 had been released.

In ‘Ẹyẹ Ìgbò: For Chibok Girls’, Lasisi laments the fate of those still in bondage just as he sympathises with their parents and other loved ones who live with the nightmare of their absence.

In the video which is available for stream Akeem Lasisi & the Songbirds are seen in special prayers for the parents of the kidnapped girls, while Lasisi is depicted leading a civilian ‘JTF’ squad into ‘Sambisa’ forest, looking for the captives. An interplay of the sorrowfully chanted ‘ẹyẹ igbo’ song, taken of a Yoruba folklore, and Lasisi’s critical poem establishes the endless painful anticipation the victims’ parents and many other concerned people have for the return of the remaining Chibok Girls.

Durign the album released last year, Lasisi had said on the track, “I still feel pained like many other concerned people. The best way to feel what the remaining abductees and their parents are going through is to imagine the tragedy happening to one. Imagining having one’s daughter or son – or both in the jaws of terrorists, somewhere in the anonymous bush, not just for a month or a year, but for 10 long years. It is extremely painful.”

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He, however, noted that producing the track for Chibok girls was a source of relief to him because making a case for such embattled young ones was a debt that whoever had a voice should pay one way or the other.