Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)
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I welcome the ambassador. My first experience of people from Nigeria was when, as a child, two young children from Biafra arrived at our school, refugees from the conflict. As kids, it was probably the first time we had actually met anyone fleeing from a war-torn region and it was unusual that it was two African children at our school. There are 40,000 Nigerians living in Ireland today. A few years later a conflict had broken out in a part of this country and we met more people fleeing from that conflict.

The ambassador has explained the meaning of “Boko Haram”, namely, forbidding western education. I do not know much about the Koran, but I always understood Mohammad had spoken about the importance of education. He even said, “Go in quest of knowledge even unto China.” I cannot understand from where Boko Haram is coming, but I presume it is anti-western sentiment. We have similar conflicts across the world, with young girls in Afghanistan being targeted because they are learning to read and write.

Nigeria is now Africa’s largest economy and has the continent’s largest oil reserves. It has a child population of 10.5 million, but only 4% of girls in northern Nigeria complete secondary school. Is the emergence of Boko Haram a symptom of the tensions within Nigerian society? While the situation in Biafra has settled down, there are many tensions within the country, many of which are down to inequalities. I have spoken to people who have travelled there who have told me that there is a lot of wealth but large extremes in poverty. What is the Nigerian Government doing to tackle societal inequalities? What is happening to the oil revenues? We condemn what happened to the schoolgirls and selling them as slaves for $10. There is no humanity in Boko Haram and no sympathy around this table for what it is doing. If there is anything we can do, we will do it, as this needs to stop. However, there are problems within Nigeria and I would like to get my head around some of the difficulties. Is Boko Haram a symptom of something that is wrong in Nigeria that needs to be fixed? I would like to hear about the peace talks, but if the ambassador cannot refer to them, I will understand.