Nigeria (Abducted Girls)

Debate between Gordon Brown and Tom Clarke

Wednesday 2nd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brown]

I am grateful for the support of the Churches in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and elsewhere. Support from around the world is giving succour and confidence to the Nigerian people. I met schoolchildren who have been writing letters to the Nigerian President in support of Nigeria’s efforts to try to capture the terrorists and release the girls. He is absolutely right that there is a real problem. If the girls have been dispersed to a number of different places, a rescue mission for one group would immediately put the other groups at risk. That is the dilemma that confronts the Nigerian Government, as I understand it. That is why they need additional support to monitor what is happening and, if it is necessary to intervene, the troops, security services and the air cover to do so.

There is a second thing that we can do to help. We cannot have safe schools if we do not have safe communities. In addition to the rising military and security presence in these towns, we need to allocate extra resources to reassure parents, teachers and children that they can go to school. The safe schools initiative, launched this afternoon in Britain by Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, is a plan to rebuild the burnt-out schools that have been the casualties of terrorist incursions, starting with the Chibok school. Our promise must be that it will be rebuilt immediately and made safe, so that when the girls are returned to their homes, their school at Chibok is safe for them to learn in without fear. The worry for many in northern Nigeria is that their school will be the next to face a terrorist raid.

[Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for securing such an excellent debate. Does he agree that in the north some of the problems arise from illiteracy, from the fact that people cannot find jobs, and from extreme poverty? Sadly, this is encouraging some people to move towards religious fundamentalism.

[Mr Brown]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He has a very honourable record in fighting for the causes of poor people in Africa, Asia and every part of the world, and I want to acknowledge the work that he has done over many years. He is absolutely right. Ngozi, the Finance Minister, referred to that point only a few minutes ago. The Government of Nigeria have to do more—she says they will do more—to help young unemployed people to get work, and to enable young ambitious girls and boys to complete their education by having safe schools, and universities and colleges, to go to.

The whole world should help Nigeria in this emergency. It has to make its schools safer, so that there is confidence among pupils and families that children can go to school. That may mean better perimeter fencing, walls, lighting, and communication and security systems to keep people in touch. We have to reassure people that everything possible is being done, otherwise we will give a propaganda advantage to the terrorists.

The Safe Schools fund has already attracted $10 million from the Nigerian Government, $10 million from the business community, £1 million from the UK and $1.5 million from Norway. Money is coming from other countries in the EU, and there are promises from the United States of America. I hope that one outcome of the debate will be to convince the Government that it is worth providing more than £1 million. Without this initiative, many of the other measures in which we are engaged to help education in Nigeria cannot be successful.

The United Nations has just passed a Security Council resolution that says that schools should have the same legal protection in conflict areas as hospitals. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack is calling on each nation to introduce and integrate guidelines into their military manuals’ rules of engagement and operational orders, so that schools have the chance of being safe havens, rather than being militarised. I hope the Government can encourage every Administration in Africa to do that.

As we heard this evening from Ngozi, and in speeches by the Secretary of State for International Development, the deputy leader of the Labour party and the Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, the kidnaps are part of a wider problem. In the last few weeks alone, we have seen reports of young girls raped and then murdered in India, and we have seen public outrage at the death sentence passed on a young Sudanese mother simply because a woman is considered to have no right to choose her own religion. Attention is now moving to Iraq, where extreme Islamists are fighting for demands that include changing the Iraqi constitution to legalise marriage for girls at the age of eight. This week and every week, around 200,000 school-age girls—some only 10, 11 or 12—are married off against their will because they have no rights that properly protect them. For many, child marriage will be preceded by genital mutilation—still to be successfully outlawed in many African countries.

A total of 7 million school-age children as young as eight or nine will be in full-time work, some of it slave labour in fields and in domestic service, and many will be trafficked into prostitution as part of a subterranean world of international trade in girl slave labour when they should be at school. As a result, 32 million school-age girls are not going to school today, or any other day. The basic right to be in education is denied to 500 million girls who will never complete their education.

Thus the abductions, the killings, the rapes, the mutilations, the trafficking, the exclusion from opportunity and the kidnaps are not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern whereby girls’ rights are not taken seriously enough in many countries, or indeed by the international community as a whole. The violation of girls’ rights is commonplace. In the end, in some countries, rights are only what the rulers decree, so that the opportunities for girls are no more than what a few patriarchs are prepared to bestow. Seventy years after the universal declaration of human rights, we are, in my view, in the midst of what I see as a great global civil rights struggle—a liberation struggle that has yet to establish, in every country of the world, every girl’s right to life, education and dignity. It is falling to girls themselves to lead the fight for rights, largely because of the failure of us as adults, who should be discharging our responsibility for and to them.

A few days ago, there was a youth takeover of the African Union in Addis Ababa; then 20 parliamentary takeovers by young people who occupied, with the permission of the parliamentarians, national assemblies in support of the Chibok girls. This was backed up by demonstrations in cities across the world, including in Rio, Lagos, Hanoi, Cairo and Islamabad. These young people still need the world to see their problem and their fight for what it is.

The bigger truth is that for years we have somehow assumed a clear, if often rocky, pathway towards human rights and universal education, but today in Pakistan the Council of Islamic Ideology is calling for all age limits on girl brides to be abolished; India has just passed up on yet another chance to outlaw child labour; countries all across Africa are failing to act on genital mutilation; and progress to get 58 million out-of-school children into school has stalled in recent years. We should not and must not stand by as many countries in the world lurch backwards when it comes to the imposition, preservation and upholding of girls’ rights.

In northern Nigeria today, we have on the one side terrorists, murderers, rapists and cowards hellbent on acts of depravity, and on the other side we have the defiant, relentless, brave beyond comprehension young people who are desperately fighting for a future but are too often oblivious to our attention. We must be clear that in the battle between the girls of the world and the backward-looking extremists, there will, in the end, be only one winner, but we should not have to wait another half-century with millions of lives ruined, millions of dreams destroyed, millions of hopes and aspirations crushed, for the world to deliver—as we must for the Nigerian girls, and for girls everywhere—the opportunities that should be and are every girl’s birthright.