More than a week after 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from the remote northeast Nigerian town of Chibok by Boko Haram on April 14, 2014, a lawyer posted the first #BringBackOurGirls tweet. Ibrahim Abdullahi's hashtag would go on to become one of Africa's most popular online campaigns and was shared more than four million times over the next month on Twitter.
#BringBackOurGirls undoubtedly brought global attention to a brutal but largely ignored conflict that since 2009 has claimed at least 20,000 lives and made more than 2.6 million others homeless. It also galvanised international support against Boko Haram at a time when Nigeria's military was floundering badly in the face of the better-armed rebels, losing territory and vital public support.
But two years on, #BringBackOurGirls risks becoming another example of the limited influence of online protest, according to Ufuoma Akpojivi, a media researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. On the ground, 219 of the 276 girls are still missing, their Government Girls Secondary School is a broken ruin and Chibok is desperate for development.
Translating social media success into tangible change on the ground has always been a challenge to online campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter and #OccupyWallStreet. #BringBackOurGirls was an initial success, bringing protesters out to the streets in a country where mass public demonstrations are rare.
Supporters of Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian who was Nigeria's president at the time of the kidnapping, dismissed it as a fabrication by his political enemies in the Muslim-majority north to derail his re-election campaign. Outspoken government critics such as the former education minister turned anti-corruption activist Oby Ezekwesili and the popular televangelist Tunde Bakare meanwhile promoted #BringBackOurGirls.
US, The world's superpower has been unable to secure the girls' release, despite Boko Haram-related counter-terrorism assistance totalling more than $400 million to date. A month after the kidnapping, US President Barack Obama sent some 80 military personnel to neighbouring Chad to help locate and "support the safe return" of the schoolgirls. US and British surveillance experts reportedly located some of the missing girls and passed on their findings to the Nigerians but they failed to follow up.
