 Good afternoon, and we are joined today by Ms. Obiakavieza-Quesely, a truly remarkable African public servant, having served in the highest positions in both private and public levels in her home country of Nigeria and internationally. A few of these positions include former World Bank Vice President for Africa, co-founder of the well-known anti-corruption group Transparency International, senior economic advisor for the Open Society Foundation, and former Federal Minister of Education in Nigeria. Recently she became one of the leading voices for the Bring Back Our Girls movement. The civic activism and social media campaigns started by Nigerians that helped galvanize international outrage about the plight of nearly 300 schoolgirls who were kidnapped by the fundamentalist terrorist group Boko Haram. Several thousands of Nigerians have also died in violence related to the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009. Ms. Ezequesely, thank you so much for being here today, it's my pleasure again. And congratulations on recently being named one of the world's 100 most influential people by time magazine. So over one year later, most of the kidnapped girls are still missing, and so are thousands of other women and children who have been taken by Boko Haram. Compared to other civic activism campaigns such as the Coney 2012 campaign that was aimed at pressuring the US government to capture Ugandan war criminal Joseph Coney, why do you think the Bring Back Our Girls movement has largely been able to stir up citizens and international support around an issue of concern in Nigeria? I think it is the fact that we're much more integrated now through social media globally than was the case with Coney. Coney had been on this rampage for quite a number of years, and so often on people get to hear about it, and then he goes off the radar. But in the case of Chiba Girls, it was instantaneous. It was coming at a time when we had more citizens in our country being on social media and using it as a means of interaction and understanding the power that it gave or rather it gives to their voice. And so when this happened and that traditional media was not even reporting the tragedy, the social media was reporting it, discussing it, and pushing on it. I mean, it was the very next day after they were abducted on the midnight of the 14th of April, the news broke through BBC on my timeline. I saw it, and then I tweeted and said, I hope this is not true. And from that tweet, I never stopped tweeting every day. I dedicated at least 10 tweets from the 15th of April. In fact, at some point, the hashtag was, where are 85 girls? Because the military sort of suggested that we were only looking for 85 girls. It was not until the 23rd of April when I went to a UNESCO book event in Portacott, and I said to the audience, we can't be at the book events and not stand in solidarity with over 200 girls that have been missing, and there's no word on that. As a former minister of education, I know what it took to get girls in the classroom, in the North East. And so these ones went to school and they're missing and we're just going to carry on. So I said, let's all rise and demand that our government which has not said a word should just go after these terrorists and rescue the girls. I asked the audience to join me in saying, bring back our daughters, bring back our girls. And one of my followers on Twitter tweeted and said, and Toby says we should all demand bring back our girls. And then I retweeted him and then asked everybody to adopt the use of that hashtag, bring back our girls. People felt connected to the story of those girls. It was instant. And sometimes I think that just the thought that those girls could be anybody's daughters, they could be anybody's sisters, just said something in everyone that picked up on their advocacy. So over the last couple of weeks, the Nigerian government has made some inroads in some positive inroads and according to reports they've rescued over 700 women and girls. The road to recovery for those who have been rescued, it's a very long road. What's next for them? What do you think the government, communities, civil society groups, what should they really be prioritizing now in reintegrating these women and children back into society? So we developed a tool that we call the verification, authentication and reintegration system. It's a simple tool, basically laying out the various activities and methods of verifying people who have been kidnapped. So we need to establish the identity again, most of them. I mean, think of it again. We were calling for archipelagos, but there have been news that would say so-and-so number of people have been abducted, so-and-so number, you know, after the abduction of archipelagos or even before the abduction, the massive scale of the abduction was one of the reasons why it resonated with everybody. But there have been these other abductions that our government never confirmed or conveyed. So suddenly we realized that we actually had so many more people than even archipelagos who lost their identity. It was like they never existed until they were rescued. So the system that establishes identity again for them, true identity, you know, it's one of the things that we have set to the government to adopt so that it's not that they are just one of the number of many people that have been rescued. Okay, then we also have, within that tool, we call it the three arrows, the rehabilitation, the resettlement, and the reintegration. And, you know, that, the very important, you know, psychosocial, post-traumatic counseling that a number of them would require, we said that has to be instant and that has to be done professionally. We've not been a society that placed a lot of importance to those kinds of metals of getting people to heal. We instantly just, you know, get up and keep going whenever anything happened in the past. But we're saying that those kinds of support services would need to be provided. Some of that is going on already in the camps where they're being kept. But then there is a whole work of the real healing process. Some of the girls have been said to be pregnant. Now, that completely changes everything in their lives. So the care, the support, and what they're going to need as a family, some of them are going to be rejected by their immediate families that are saying, we don't know who you are anymore. We're not sure we want a child that has been said by somebody who is a terrorist. So there's going to be a lot of stigmatization going on. And so for us as a movement, we've been an advocacy movement. What we've said is that we're going to stay being an advocacy movement. Let's not go entering into a field that is not natural to the way our movement is configured. However, we're going to be very, very adroit in identifying partnership. And so we're already working with some key partners in the development sector. And with other professional bodies to sort of get around the very clear support that the girls and the women and the children that are being rescued will have to go through, will have to be given in order to get them back into safe habitation and restoration of livelihood. We just really need this to be an episode that does not destroy them for life. Well, speaking about the Bring Back Our Girls movement, since its inception, the movement has had its own share of critic. Some who say that the movement has been an opportunity to raise awareness about a very important issue in Nigeria. And others who say the movement is just another social media campaign that will lose its relevance soon. What do you say to this and what do you think the movement has done to, has it had any effect on civic activism in Nigeria? And what do you see as the future of the Bring Back Our Girls movement? The advocacy is not only effective by virtue of the fact that it raised awareness. It actually compelled action. Now, whether the action has so far resulted in the objective that we intended is a different thing. We know our girls are not back. So we stay frustrated but energized to continue to demand that action that results in their rescue should be taken. OK, so there is the awareness, there is the compelling. If we had the mandate and the capacity to act, we would have done that as a movement. But we don't. So you advocate for something that you don't have the capacity and the mandate to do. So we will do that. People who sort of say this is a mere social media campaign, they don't have the full picture. We're not just a social media campaign. We actually have been on the ground up until today. We have daily, we sort of took poetic license and decided to call sitting a sit-out just as a signature of what we do. So we do a sit-out daily at the Unity Fountain in Abuja. Basically, citizens would devote some three hours of their day just sitting and having conversations demanding that action be taken concerning achievable girls. In the early days, we had meetings with the different entities that had the power to do something about achievable girls. So it wasn't a mere social media, comfortable advocacy kind of thing. We really walked our talk and we haven't stopped. We have met at international levels. For example, the United States offered support in the early days of the abduction of our girls. We needed accountability from the US. What was it that happened? Why didn't it amount to the rescue of our girls? Why was it that some of the supporters of government could say to us, oh well, if the US couldn't find the girls when they came here, what were you expecting from the government of Nigeria? That's like a cop out, that's like using a terrible alibi, right? So we engaged with the US government also. We've met all levels of people in the administration. And the good thing now is that whereas in the early days of that support, there were frustrations along the way, as we now know. And so it didn't amount to much. More and more I hear of senior officials of the administration promising that a new window of opportunity exists for a full re-engagement to try to find our Chibo girls. We are never going to stop. The advocacy for Chibo girls is a symbol of citizens finding their voice. The fact that our Chibo girls were successfully abducted is a story in the failure of governance. It tells, that's the most important thing it tells you. And so if the underlying issues are governance failure issues, then citizens now know that demanding for accountability by those that govern them would make a big difference to preventing certain occurrences. And so more and more, especially women, young women, I see a lot of young women in Nigeria, they found their voices. They now are not sprint check-ins who just walk away from situations. They demand for action. We see many more young people saying, we can make a demand on government. And I think that what we've been able to crystallize, that engagement of citizens, that active engagement of citizens, we need to now organize it to be very empirical so that empirical advocacy would push the capacity and the capabilities that citizens bring to the table. And through empirical advocacy, citizens will actually begin to run what I call the office of the citizen. The office of the citizen is the most important office in any country. The fact that citizens are eternally vigilant. That's the prize, as Thomas Jefferson said, that they pay for liberty. So the Nigerian citizens who are now understanding the necessity for their voice to compare the right kind of action by their governments are never going to back away. We have seen the benefit of not being aloof to the things that happen to other people. So people are going to be more involved. People are going to scrutinize government more. People are going to demand for action. People are going to demand for accountability. Citizens are also going to rise up to their own responsibility. Every citizen has a duty to the country. And so that whole citizenship space is becoming an interesting space for us. I wish we had some more time to explore this whole notion of the office of the citizen, because it sounds very, very interesting. But on a final question, speaking about this notion of governance, over the last couple of weeks, Nigeria has gotten a lot of positive attention because of the conduct of the elections. On May 29th, we'll mark the transition from the incumbent to the incoming opposition. And the president-elect will have a lot of problems and a lot of challenges to tackle. And there are high expectations from the citizens. Now, there are a lot of priorities that we can lay out. But in your own opinion, what would you say is the top priority the incoming government should focus on and the top priority the U.S. government should focus on in its support to Nigeria? So number one is our incoming president has to stop being a candidate. He's now elected. And so he's going to have to reconcile the entire country. All the divisions have to vanish through deliberate intentional effort on his part to unite the country behind one common purpose. The second thing is going to be that our society became a place where the cost and consequence of bad behavior became so low that people got incentive to behave badly. So we need to change that. And so it means that the sanctioning of bad behavior, we need to just bring it big time. And so the anti-corruption effort cannot simply be about doing the whole orientation for a transparent environment, doing the structural or institutional changes that prevent corruption. It has to be fighting corruption by sanctioning corruption so that when you sanction corruption, that's a deterrence. And then the third thing is going to be a focus on the critical investments that would drive a diversification of the economy because you need that in order for jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs have to be a key economic development agenda. And then in terms of what the U.S. can do, the U.S. would say clearly that public finance is in ruin because of the poor management of oil revenue. Therefore, the space for the government itself to invest in critical infrastructure is very, very narrow. So friends like the U.S. can support the process using instruments available to EGZIM, to OPIC, and all other instruments to get many more private capital flowing into the country from the United States.