Sincerely speaking, I do not know what ‘chi’ means in Hausa and have not also bothered to enquire from those who should know. On the other hand, I think I have sufficient grasp of Igbo to know that the word stands for god or deity while Chukwu is reserved for the Supreme One.
In any case, whatever its real Hausa meaning or connotation, this three-letter nomenclature seems not to dwell pretty with Boko Haram and the other terrorist gangs currently riding roughshod across northern Nigeria.
On April 14, 2014 the once peaceful village of Chibok, in Borno State, was roused from sleep to discover that it had just qualified to become a red dot on the terror map of the world courtesy of Boko Haram whose insurgents, acting in commando-style, overran a government girls secondary school in the community and abducted no fewer than 276 students.
It was later reported that 57 of these girls jumped from the vehicles in which they were being transported and escaped, leaving the total number taken captive as 219. Out of this figure, about 107 were subsequently released in an exchange deal between the Federal Government and Boko Haram. Of the 57 escapees, 20 are said to be currently studying in the US.
The rest 112 girls have remained in captivity to this day even as we know that some of them have since been married off to Boko Haram fighters while others had died strapped with explosives to undertake suicide missions in the north east. It was also rumoured that a number of the girls may have been killed during sustained Nigerian Air Force bombardment of the terrorists’ camps in Sambisa Forest in the aftermath of the 2014 raid.
The Federal Government’s repeated assurances that the remaining Chibok schoolgirls would soon be reunited with their families have since ceased to excite anybody, including the BringBackOurGirls campaigners. Visibly distraught parents have continued to travel to Abuja in the hope of getting more concrete reassurances from the Presidency, all to no avail. Instead, Boko Haram continues to unleash mayhem on the village, killing people and burning houses with survivors fleeing to swell the already congested Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in the state capital.
Again, at 5.30 pm on February, 2018, and roughly four years after the Chibok incident, 110 students of Government Girls Science and Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, in Yobe State were reported to have been swiftly rounded up and taken hostage by Boko Haram.
Dapchi is said to lie 275 kilometres northwest of Chibok and, unlike what was witnessed in the latter’s case, federal troops mounted a determined but belated pursuit of the bandits and their human loot. However, after a period of negotiations, facilitated mainly by international non-governmental bodies, 106 of the girls were released and transported back to Dapchi by their abductors; though not without the payment of ransom as was widely reported in the news but later denied by the government.
Officially, only one of the girls, Leah Sharibu, is still being held by the insurgents due mainly to her refusal to renounce her Christian faith and convert to Islam as demanded by her abductors. Already, five girls were said to have died while being transported to the kidnappers’ hideout.
To the very uncanny, the Dapchibok (sorry, Dapchi and Chibok) raids would appear like a mere coincidence, but how about this? At 12.10 am on October 2, 2019 armed men reportedly struck at a private co-educational secondary school in Kaduna State whisking away six girls and two teachers. Yes, you guessed right. Like the Chibok and Dapchi schools before it, the Kaduna victim, known as Engravers College, is based in Chikun, another community with the chi nomenclature.
The six students and their teachers were let go last Friday, after 23 days in the den of their kidnappers. Although no group has, as yet, openly claimed responsibility for this latest incident, it is already known that the act of invading secondary schools and herding away mostly female students has since become a distinctive characteristic of Boko Haram.
Chibok, Dapchi and Chikun may be small communities lying along routes that are hardly guarded round the clock but nobody should underrate the reach of Boko Haram or any of the northern-based terrorist groups for that matter. The dreaded insurgents whose main objective is to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria had severally come close to overrunning Maiduguri, the Borno State seat of power.
Sometime in 2014, the group steadily made incursions into Borno, Adamawa and Yobe (the BAY States of Boko Haram) during which it reportedly gained control of about 14 local government areas, hoisted its flag and declared a caliphate. Even Abuja, the nation’s capital, was threatened at some point. Yes, remember the Nyanya explosions.
Finally, I want to wager that Bauchi has some mixed or purely girls’ schools. I also want to assume that there are other chi towns in the north, particularly those with an all-female institution. If these scenarios are given, then it will not be out of place to bid that they begin to keep permanent vigil around such schools.
I am neither a soothsayer nor an alarmist, but ignore my hunch and your guess will be as bad as mine, thank you.

Ibelema Jumbo