Malala meets Nigerian leader over missing school girls

ABUJA. Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan is billed to hold a meeting on Monday with Pakistani schoolgirl and activist Malala Yousafzai, who is in the west African country to hold talks with officials and parents of more than 200 school girls abducted in April, according to officials. Malala, who pledged to voice her support for the release of the abducted girls, have suffered a similar fate in 2012 when she survived being shot in the head by the Taliban on her way from school. Her mission in Nigeria is to campaign for better education for all girls. On Sunday, she held meetings in the Nigerian capital Abuja with parents of the missing girls and some of the teenagers who reportedly escaped from their captors’ den after the mid-April abduction. The girls were abducted by Boko Haram in their hostels in Chibok Town of Nigeria’s northeastern state of Borno. “The situation at Chibok is the same with the situation in Swat (her birthplace in Pakistan) where some extremists stopped more than 400 girls from going to school,” Malala told the gathering, after listening to stories of the girls who were lucky to escape from Boko Haram’s hideout. The Pakistani activist, fighting for girls’ education rights, urged the Nigerian government to take the girls’ plight seriously for the sake of the country’s future. She further called on stakeholders in the country to join in the campaign for peace and give support to the girl child education.