Veteran journalist Stephanie Busari on Saturday delivered an emotional commencement speech to the American University of Nigeria (AUN) class of 2026, praising graduating students for persevering through hardship and paying special tribute to former Chibok schoolgirls abduction victims who completed their university education.
During this year’s graduation ceremony, the 17th since the university’s establishment, 261 graduates received undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, including 12 of the former Chibok schoolgirls.
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The 12 girls were part of the 276 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram insurgents from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State in April 2014.
While some escaped, others were freed and negotiated out of the terrorists’ enclave in batches. Some of the girls were re-enrolled at AUN while others were flown to the United States to further their education.
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President of the university, DeWayne Frazier, described the graduation of the former abductees as “a sacred moment of triumph over fear, resilience over trauma, and hope over everything that once tried to silence their future.”
“For many years, our cry was ‘Bring Back Our Girls’, but today, we send our ‘girls’ forward,” Mr Frazier said.
The AUN president said the graduation of the 12 young women demonstrated the enduring power of education despite extremists’ attempts to suppress it.
Commencement speech
Speaking at the graduation ceremony, Ms Busari said every graduating student had overcome personal struggles to reach the milestone, noting that some battled invisible challenges while others carried family and financial responsibilities alongside their studies.
“You did not arrive here by accident,” she said. “You kept making the decision to continue when stopping would have been easier.”
The journalist, who gained international recognition for obtaining a proof-of-life video of the abducted Chibok girls in 2016, reflected on her years covering the tragedy and the eventual release of some of the captives.
She recalled meeting several of the girls in 2017 at the Presidential Villa in Abuja after their freedom.
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“At the time, we did not know if the work would make any difference. We did it because the alternative was silence, and silence felt like complicity,” she said.
Addressing the 12 former abductees, she described their graduation as proof that attempts to deny them education had failed.
“You were taken from your hostel in the middle of the night by people who believed your education was a threat worth eliminating. What they failed to understand is that once that power takes root in a person, it cannot be removed by force,” she said.
“Now you are here, with degrees in your hands and your lives ahead of you, in a moment that was specifically designed never to happen. You are not merely survivors of a story. You are authors of what comes next.”
She urged all members of the graduating class to remember the resilience that carried them through university and to rely on that experience during future challenges.
“I once believed the power was only in telling the story,” she said. “Now I believe the greater power is in living it forward.”
