On Tuesday April 21, 2015 Obiageli Ezekwesili, Samantha Power
and Kanye West (all listed in the current TIME 100 Most Influential People In
The World) attended TIME’s 100 Gala which was staged at the Lincoln Center in
New York City.
The current Senior Economic Adviser with the Africa
Economic Development Policy Initiative (AEDPI) and leading voice on the global
#BringBackOurGirls Campaign attended the event as an honouree.
Putting the girls in fore-front of the conversation, she
called on President Obama to do more to help find the girls abducted by
Islamist group Boko Haram. “If he could get Osama bin Laden, he could get our
girls,” she said.
Ezekwesili, met with Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador
to the U.N., and with Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, who runs a school for former
child soldiers in Uganda at the TIME 100 gala.
“It is time for someone as powerful as Barack Obama to
compare the girls of Chibok to his own daughters,” Ezekwesili said. “These
girls are a symbol of our own message to girls that they should be educated,
that we would go beyond the call of duty for you.”
She expressed the fact we live in a world where “a child
is forced to choose between being alive and being educated.”
Power said the U.S. was looking at ways to bolster the
fight against Boko Haram, which has killed and kidnapped thousands in Nigeria
over the past few months. “We’ve been looking at how to throw our weight behind
an international force.”
Nyirumbe, who wrote on Ezekwesili for the 2015 TIME 100,
said that the meeting between her, Ezekwesili and Power reminded her of “the
power of women.”
“I would like to see a lot of people more involved in
practical solutions to practical problems,” she said. “Women have got to the
point where we can turn the world upside down.”
Other Nigerians who made the TIME 100 list are Nigeria's President-Elect, Muhammadu Buhari
and award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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