What's so special about the Chibok Girls?

Before and after that night, thousands of people have been kidnapped by Boko Haram. Men have been forced to carry arms and join in the fighting. Women have been made to live in slave-like conditions. Children have had their childhoods cut short with the burden of captivity.

This begs the question, why are a group of girls given much more importance over the thousands more who have suffered similar, or probably worse conditions?

Our answer sits in a dark corner of January 1970.

Nigerian launched "Operation Tail-Wind", a final offensive against Biafran forces, and by the middle of January, the war was officially over.

The Head of State at the time, General Yakubu Gowon, delivered his famous "no victor, no vanquished" speech, which brought a symbolic end to the war.

What that speech didn't talk about was that three (3) million people are estimated to have died in that war.

ALSO READ:"Forget about Biafra," Buhari tells Igbos

In the following decades up until this day, thousands and possibly millions of lives have been lost in meaningless conflicts and incidents, from the inter-tribal and inter-religious riots across Nigeria to extrajudicial killings by the armed forces.

Fast forward to the advent of Boko Haram and our long history with forgetfulness still lingers. It is how we move on after every incident, as if it never happened, expecting that somehow, those wounds will heal, or the vacuum the dead left will be filled.

We reduce the all the dead to words like "30 killed in crisis", "114 killed in the riots" "43 boys killed in Mubi". We reduce them to statistics for the next elections, or speech, or report. Nothing ever happens.

For the first time in our history, a large group of victims isn't just numbers, they are people. People with names, with ages, with faces.

ALSO SEE:Photos of the emotional reunion of the Chibok girls with their families

We know Amina Ali. Mary Usman. Jummai John. We know all kidnapped girls. We know their hobbies, we know their parents. We know their school. Their names give them individuality.

Make no mistake, this doesn't make the thousands of others less important, they deserve a life of freedom where they can fulfill their dreams.

Here's a quick fact. When a child goes missing in the U.S, an AMBER Alert is declared. That Broadcast Emergency Response service was named after Amber Hagerman, a 9-year-old who was abducted and killed in 1996. Amber doesn't make other missing children less important, but it makes her iconic in the sense that she was the beginning of something important.

When people stop becoming numbers and start becoming names, they become more human in our hearts. The Chibok Girls might be only a tiny fraction of the thousands who have been snatched away, but they just might be a pretty good start to something important. A culture of remembering, and never moving on until we've brought real closure to a tragedy, and hence we can move on as better individuals.