Imagine if you will that you are a Briton and suddenly the entire population of the City of Truro in Cornwall or Hailsham in East Sussex, 22,000 people suddenly disappeared, dragged away over the course of a decade by violent thugs. Imagine also that among those taken were your relatives maybe even your children and also having the agony of not knowing if these relatives are either alive or dead or whether you will ever see them again.

This is the plight of the citizens of Nigeria in West Africa where Islamic jihadis from the Boko Haram group have been operating. Over the last ten years over 22,000 Nigerian citizens have been abducted by Boko Haram and many of them have never been seen again.

It doesn’t take much to imagine ourselves in the places of those who have been made bereft by violent thugs motivated by an equally violent ideology. We would quite rightly be devastated if what has happened to the Nigerians happened to us and our loved ones.

The world cannot sit by and watch as Islamists slaughter and enslave human beings across the African continent and especially so in Nigeria. Not only should we not sit by and be silent in the face of this atrocity as speaking up is the moral thing to do, but one day it may be our nations that suffer from the sort of jihad that is bringing so much harm to African nations like Nigeria.