Today is Leah Sharibu's birthday. She has spent the last nine years in ISWAP captivity for refusing to convert to Islam. She is the only Dapchi girl who was never returned.

On 19 February 2018, ISWAP attacked Government Girls' Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State, and took 110 girls. Within weeks, 104 were released through government negotiation. Five reportedly died. One was kept.

Leah Sharibu was 14. She refused to renounce her Christian faith. ISWAP told her family she would remain in captivity as a slave for life if their demands were not met. She has spent every birthday since then in their custody. Today she turns 23.

A group called Friends of Leah Sharibu marked her birthday this week with renewed advocacy, calling on the federal government to keep her case visible. The Nigerian government has not given a public update on negotiations in some time.

Think about what nine years means.

When Leah was taken, she was sitting in a classroom. The other girls went home. She did not. She was 14, which means she has now spent more of her teenage and adult life inside ISWAP captivity than outside it. She has missed secondary school, university, whatever she would have chosen to do. She is believed to have given birth to children fathered by her captors. The government that was supposed to bring her home has been under three different administrations since her abduction. None of them have.

Leah Sharibu has become a name that surfaces once a year, on her birthday, with a fresh advocacy statement and renewed calls for action. Then the day passes. The year resumes. The situation does not change. That is not the fault of the advocates who show up. It is the condition of a state that cannot make her situation urgent enough to resolve it. Nigeria has brought people home from ISWAP before, through negotiation and through force. It has not brought her home. Nobody has explained why she remains the exception, and nobody in government has been asked to explain it publicly in recent memory.

There is no resolution to write here. No development that moves the story forward. Just a fact, stated plainly, because today is the day it should be stated.

She is 23 years old. She has been held for nine years. She was 14 when she was taken.

Today is her birthday.