United States’ former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said on Wednesday night in New York that the Nigerian government had shown irresponsibility in matters relating to girls and boys over the years.

Clinton, who is a likely presidential candidate in 2016, added her voice to an increasingly widespread outrage that has followed the kidnap of over 250 schoolgirls from a government secondary school in Chibok, Borno State by Boko Haram insurgents on April 14, 2014.

She described the action of the terrorist group as “abominable, criminal, an act of terrorism” which required the “fullest response possible first and foremost from the government of Nigeria.”

“The government of Nigeria has been, in my view, somewhat derelict in its responsibility for protecting boys and girls, men and women,” she said.

The Daily Mail reports Clinton as saying that during her tenure as that Secretary of States, she was pressured by the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command to add Boko Haram to the state’s official list of terror organisations, a request she refused.

But in November 2013, the current Secretary of State, John Kerry, granted that request.

-Punch