The stakeholders must do more to secure our schools
When gunmen enter a school premises and cart away children, government needs to do more than sending ‘emissaries’ to negotiate with criminals. The authorities must recognise the implications of last week’s killing of a student and the abduction of 27 others along with three staff and 12 members of their families at Government Science College, Kagara, Niger State. The experiences of Federal Government College, Buni Yadi where no fewer than 58 male students were brutally assassinated and that of Government Secondary School, Chibok where more than a hundred girls are yet to be accounted for as well as that of Government Girls’ Science and Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi where Lear Shairbu remains in captivity three years after, should have taught lessons on such tragedies.
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The Nigerian Senate has mandated its committees on Basic and Tertiary Education to investigate allegations of abuse of $20 million meant to implement the Safe Schools Initiative of the Federal Government.
Another Day of Abduction
Education in Nigeria is increasingly threatened. On insecurity grounds, Nigerian school kids are faced with mounting violence at places of learning. On 17th February 2021, about 27 children were kidnapped by armed men from a secondary school in Kagara Niger State. The abduction is the latest item on the growing list of schoolchildren abduction in Nigeria. In December 2020, hundreds of schoolboys were abducted from their school in Katsina state. Although the schoolboys have been released, the incident was the most brazen target on school children in Nigeria after the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State by Boko Haram insurgents. There was also the kidnapping of nearly 110 Dapchi girls in the same Borno state by terrorists. However, the schoolgirls were later released.