Insecurity: Government must protect schools from abduction attacks
Recently, kidnapping in the Country has become a torrent menace. Roving criminality of abduction for ransom has become a chain in the lamentable state of insecurity in the Country.
Records have shown how schools have become targets for bandits and perpetrators tagged as “unknown gunmen” to unleash their operations aiming to seize students for ransom.
Recently, it was disclosed 14 States of the Federation as well as the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, are at risk of attacks by insurgents and bandits targeted at schools.
The warning amidst the torrent resurgence of the mass abduction of pupils recurring in the Country is a source of concern. The National Coordinator of Financing Safe Schools in Nigeria, Hajia Halima Iliya, told a national daily on Sunday, that the data of at-risk schools had been collected for intervention, noting that 14 States as well as the FCT were at risk. Iliya declined to identify the States, but the Commander of the National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre, Nigeria Security, and Civil Defence Corps, Hammed Abodunrin, said they included Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Benue, Yobe, Katsina, FCT, Kebbi, Sokoto, Plateau, Zamfara and three others.
Struggles to free no fewer than 465 pupils, teachers, and women abducted recently still pose deep concern. Fifteen pupils of an Islamiya school in Sokoto State were kidnapped in the early hours of Saturday, 9th March, less than 72 hours after 287 schoolchildren and teachers were abducted from the LEA primary school and the Government Secondary School both at Kuriga, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State. Twenty eight of them were on Sunday 10th, March, reported to have escaped, while 259 are in captivity.
A few days before the Kaduna incident, 200 female Internally Displaced Persons were taken away by terrorists in Borno State. The women were kidnapped in Ngala, the headquarters of Gambarou Ngala in Borno state while fetching firewood in the bush.
On Sunday, 10th March, there were reports that nine of them had regained freedom, remaining 191 in captivity. Also recently, bandits abducted an undisclosed number of people in the Gonin-Gora community in the same Chikun LGA of Kaduna, prompting residents to barricade the Kaduna-Abuja Expressway in protest.
As a response to the April 2014 abduction of the Chibok school girls, the Safe Schools Initiative was launched by the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, alongside the Nigerian Global Business Coalition for Education and private sector leaders at the World Economic Forum Africa.
The Federal Government had earlier inaugurated the Safe Schools Fund with a $10m contribution and another $10m pledge from the private sector. In further support for the programme, the Federal Government budgeted N15bn for the SSI in the 2023 fiscal year.
Meanwhile, the Presidency has described the recent cases of kidnapping across the country as efforts by “sub-regional geopolitical forces conspiring to undermine the government of President Bola Tinubu.” Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr Ajuri Ngelale, mentioned this when he spoke on TVC’s Politics on Sunday.
On the programme titled ‘Counting the Cost of Presidents Tinubu’s Reforms,’ Ngelale revealed that the Federal Government was already receiving support from the United States government for the release of students kidnapped in Kaduna.
“I will say this: across the north, we understand that some of the sub-regional geopolitical forces that are currently at play are actively conspiring against the stability of Nigeria,” the President’s spokesman had said.
It is important that the Federal Government take decisive measures to address the rising spate of kidnapping in the Country, particularly as schools including students and teachers are increasingly becoming soft targets. Subjecting harmless and innocent students to traumatic experiences of abduction would not only leave a psychological distress with their memories, and those of their parents and loved ones, but remains a red signal of deterrence to create fear in students and their guardians to attend schools. Where the academic environment becomes insecure, it creates panic which cannot in any way be conducive for learning.
It is hence pertinent for the Federal Government to tackle the menace headlong than merely reducing it to an act sponsored by political forces.
