Katsina abduction: How safe are Nigerian schools?

 

“It is not just a condolence visit, it is a statement that all of us are fed up with the shedding of innocent blood under whatever guise across this country. So many lives have been lost in the past, we can’t even compute how many lives we have lost. It becomes like a daily occurrence, a daily event. A new normal, it becomes a story when in a day, nobody was killed in a particular place of this country.”

– Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar, during a condolence visit to Borno State over the Zabarmari killings.

To say life is cheap in Nigeria is to state the obvious. The country has descended into the Hobbesian state of nature where life is cruel, short, brutish and nasty. The regime of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), rode to power in 2015 and 2019 on three core campaign promises, namely, to fix the economy, fight corruption and combat insecurity. Much as the regime has tried to make good these campaign promises, it has failed significantly. Just last November, the country slipped into its worst economic recession in over 30 years; the 2019 Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index rated Nigeria as 146 out of 180 countries surveyed while the 2020 Global Terrorism Index put Nigeria as the third most impacted country by terrorism after Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence Sa’ad Abubakar, has almost shouted himself hoarse calling on government at all levels to beef up security across the country because of the subsisting scary security situation. While the general security is getting worse, the frequent attacks of bandits on our schools call for urgent action. Just on Friday, December 11, 2020, an estimated 333 schoolboys at the Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, Katsina State were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents. According to Abubakar Shekau, in an audio message first published by HumAngle, he stated that the action was carried out to ‘promote islam and discourage un-islamic practices’. As of the time of writing this piece, Katsina State governor, Aminu Bello Masari, said negotiations were on to free the abducted students.

It is not the first time this is happening in Nigeria. On Monday, November 23, 2020, unknown gunmen reportedly invaded the home of a staff member of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and abducted him and his family. Last month also, nine French students of ABU were abducted along the Kaduna – Abuja highway with heavy ransom demanded of them before they could be freed. On February 19, 2018, the Federal Government confirmed that 110 female students of the Government Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State were abducted and most of them later released except for Leah Sharibu, the only Christian among them, who is still in captivity.

In February 2014, Boko Haram terrorists shot or burned to death 59 pupils of the Federal Government College of Buni Yadi, Yobe State. As dastardly as this killing was, it did not generate international outrage as the April 14, 2014 Boko Haram militants’ abduction of about 276 students of Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. This incident sparked off one of the biggest global social media campaigns, with tweeters using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

Kidnapping of students is not only a northern Nigeria phenomenon. In May 2017, Pelumi Philips, Farouq Yusuf, Isiaq Rahmon, Adebayo George, Judah Agbausi and Peter Jonah, all students of Lagos Model College, Igbonla, Epe spent 65 days in the kidnappers’ den before they were released.

Recall that after the 2014 Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction, the Safe Schools Initiative was conceived as a response to children and schools affected by militants in the North-East states. According to the Learning Cities Network newsletter of March 9, 2015, “The programme was launched by the Government of Nigeria and the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, former UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, alongside the Nigerian Global Business Coalition for Education and private sector leaders in Abuja in May 2014.  The Safe School Initiative entails a combination of:  transfer of secondary school students to other states; support to education in the IDP camps and pilot safe schools’ models including community mobilisation. The initiative was initially implemented in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states. The Government of Nigeria also established a national Safe Schools Fund to accommodate capitalisation from the Federal Government, private sector, and grants from donors. This national fund is to be complemented by the establishment of the Nigeria Safe Schools Initiative Multi-Donor Trust Fund also for donors for matching co-financing and implementation of activities pertaining to the initiative.”

What has become of this noble initiative? How much resources have been received from the different partners on this project and what has been done with the funds?  It is heartrending that five years after the launch of this initiative, many more abductions and attacks have been carried out in several schools. As I earlier recounted, not even our tertiary institutions are spared as kidnappers now invade universities to abduct lecturers as happened with the recent case in ABU, Zaria.

The implication of unsafe schools is very grave. Already, Nigeria has an estimated 13.5 million out-of-school children. This ugly phenomenon is going to get worse as students and pupils will shun school due to fear of being abducted. Ironically, such out-of-school children portend grave danger for the Nigerian society as many of them may grow up to constitute a nuisance and terror to the rest of society.

As it stands, the governor of Katsina State has ordered the closure of all boarding schools in the state as a result of the Kankara abduction.

This latest abduction of schoolchildren is a wakeup call for government at all levels to up their ante in terms of provision of safety measures in public schools from primary to tertiary levels. Private school owners also need to do the same. It is imperative for school management boards or committees to adopt some of the following security measures: perimeter fencing for the school, security posts should be at the entrances to the schools with possible scanning machines; installation of Closed Circuit Television cameras within and around the school premises; trained security personnel should be deployed to schools; increased police patrols around the school areas and provision of 3-digit security alert toll-free lines. There is also the need to provide security education and tips for both staff and students of schools so that they are knowledgeable about what to do if and when they are under attack by undesirable elements.