It isn’t just hearts that are broken in Kaduna State. It isn’t just the serenity of many families that has been shattered by uncertainty. The loss of face for a state that hosts Nigeria’s premier military institutions might be irreversible. But that is only one theme in a country of tear-streaked themes.
On 7th March 2024, while they were still basking in the solemnity of a general assembly, about 287 pupils and some staff members of LEA Primary School, Kuriga 1, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State were jolted back to reality and hustled into an unimaginable fate by armed criminals. The abductions, shocking in its number and audacity has ferried an entire country into a hasty return to the past, prompting difficult questions about the direction of the country under a new administration. What is especially disconcerting for many Nigerians is that they thought they had stuck away those questions somewhere in the past.
In captivity, the children ripped away from their reality while some of their stunned parents watched on will be forced to engage their young minds in a distressing reflection on what it means to grow up in Nigeria. They will also be forced to become child umpires in calling emergency results in the increasingly gripping Nigerian context between crime and civility. They will be forced to pronounce a clear winner in the race between the easy millions of crime and the immiseration of honest work.
The children will also be forced to reconsider what they know about school as a sanctuary of some sorts, as a place where they go to read and learn to be good citizens and ambassadors of their country.
When Boko Haram rejigged and expanded its operations in 2009, western education was a pronounced target. In more than a decade of a murderous, traitorous and treacherous campaigns, many schools were torn down and the education of numberless children put into irreparable jeopardy.
Even when Boko Haram’s audacious terrorism began to embolden and inspire others terrorist groups and new forms of terrorism, education remained a key target.
The attacks are well documented, especially in Kaduna State, which has unfortunately become a playground for the terrorists haunting Nigeria despite its heavy military presence.
Nigerians, and indeed the world, remember the horrifying abductions that hit the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, in 2014, and the Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi in 2018. The fact that till this day, some of the girls, many of whom left as innocent teenagers but have since become mothers are yet to return tells its story.
In 2021, well over one hundred secondary school students were kidnapped from the Baptist Bethel High School in Chikun, Kaduna. They were to spend months in harrowing captivity. According to the Baptist Convention, it had to churn out a hefty sum of two hundred and fifty million Naira to secure the release of the hapless students.
In Tegina, Niger State, more than a hundred children were snatched from their school in 2021 and forced to spend about eighty-nine days in captivity. The instances abound, which begs a handful of questions.
What is the attack on education in Nigeria about? What is the end-goal of the faceless criminals whom desperate Nigerians continue to fund by shelling out millions of Naira to facilitate the release of their abducted children?
Are Nigerian students and pupils random victims of Nigeria’s terrorism-related kidnapping nightmare, or are they specific and soft targets of what is a deliberate attempt to set back education in Nigeria.
Even before Boko Haram turned its ire towards education in Nigeria in the last decade, education was already on a free-fall in the country. Years of under-investment in education had led to poor funding, and crumbling educational infrastructure. This had in turn bred disillusionment, indifference, and disinterest in many school pupils and students, but especially in their parents who would rather their children did something else. Poverty has also made education a rather expendable luxury for many parents and their children.
Nigeria is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on Safe Schools, which is meant to protect schools and their students from armed conflicts. However, experience has shown that in the last decade, Nigerian schools have been anything but safe.
The effects of this recent school attack will be felt for years to come. Just when Nigerians were tempted to think that the country under a new administration was finally on its way away from the path of such attacks, this attack is a brutal jab at a broken just when it was beginning to pick up its pieces.
The fear which never really went away will now return with vengeance to the hearts of parents who were suspicious of the sudden tranquility all along. The children, some as young as nine, would also learn to feel primal fear in a country where fun has long been replaced by the darkest kind of fear.
It indicts Nigeria’s security architecture that many schools sprawled across the country are vulnerable to attacks by non-state actors who are bent on disrupting the country.
Education is the great equalizer. It is why everything possible should be done to rein in the criminals who are bent on taking away this most vital of resources from the poorest and most vulnerable Nigerian children.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
