AN EPIDEMIC OF STOLEN SCHOOL CHILDREN
The authorities must do more to secure and protect our children
On the morning of 15 May, as children in three schools in the Oriire area of Oyo State were settling into the ordinary rituals of a school day, more than a dozen gunmen on motorcycles rode into Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota; Community Grammar School, Esiele; and L.A. Primary School. By the time they rode back into the forest, an assistant headmaster and a motorcyclist lay dead while dozens of pupils and their teachers were herded into the bush at gunpoint. A few days later, the abductors beheaded one of those teachers. Later still, a member of the security forces who had joined the rescue effort died after running into explosives the kidnappers had planted on the trail.
Meanwhile, on the very same day in distant Borno State, gunmen seized more than 40 children from a school in the Askira/Uba area, as though to remind Nigerians that this is not a local tragedy but a national condition. Those abducted Borno children are still unaccounted for while the pupils and the surviving teachers of the Oyo State tragedy remain somewhere in the forest. The principal of one of the schools, herself a captive, has filmed a video from the bush, begging the country to remember that they are alive and waiting.
For years, Nigerians had comforted themselves that this was an affliction restricted to a section of the country, a problem of ungoverned forests far from where the powerful sleep. Not anymore. Today, no zone in the country is safe from these marauders. And lest anyone imagine that proximity to power offers protection, last week in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, gunmen abducted the younger sister of a former Minister of Power, together with her 12-year-old twin sons, while on the school run. Fortunately, they have regained their freedom.
In the aftermath of the April 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, a coalition of Nigerian business leaders, working with the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his capacity as United Nations envoy, launched what was christened the Safe Schools Initiative. Tens of millions of dollars were pledged and raised. And then the project quietly lost its breath. Today, going by most reports, more than 42,000 vulnerable schools across the country still stand without so much as a perimeter fence between a child and a kidnapper.
Perimeter fencing, solar-powered lighting, early-warning systems, and rapid-response protocols are the minimum decency we owe a child who shows up to learn. Some form of properly designed and checked sub-national policing is a matter of survival. The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) has refused to suffer in silence by taking its grief to the streets in Lagos, Kano, Plateau, Enugu, Osun, Taraba, Kogi, and other states. The teachers have also threatened to shut down the nation’s classrooms if the government does not act. In response, there is a presidential directive to recruit 1,000 Forest guards. But a specialised security unit announced in a press release is not the same as a child returned to his/her mother.
Education is the one thing that might, in a generation, drain the swamp from which banditry rises. Already, the sheer weight of insecurity is making many parents reluctant to send their wards to school in a nation already plagued with millions of out-of-school children. Indeed, Amnesty International Nigeria has warned on the consequences of the ongoing wave of kidnappings targeting schools. “The trauma that comes with being abducted, or with the fear of being abducted, is going to prevent thousands of children from getting an education completely,” according to Country Director, Isa Sanusi. Sadly, many schools, especially in rural communities across the country, are easy targets for these criminals.
A nation that cannot keep its children in school has, in the most literal sense, mortgaged its future. Therefore, guarding schools and equipping them with electronic warning systems and devices that help track affected locations are minimum requirements. If children cannot freely and safely go to schools, and citizens freedom is curtailed by fear of abduction and kidnapping, where lies the soul of our republic?