The terrorist threat to education

Sir: On March 7, 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 abduction, 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 murderous, traitorous and treacherous campaigns, many schools were torn down and the education of numberless children put into irreparable jeopardy.

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.

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?

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.

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 equaliser. 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, [email protected]