EDITORIAL: Ending insecurity and school kidnappings across Nigeria

Determined not to leave any day without grim harvests in Nigeria, terrorists and bandits upped the ante last week with the killings and mass kidnappings of citizens, after which they escaped with ease. Brigadier-General Musa Uba, the commander of the 25 Task Force Brigade, and his men, including members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), were ambushed and killed in Borno State by fighters of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

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In Kebbi State, last Monday, bandits stormed a secondary school, killed its vice-principal, and kidnapped 25 female students from the dormitory. This occurred in spite of an intelligence report which should have prevented it. The governor of the state, Nasir Idris, is appalled by this irony, and he sees it as “clear sabotage.”

A similar and bigger incident occurred on Friday, at St. Mary Secondary School, Papiri – a Catholic private institution in Niger State, where 315 students and teachers were abducted.

These evil acts exhume the ugly memory of the Boko Haram abduction of 276 Chibok school girls on 14 April 2014. Incredibly, 91 of them are still unaccounted for. In 2021, over 100 students and some members of staff of a government secondary school in the same Kebbi State suffered a similar fate. They were released in two batches after a heavy ransom was paid.

The abduction at Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Danko/Wasagu Local Government Area of Kebbi State, underscores, once again, the ineffectiveness and distressing issue of compromise in the government’s counterinsurgency strategy and operations. President Bola Tinubu has admitted that a “security breach” or not acting on available intelligence led to the present debacle.

Governor Idris, in decrying the received negligence, said: “We got credible intelligence from the DSS that this school was likely to be attacked…The decision was that we would provide round-the-clock protection.” Soldiers at the Ribah junction checkpoint, less than a kilometre from the school, were reportedly mobilised. But they left the school by 12 a.m., after which the terrorists struck in the wee hours. A complicitous scenario like this should not be swept under the carpet.

Since then, the government’s response has been panicky. The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Idris Mohammed, said, “Our security and intelligence services have been given a clear directive to locate, rescue and safely return the students, and to ensure that the perpetrators face justice.”

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This mission must be accomplished without delay, with the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle’s relocation to Kebbi last Friday, at the behest of the President, to coordinate action. Unfortunately, a week has passed without freedom for these students. This is a major indictment of the security agencies. For the president, the ministers, and the security agencies, it is more work, with the latest kidnapping in a Niger school.

The Maga school kidnapping is a deadly blow to girl-child education in the North, which is already beset by several socio-cultural setbacks. The region has 80 per cent of the 18.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria, according to Ango Abdullahi, chairman of the Northern Elders Forum.

Sadly, these school abductions have a toxic adjunct in the terrorist invasion of Christ Apostolic Church, Eruku, in Kwara State on Tuesday last week. A viral video of this tragedy showed the villains shooting sporadically and leaving three worshippers dead, while 38 others were kidnapped. While the terrorists demanded a ₦100 million ransom for each of the captives, it is quite cheerful news that the worshippers finally regained their freedom yesterday, under circumstances that are currently still unclear.

Generally, the optic is not good for Nigeria, particularly at a time when President Donald Trump has threatened the country with military action, and the US Congress held a public hearing on Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern. In Kaduna, a Catholic cleric was also kidnapped at the same time.

As such, it was understandable that the president had to step down his scheduled travels for the G20 in South Africa and the AU-EU Summits in Luanda, Angola. Only irresponsible leaders act like Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned. Mr Tinubu has also ordered the deployment of troops to hot spots of insecurity in the country.

All said, over the past decade, the frequency of school kidnappings ought to have alarmed the government to the point of building up sufficient knowledge around early warning mechanisms, with the right lessons learnt on how to contain these occurrences. They include: the 317 girls kidnapped from Zamfara State in February 2021; 80 students abducted from Federal Government College, Yauri, also in 2021; the 2020 seizure of 344 schoolboys in Kankara in Katsina State; and 140 students taken away from Bethel Baptist High School, Kaduna.

Earlier on, 110 Dapchi schoolgirls were kidnapped in 2018. The federal government’s intervention led to their release. But one of them, Leah Sharibu, remains in captivity on account of what is alleged as her refusal to renounce her Christian faith.

Under Mr Tinubu’s administration, 287 pupils were abducted in Kuriga, Kaduna State, in March 2024. These grim episodes, an SBM intelligence report says, have led to ₦5 billion ransom payments. Between July 2022 and June 2023, a total of 582 kidnapping cases occurred, with 3,620 people entangled in these incidents. They are folks whom the Nigerian State failed to protect and secure, contrary to the hallowed stipulations of the Nigerian Constitution.

Categorically, Governor Idris cannot acquit himself of blame in the abduction of the schoolgirls. Only ineptitude in governance could have allowed a boarding school system with girls, in a state where the activities of kidnappers are well-known, to become such a soft target. More so, Kebbi is located within a phalanx comprising Katsina, Sokoto, and Kaduna states, in the North-West, susceptible to the worst form of banditry in the country, and all with active Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorist cells as well.

The Borno State government demonstrated wisdom in 2018 when it abolished boarding in its schools indefinitely, except for those in the state capital, Maiduguri and Biu. Other states plagued by a similar security situation ought to have taken the same step.

The deployment of more troops to troubled areas, as the president has done, has been routine since the Buhari administration. But this has not achieved the much-needed results due to a raft of issues. The challenges are deep, and they call for a strategy and policy reset by President Tinubu. After his visit to Yelwata in Benue State on 18 June, over the killing of about 200 persons, where he gave every necessary directive, he needs to ponder and ask why the attacks and killings have persisted.

It took the bullying of President Trump for a top commander of the Ansari terrorist group, Abdulazeez Obadaki, a fugitive since his July 2022 Kuje jailbreak, to be rearrested penultimate Friday. The terrorist masterminded the 7 August 2012 mass shooting at Deeper Life Bible Church, near Okene, in Kogi State, that left 19 people dead.

We strongly believe that this war against terrorism cannot be won with Nigeria still covering up the list of 400 terror financiers, which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) handed over during the Buhari administration in 2022. Public disclosure of the list is a critical starting point for a roots-and-branch approach to cracking down on these evil doers.

Tinubu has to shake off Buhari’s duplicity in dealing with this matter. Nigeria has been engaged in a war on terrorism that has been unduly stretched by the weight of avoidable contradictions. The president should hasten the creation of state policing. With swathes of Nigerian territory under the effective control of non-state actors, and nobody feeling safe, it will be delusional to hope for this nightmare to be over soon.