Nigeria’s education system under siege

Education in Nigeria has become a casualty of war without a formal battlefield. While bombs may not fall in every city and tanks may not roll down our highways, an invisible war is being fought daily against the country’s most critical asset – our children’s right to learn. Nowhere is this assault more brutal than in northern Nigeria, a region already burdened by poverty, illiteracy and weak infrastructure. The recent closure of schools in some states due to insecurity is not just an emergency response; it is a loud confession that the nation is losing control of its future.

When bandits storm schools, abduct children and hold them for ransom, it is tempting to see the crime purely as kidnapping. But this is a dangerous understatement. What is unfolding is a direct, strategic attack on education itself. Classrooms have become crime scenes. Hostels have turned into hunting grounds. Teachers have been transformed into fleeing refugees. Parents are forced into the wicked choice between sending their children to school or keeping them alive. This is not ordinary criminality; it is warfare against knowledge, opportunity and progress.

“An economy cannot rise when its schools are falling. Every school closure is a factory shutdown in advance, producing unemployment, poverty and resentment for decades to come.”

Northern Nigeria entered this crisis already disadvantaged. Literacy rates lag behind the national average. Out-of-school children are disproportionately concentrated in the region. Poverty and unemployment have kept millions of young people out of classrooms even in times of peace. Now, insecurity has poured petrol on a fire that was already burning. The closure of schools in response to bandit attacks is not a policy triumph; it is the last resort of a state that has failed to protect learners and teachers.

From Chibok to Dapchi, Kankara to Kagara, and Zamfara to Kaduna, the pattern is grimly familiar. Armed groups attack schools, kidnap students, demand ransom, negotiate through intermediaries and disappear back into forests. The children are eventually released, if families and government are lucky, only to return home traumatised, emotionally scarred and academically disrupted. But for every student who regains freedom, hundreds of others quietly drop out of school forever. Fear is now a stronger influence on school attendance than hunger or school fees.

The damage goes beyond numbers. A society that cannot guarantee safety in schools loses more than classrooms; it loses trust. Parents lose faith in the promise that education offers a better life. Communities lose confidence in the government’s capacity to provide even the most basic public good – security. And young Nigerians, instead of seeing education as a ladder out of poverty, begin to see it as a risk to their lives. This is how nations collapse slowly, not with explosions alone, but with broken confidence and abandoned dreams.

What makes this tragedy even more painful is its deliberate nature. These attacks are not random. Schools are targeted because they symbolise enlightenment, choice and transformation. Extremists hate education because it frees the mind. Criminal gangs love attacking schools because ransoms are high and resistance is low. Together, ideology and greed have found a perfect victim – innocent children.

Read also: How insecurity, infrastructure flutter Nigeria’s education, 12.5% pupils in school

Yet the government response has been dangerously predictable. After each attack comes the same ritual – condemnation, negotiation, payment, and reunion ceremonies. Criminals are paid and, in effect, rewarded. What message does this send? That kidnapping pays. That banditry is a business model. That schools are soft targets. By repeatedly negotiating without consequences, the state is not just failing to deter crime; it is subsidising it.

The education crisis is now intertwined with the wider economic crisis. Investors avoid regions where bullets interrupt lessons. Businesses hesitate where workers grow up uneducated. Communities trapped in fear cannot be productive. An economy cannot rise when its schools are falling. Every school closure is a factory shutdown in advance, producing unemployment, poverty and resentment for decades to come.

Girls bear a heavier burden. Abductions have disproportionately targeted female students, weakening efforts to improve girl-child education in a region where cultural barriers already exist. When girls are pulled out of school for safety, early marriage and poverty rush in to replace education. The result is a generational setback that Nigeria can ill afford.

This is the moment for moral courage and political clarity. First, schools must be treated as security-critical infrastructure, just like airports and oil installations. Security architecture must be redesigned to prioritise educational institutions. Second, ransom payments, whether open or disguised, must stop. A nation cannot pay its way out of terror. Third, intelligence-led operations, community policing and regional security cooperation must be intensified, not in speeches but in action.

But security alone is not enough. Government must also rebuild trust by rebuilding schools, supporting traumatised teachers and offering incentives for education in high-risk areas. Parents must be reassured that schools are safer than the streets or farmland. Teachers must be protected, trained and motivated. Communities must be involved, not as spectators but as partners in security.

As Nigeria stands now, one path leads to a nation educated, confident and competitive. The other leads to a country where classrooms are empty, crime is profitable and ignorance rules. If education continues to bleed, the nation will bleed with it.

A country that allows children to be taken from classrooms today will tomorrow find that its future has been kidnapped.

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