Books in the shadow of guns: Insecurity, learning loss, and the credibility of educational assessment in Nigeria

On November 21, 2025, armed gunmen stormed St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, abducting 303 students, some as young as five years old, and 12 teachers in what would become Nigeria’s single largest school kidnapping. Three days earlier, 25 schoolgirls had been seized from Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Kebbi State, their vice principal murdered. Although 130 school children were freed on December 21, 2025, over 250 children remained in captivity for weeks after. Their families lived in anguish, unable to speak openly for fear of being the next victim, as one father told Human Rights Watch. This is Nigeria’s educational reality in December 2025: classrooms transformed into hunting grounds, children treated as commodities, and students held hostage by guns.

Yet, even as these children languished in captivity, Nigeria’s assessment system confronted its own validity and credibility anguish. In August 2025, the West African Examination Council (WAEC) announced that only 38.32 percent of 1,969,313 candidates obtained credit passes in five subjects, including English and Mathematics, a catastrophic 33.8 percent decline from the 2024 results. Days later, citing “technical glitches,” WAEC revised the figures to 62.96 percent.

This debacle, following the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB’s) omission of over 300,000 candidates from its 2025 results, crystallizes a devastating question: Can Nigeria’s educational system retain any credibility and validity when students cannot safely attend school, and examination bodies cannot accurately report results?

The November 2025 kidnappings are not aberrations; they represent a systematic assault on education. Save the Children (SC), Nigeria, documents at least 10 mass school kidnappings in less than two years, affecting over 670 children. Since the 2014 Chibok tragedy, at least 1,500 students have been seized, with armed groups extracting approximately $1.42 billion in ransoms between May 2023 and April 2024 alone. Following the St. Mary’s abduction, Niger State closed all schools indefinitely, with some neighboring states taking similar measures. Parents across northern Nigeria are left with a conflicting choice: risk their children’s lives by sending them to school or condemn them to illiteracy by keeping them home.

With 802 schools closed in northeastern states, 497 classrooms destroyed, and recurring kidnappings forcing prolonged shutdowns, learning continuity has collapsed. Nigeria now has 18-20 million out-of-school children, which is about 27 percent of the school-age population, one in five globally. For those attending sporadically, the cognitive damage is profound. Educational psychology establishes that effective learning requires sustained engagement and secure environments. When students experience interrupted schooling, witness trauma, and live in perpetual fear, their capacity for knowledge retention and higher-order thinking diminishes catastrophically. Chronic stress impairs working memory, executive function, and emotional regulation, precisely the capacities essential for academic achievement and examination success.

The 2025 WAEC crisis exposed not merely performance declines, but fundamental assessment system fragility. The WAEC’s initial announcement of 38.32 percent pass rates, followed by a revision to 62.96 percent after admitting “bugs” in their result system, destroys public confidence in high-stakes examinations. When examination bodies cannot guarantee result accuracy, meritocratic educational advancement becomes fiction.

This operates within contexts of pervasive compromise. Reports indicate WAEC’s 2025 English Language papers were leaked online weeks before examinations, available freely and behind paywalls. Yet, WAEC proceeded, implementing hasty schedule changes, creating chaos in examination centers. Many candidates wrote examinations by candlelight and makeshift torches in schools lacking electricity. The report shows that WAEC withheld nearly 23 percent of results pending malpractice verification, flagging approximately 192,000 candidates. Lagos State, despite paying N1.58 billion for examination fees, saw only 47 percent of students pass five subjects. These are not isolated incidents but systemic collapse.

International perceptions reflect this reality. Universities and employers increasingly question the validity of Nigerian certificates. Ghanaian WASSCE certificates command greater trust than Nigerian ones, despite Nigeria’s historically superior pass rates. As one observer noted, “when employers see a Ghanian WASSCE certificate, they assume greater integrity.” This perception gap, justified by recurring scandals, devalues Nigerian educational credentials globally, creating vicious cycles where education system failures drive emigration, which international restrictions then punish.

Despite the continuous decay in the education and assessment practices in the nation, individuals with high levels of intellectual capacity have continued to excel, even with little resources available. Professionals across various fields of human endeavors have continued to seek opportunities across different countries of the world. However, this is being threatened by recent international policies from these countries against Nigeria. On July 8, 2025, the United States slashed non-immigrant and student visas for Nigerian citizens from two years, multiple entry to a single-entry, three-month validity, as part of a “reciprocity” policy, meaning that Nigeria grants similar visas to Americans, although Nigeria disputes this justification. Also, on December 16, 2025, the United States announced Presidential Proclamation 10998, imposing partial visa suspensions on 19 countries, including Nigeria, effective January 1, 2026. For Nigerian students, this means suspension of F, M, and J student and exchange visitor visas. Nigeria, which is the ninth-largest source of international students to the United States, with 22,850 citizens in 2024, contributing billions annually, now faces effective exclusion from American higher education for new applicants.

The U.S justification explicitly cites Nigeria’s institutional failures, such as the extremist group activities complicating screening processes, visa overstay rates of 11.9 percent for student visas, concerns about document integrity, and regional instability. In other words, the insecurity plaguing Nigerian schools, the assessment credibility crisis undermining certificate value, and governance failures enabling both have become grounds for excluding Nigerian students from American universities. Nigeria’s inability to improve education standards, protect its schools, or ensure examination integrity now punishes individual students seeking better opportunities.

In 2024, Canada imposed caps reducing study permit approvals by 35 percent, with Nigerian approval rates plummeting from 38 percent in 2023 to just 18 percent in 2024. By 2026, Canada plans to slash new study permits from 305,900 to approximately 155,000, nearly half. For Nigerians, this means drastically increased competition, higher proof-of-funds requirements (CAD $22,895 plus tuition from September 2025), and provincial attestation letter requirements, creating additional barriers. The Nigeria Student Express visa stream, which briefly doubled approval rates, cannot overcome structural caps.

The United Kingdom, while not imposing outright bans, has restricted dependent visas for postgraduate-taught students and announced Graduate Visa reductions from two years to 18 months for post-2027 applicants. Ireland increased savings proof requirements to €10,000 for courses exceeding eight months. Even traditional alternatives face tightening constraints, pushing Nigerian students toward other countries, or accepting that international education is increasingly inaccessible.

The brain drains further worsen the situation as it depletes Nigeria’s human capital. The UNESCO estimates Nigeria needs hundreds of thousands of new teachers, yet experienced educators flee en masse to the UK, Canada, and the Middle East. Every departing teacher, taking irreplaceable experience and understanding of Nigeria’s educational landscape, leaves schools staffed by inexperienced personnel or closing entirely. Over 5,000 doctors have left for the UK alone in nine years, creating doctor-patient ratios of 1:9,083 against the WHO’s 1:6,000 recommendations. While diaspora remittances approach $20 billion annually, they cannot compensate for hollowing out intellectual capital.

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The drivers are documented: insecurity making teaching life-threatening, remuneration under N50,000 monthly for many teachers, overcrowded classrooms without basic resources, political instability, and hopelessness.

Nigeria signed the Safe Schools Declaration, yet kidnapping continues relentlessly. The November 2024 Senate investigation into the Safe School Fund questioned why earmarked protection money failed to prevent recurring attacks, implicating political will more than resource availability. Nigeria allocates only 6.39 percent of its budget to education, far below UNESCO’s 15-20 percent benchmark, while billions disappear annually to corruption. President Tinubu’s administration has witnessed at least five mass school kidnappings since May 2023, yet responses remain reactive, with security cordons after attacks, tactical squad deployments achieving minimal results.

Policy disconnects exemplify governance failure. From NECO’s transition to computer-based testing, when most schools lack functioning computer labs or electricity, to JAMB posting candidates to distant, insecure examination centers, and WAEC’s “paper serialization” innovation, which is inadvertently causing mass result errors. These decisions, made in bureaucratic isolation from ground realities, prioritize administrative convenience over student welfare, excluding rather than including.

Rescuing Nigeria’s education system requires comprehensive, internationally aligned interventions. First, implement the Safe Schools Declaration meaningfully through immediate infrastructure fortification: early warning systems in all schools, physical security improvements, trained personnel, and emergency protocols. Colombia and Afghanistan, despite conflict, have protected educational institutions through systematic security investments.

Second, establish unified examination platforms integrating all nationally administered assessment, ensuring data integrity, reducing duplication, enabling verification, and providing transparent audit trails. Singapore and South Korea demonstrate how digitized, integrated systems enhance credibility while reducing malpractice. Third, shift toward continuous assessment models, reducing reliance on single high-stakes examinations, as the UNESCO Education 2030 Framework emphasizes. Fourth, invest massively in teacher recruitment, training, and retention through competitive salaries and improved conditions.

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Fifth, address root causes: insecurity through comprehensive security reform, poverty through inclusive development, and corruption through transparent governance. Most critically, recognize that international visa restrictions are consequences of Nigeria’s failures. The U.S. explicitly cited insecurity, document integrity concerns, and governance failures in the visa ban proclamation. These policies are not arbitrary discriminations but responses to the observable institutional collapse of Nigeria.

As 2025 ends with parents still reeling over the recent kidnappings, Nigeria confronts unforgiving arithmetic. Twenty million out-of-school children; 34 percent decline in WAEC pass rates; student visa suspensions from the United States; halved Canadian study permits; teachers fleeing en masse; assessment validity and credibility in tatters; these are not isolated misfortunes but interconnected consequences of systemic failure.

The cruel mathematics continue: Nigeria invests billions training professionals who emigrate, contributing expertise to foreign economies while Nigerian hospitals, schools, and institutions hemorrhage talent. Every kidnapped child, every compromised examination, every departing educator represents not just individual tragedy but collective derogation of national potential.

Yet, Nigeria possesses resources, expertise, and institutional frameworks, but what is lacking is the political will to prioritize human development comprehensively and consistently. International standards successful models exist; adaptation requires commitment, not innovation. The stakes transcend education policy, extending to national security, economic transformation, and democratic consolidation.

The question confronting Nigeria’s leaders is stark: will they recognize that books cannot flourish in the shadow of guns, that assessment validity and credibility cannot survive administrative chaos, and that national development cannot proceed amid brain drain? Will they understand that visa restrictions and other restrictive policies are not causes but consequences, and symptoms of failure that only Nigerians can address?

The answer will determine whether Nigeria’s youth inherit opportunity or only regret, whether the nation builds or merely bleeds, whether 2026 brings change or just more children in captivity, more examinations in chaos, and more doors closing abroad. The children still held hostage in Niger State’s forests, their families waiting in anguish, deserve better. So does every Nigerian.

Christopher A. Ocheni, Daniel O. Oyeniran, and Justice Dadzie are PhD Students, Educational Research, The University of Alabama, USA

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