By A A IsaacTamson
Thirteen days after bandits freely spent hours loading 317 teenage girls onto Hilux vehicles and motorcycles and conveying them to their well-known enclave—the Dangulbi Forest in Maru Local Government Area of Zamfara State, thirty-nine students were kidnapped from the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation in Afaka, Kaduna State. Perhaps attacks on schools had, by then, become a normalised element. In 2021 alone, eight targeted attacks on schools were recorded (see Fig. 1), affecting nearly one thousand people(See Fig.2). The Afaka incident was the third of the eight school kidnappings documented that year.
How did the repeated targeting of educational institutions come to be treated as routine rather than as a national emergency? Why has a crisis that endangers children’s lives, education, and futures failed to command sustained global attention and outrage?
The roots of Nigeria’s school-targeted violence stretch back more than a decade. The kidnapping of Nursery and Primary School students in Aba, Abia State, in 2010 marked a critical turning point in attacks directed at students and educational institutions.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1: Number of Students kidnapped between 2013- 2025
However, it wasn’t until the declaration of a state of emergency in Yobe, Borno, and Adamawa in May 2013 that such attacks began to escalate in frequency and scale. The burning of forty-one students and one teacher at Government Secondary School, Mamudo, Yobe State, became the first major incident. Studenthat moment, approximately thirty-six school- or student-targeted attacks have been recorded, affecting an estimated 2,782 people, with more than 300 individuals either confirmed dead or still missing.
When Terror Learned the Value of Children
The tragedy of Nigeria’s school-kidnapping crisis lies not only in its scale, but in its failure to consistently provoke the humane response it demands. This is partly because such violence has, over time, been absorbed into the country’s political and social reality. Mass abductions, school raids, and the killing of students ceased to be shocking interruptions to national life and instead became recurring features of it. What should have triggered sustained emergency responses became familiar headlines, steadily dulling both public outrage and international attention. As communities endured repeated losses, many came to believe their suffering would persist without consequence, reinforcing the sense that the protection of children and schools had slipped down the list of urgent national priorities.
For instance, when fifty-nine boys of Federal Government College, Buni Yadi, were murdered in February 2014, the country expressed concern, but little changed. It was not until 276 girls were abducted from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, two months later that the world finally reacted. The incident revealed, with brutal clarity, that schools had become lucrative targets. Citizens protested, international voices rose and it made the government resolve until the terrorists began releasing some of the girls; then urgency began to fade. Today, about 113 Chibok girls remain missing, yet national insistence has weakened, and the state has moved on.
Emergency Declaration after fresh attack: Action, Reaction, or Repetition?
On 26 November 2025, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared a nationwide state of emergency on security following two major abductions within the span of a single week — the kidnapping of twenty-five schoolgirls in Kebbi and the abduction of 315 people from St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School, Papiri, in Niger State. The government responded with promises of rapid recruitment, expanded training structures, and increased deployment of security personnel. The president who was supposed to attend to an ongoing G20 summit in South Africa cancelled it to attend to this urgent security problem. This decision to prioritise the safe release of the captives has yielded positive results, as the captives have now been secured and the proactiveness of his intervention is indeed commendable and marks a significant improvement over previous response.
Figure 2: Number of victims kidnapped or murdered between 2013-2025
Beyond this commendation, when held against the history of student-targeted attacks in Nigeria, the announcement still occupies the seat of a troubling continuum. Since the return to democratic era in 1997, each administration has eventually arrived at the same crossroads: an emergency is declared only after the system is fractured, not before. The passive approach of waiting for another abduction to spark public outcry and reactive official urgency over the years has proven to be a patterned response that is less of a protective mechanism.
Diagnosing the System Before Prescribing Solutions
Menkhaus and Shapiro (2010) argue that widespread insecurity—such as Nigeria’s repeated incidents of mass abduction—signals a diminishing capacity of the state to maintain a monopoly over legitimate force. This corresponds with Clunan and Trinkunas’ (2010) conceptualisation of ungoverned spaces: territories where state authority is weakened, sovereignty is contested, and non-state actors increasingly determine the terms of order and survival. In such environments, armed groups fill the vacuum left by weakened institutions, asserting power in places where governmental presence is inconsistent or ineffective.
The Nigerian experience reflects this pattern with unsettling clarity. Where communities lack visible state protection, violent networks gain the confidence to attack schools, disrupt economic life, and terrorise civilians with minimal resistance. In these contexts, the state often exists in principle yet lacks the institutional reach to protect those under its jurisdiction. The former Minister of Defence, Hon. Mohammed Badaru Abubakar, shortly before he resigned on health grounds acknowledged this during his speech at the public lecture of the 18th Annual General Assembly of the Ahmadu Bello University Alumni Association, held on 28 November 2025. In his words, “we recognise that peace is not just the absence of war, but the presence of justice.” He further identified the root causes of insecurity as “poverty, lack of education, and many others.”
Williams (2010) observes that, in contexts of fragile governance, participation in organised crime or cooperation with armed groups may become a rational adaptation to insecurity. When state institutions fail to provide safety, populations gravitate towards alternative forms of authority—sometimes voluntarily, often under duress. Insecurity then becomes self-replicating: communities normalise fear, and perpetrators refine their tactics with the expectation that state responses will remain reactive rather than preventative.
Simply recruiting more security personnel, expanding training facilities, or declaring periodic states of emergency will not end Nigeria’s security crisis. The abduction of 177 worshippers in Kajuru, Kaduna, and the relentless killings in Niger, Kebbi, Zamfara, and Benue show that violence is systemic, deeply entrenched, and beyond the reach of quick fixes.
Protecting Schools Through Implementation
Nigeria’s persistent pattern of school-targeted violence reflects a governance failure rooted less in the absence of policy than in the absence of implementation. Over time, mass abductions and attacks on educational institutions have been met with emergency declarations and reactive deployments that address symptoms rather than causes. Yet the National Plan on Financing Safe Schools (2023–2026) already identifies school attacks as a systemic threat requiring preventive coordination, community participation, institutional accountability, and sustainable financing (Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning [FMFBNP], 2023). The continued normalisation of violence against students therefore signals a failure to operationalise an existing national framework, not a lack of strategic direction.
A critical step toward reversing this pattern is the full operationalisation of the Plan’s National School Security Rapid Response and Coordination Infrastructure, including response centres at federal, state, and local government levels, supported by nationwide monitoring and data-collection systems. The ability of armed groups to spend hours attacking schools and transporting victims demonstrates the cost of fragmented coordination and delayed response. Implementing these mechanisms would enable early-warning signals from vulnerable communities to trigger preventive action, rather than post-attack mobilisation, thereby shifting school protection from reaction to deterrence (FMFBNP, 2023).
Equally vital is the implementation of the Plan’s school-level security resilience measures, particularly those addressing the physical vulnerability of learning environments. This includes prioritising the construction of high perimeter fencing, the installation of solar-powered lighting to eliminate dark and unmonitored spaces, and the creation of designated safe rooms within school compounds where learners and staff can temporarily shelter during an attack. These interventions, consistent with the Plan’s emphasis on non-kinetic measures and rehabilitation of schools, acknowledge that deterrence begins with making schools harder targets (FMFBNP, 2023). Beyond infrastructure, all schools—both public and private—must be deliberately treated as spaces of necessary governance rather than peripheral civilian sites. Ensuring a minimal but visible security presence, tailored to risk levels and coordinated with community structures, would reassert the state’s protective authority over educational spaces and signal that schools are protected civilian environments, not negotiable zones of vulnerability.
References
- Clunan, A. L., & Trinkunas, H. A. (2010). Conceptualizing ungoverned spaces: Territorial statehood, contested authority, and softened sovereignty. In A. L. Clunan & H. A. Trinkunas (Eds.), Ungoverned spaces: Alternatives to state authority in an era of softened sovereignty (pp. 17-33). Stanford University Press.
- Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning. (2023). National Plan on Financing Safe Schools (2023–2026). Government of Nigeria.
- Menkhaus, K., & Shapiro, J. N. (2010). Non-state actors and failed states: Lessons from Al-Qa’ida’s experiences in the Horn of Africa. In A. L. Clunan & H. A. Trinkunas (Eds.), Ungoverned spaces: Alternatives to state authority in an era of softened sovereignty (pp. 77-104). Stanford University Press.
- Williams, P. (2010). Here be dragons: Dangerous spaces and international security. In A. L. Clunan & H. A. Trinkunas (Eds.), Ungoverned spaces: Alternatives to state authority in an era of softened sovereignty (pp. 34-56). Stanford University Press.
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