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NO doubt, Nigerian women, if given the opportunity in any field of human endeavour, will always prove to be excellent achievers. With hard work and diligence, Nigerian women have come of age, marching side by side their male counterparts. It is on record that the few women given the chance to lead have not disappointed. It was based on this supportive role that women have cultivated to encourage one another that the coalition of professional women’s groups from different fields and modes in the transportation and maritime industry called HBU Group extolled the exemplary leadership qualities of Hadiza Bala Usman as the first female Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA). The groups, in solidarity, have commended the tremendous achievements Hadiza Bala Usman recorded in office. She has served as a role model to women in leadership positions in the country. The group noted that if more women were given the chance to lead, they would performed excellently well.
The recent abduction of 344 students of the Government Secondary School, Kankara, Katsina State from their school hostels is the single most audacious mass kidnapping since the crime became rife in Nigeria.
The Kankara abductions drew the attention of the global community almost in the way that the 2014 abductions of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok by Boko Haram did.
While the Kankara boys have been released after six days in captivity, over a hundred of the Chibok girls remain unaccounted for.
Other mass abductions of students in the country included the Dapchi abductions of February 19, 2018, where jihadi group, Boko Haram, stormed a school in Borno and kidnapped 110 students.
At first glance, the October killings of protesters by security forces in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, seem to have little in common with the November Boko Haram massacre of at least 43 farmers in Nigeria’s northeast, or the December 11 abduction of hundreds of school students in Katsina State. With vastly different circumstances, motivations, and perpetrators and separated by hundreds of miles all three episodes could easily be recorded as just further tragic installments in Nigeria’s long history of violence. However, these incidents underscore the wider failure of the state to provide security for its citizens, only deepening the trust deficit felt by Nigerians.
Nigeria: Katsina Abduction - 668 Students Still Missing - School Register Shows allafrica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from allafrica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Plan International, a non-governmental organisation focused
on girls’ rights, says the Nigerian government has not learnt from past
experiences.
Making references to the abduction of over 200 schoolgirls
from Chibok in 2014, and a similar incident in Dapchi Secondary School in 2018,
the organisation said government should have put in place adequate security to
prevent the attack that occurred in Katsina over the weekend.
Gunmen had, on Friday, attacked Government Science Secondary
School, Kankara, Katsina, with over 300 students still missing as of Sunday
afternoon.
Hussaini Abdu, Plan International’s country director in
Nigeria, said the government should have learnt from previous incidents and put