Suspected gunmen on Friday morning attacked a school in Zamfara State, abducting scores of students in the third mass abduction in the past three months in Africa’s most populous nation.
The attackers stormed the Government Girls Secondary School in Jangebe in the wee hours of the day.
Hours later, the police authorities in the northwestern state confirmed that three hundred and seventeen students (317) were abducted in the latest kidnapping, a development which Amnesty International described as an “attack on education in Northern Nigeria.”
Friday’s attack by assailants is not an isolated case. In the past few years, schoolchildren have become the latest high-profile kidnapping targets in the country, especially in the northern part, raising concerns over the safety of educational institutions across the nation.
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The Minister of Information and Culture,
Alhaji Lai Mohammed, dismissed the claim on Saturday when he featured on a special edition of the Nigeria Television Authority programme, “Good Morning Nigeria’’
The special edition of the usual weekday programme dedicated to the rescue of the 344 school boys abducted from their school on Dec. 11 in Kankara was monitored by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
NAN also recalls that on Feb. 19, 2018, 110 schoolgirls were abducted from Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe.
When the government secured the release of 104 of the schoolgirls and two other children in March 21, 2018, certain groups, including the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, had also alleged that it was stage-managed to score cheap political point.
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.