Our Schoolgirls Again?
By Alabidun Shuaib AbdulRahman
They have taken our daughters again. Another school, another night raid, another round of shock and condemnation delivered from our politicians both in Abuja and Birnin Kebbi. The latest tragedy in Maga, Kebbi State, where armed men stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in the dead of night, killed a vice-principal and abducted about twenty-five schoolgirls returns Nigeria to a familiar, unbearable question: why does this keep happening?
The attack, like so many before it, was swift, brutal, and predictable. Two of the girls escaped hours later, but the others were marched away into the dark bush, swallowed by the expanding geography of kidnapping that now defines northern Nigeria’s insecurity.
Since Chibok in 2014, Nigeria has lived in cycles of outrage, promises, search-and-rescue operations, whispered negotiations and quiet retreats. Governments change, uniforms change, spokespersons change, but the pattern remains what it has always been: repeating national grief wrapped in official denial.
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In my column this week, I attempt what the Nigerian state has struggled to do by cataloguing this grim history, examine the policies proclaimed to address it and identify the failures that persist, including logistics and political evasions that have enabled this tragedy to endure.
The starting point is Chibok. In April 2014, 276 girls were taken from their hostels in Borno State in an operation that exposed the fragility of Nigeria’s security architecture. Boko Haram swept into the school with ease, herded the girls away, and vanished into Sambisa Forest. Dozens escaped or were released through negotiations, but many remain unaccounted for. Those images of grieving parents, empty metal bunks and students forced into trucks at gunpoint became an international symbol of Nigerian state failure.
Four years later, Dapchi happened. In February 2018, 110 girls were taken by another faction of Boko Haram. Weeks later, most of them returned in a convoy of insurgents who reportedly apologised to locals. Five girls died in captivity and one girl, Leah Sharibu, was held back allegedly for refusing to renounce her faith. The government denied ransom payments, but independent reports and community testimonies suggested that a financial or negotiated settlement was part of the release. As with Chibok, the truth remains tucked beneath layers of state secrecy.
By 2021, the epicenter of school abductions had shifted from the northeast to the northwest, where criminal gangs labelled “bandits” for bureaucratic convenience discovered that abducting schoolchildren offered a profitable business model. In February of that year, around 279 girls were taken from Jangebe in Zamfara State. The girls were released days later in circumstances that raised more questions than answers, especially regarding whether the government had adhered to its public stance of never paying ransom. The official line was that the girls were freed through “peaceful negotiations,” a phrase that Nigerians have learned to interpret with skepticism.
Then came the Kuriga raid in Kaduna State in March 2024. Gunmen seized scores of pupils and staff, prompting a frantic response from soldiers and vigilantes. The kidnappers demanded one billion naira, a figure that reflects the industrialisation of kidnapping in Nigeria. The government later announced rescues and recoveries, but the opacity surrounding negotiations and whether payments were made reinforced public distrust. Kuriga demonstrated how deeply entrenched the kidnapping economy had become, and how state responses often came too late or too tentatively to deter future attacks.
Now Kebbi joins this ledger of heartbreak. The Maga abduction, which took place on 17–18 November 2025, is a reminder that no policy documents, no televised condemnations, no promises of “never again” have fundamentally changed the ground realities for children in rural Nigerian schools. The attackers struck with confidence, knowing full well that response times would be slow, the terrain favoured them, and the state’s first instinct would be to issue a condemnation rather than a deterrent.
To understand the persistence of this crisis, we must examine the architecture of government responses. Each administration, from Goodluck Jonathan to Muhammadu Buhari to Bola Tinubu, has followed a familiar script. First comes loud condemnation, then high-level visits by ministers and security chiefs, then a declaration of intensified operations. Afterward, either the abductees reappear through rescue or release or they fade from media attention until the next tragedy.
In 2021, Nigeria released a National Policy on Safety, Security and Violence-Free Schools. On paper, it is an impressive document: it outlines minimum standards, coordination structures, and the responsibilities of federal, state and local governments to secure educational spaces. It is complemented by Nigeria’s earlier endorsement of the Safe Schools Declaration in 2015, an international pledge to protect education during conflict. But policies are not the same as implementation. Despite these commitments, most rural schools in the north still lack perimeter fencing, adequate lighting, trained security personnel, reliable communication systems or rapid-response mechanisms. The majority operate like soft targets, predictable, poorly defended, and accessible.
The logistics failures are basic and persistent. Attackers favour schools that are isolated, under-lit, and often undefended at night. They use motorcycles and pickup trucks that can navigate forest paths better than the armoured vehicles of Nigerian troops. Communication gaps delay alerts, while coordination problems between police, military and community vigilantes often lead to confusion rather than rapid mobilisation. In some cases, parents reach the school before security forces do.
The deeper problem is that the economics of kidnapping favour the criminals. Ransom payments whether officially acknowledged or not have become a major source of revenue for both insurgent groups and bandit gangs. Investigative reporting has alleged that millions of euros were exchanged in the negotiations that secured the release of some Chibok girls in 2017. The government denied the claims, but cannot provide transparent evidence to the contrary. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, compiled estimates suggested that over 3,600 people were kidnapped nationwide and around five billion naira was paid in ransoms. In an environment where ransom remains profitable and risks for perpetrators remain minimal, the incentives favour repetition. Children thus become economic assets in the underworld of Nigerian insecurity.
The Kebbi abduction fits this pattern. While kidnappers had not publicly stated their demand at the time of writing, the trajectory of past incidents shows that negotiations and financial incentives inevitably become part of the conversation. Communities already fear that the girls may be ransomed or exchanged for safe passage, even as officials continue to insist that government “does not pay ransom.”
The question, then, is what should Nigeria do differently? The first step is transparency. If the government ever pays ransom, openly or through intermediaries, it must be recorded, audited and overseen by a parliamentary mechanism. Denial has become a policy crutch that hides failures and permits the kidnapping economy to thrive. Citizens are not asking for operational details but for honest accounting. Democracies cannot manage national security challenges with secrecy as default.
The second step is to build a national school-security system that actually works. This requires ring-fenced funding, independent audits, and yearly progress reports. School security cannot be left to states alone, many of which are broke or conflicted by local politics. Fencing, lighting, guard recruitment, communication devices and training must be budgeted as essential infrastructure, not as emergency responses after tragedies.
Third, Nigeria must rethink its over-militarised approach. The presence of soldiers in a state does not automatically translate into safer schools. What works is community-integrated policing, properly trained rural response units, early-warning systems, and consistent policing presence around high-risk schools. Military raids may free hostages but rarely prevent the next abduction.
Fourth, the government must confront the ransom market directly. Either Nigeria adopts a strict no-ransom policy that is enforced transparently and consistently, or it acknowledges that negotiations are sometimes unavoidable and establishes a regulated oversight process. The current situation, denials masking back-channel payments is the worst of both worlds.
Finally, the nation needs public, verifiable data. Nigerians should be able to know how many schools have met minimum safety standards, how much has been spent on safe-school measures since 2014, how many perpetrators have been prosecuted, and how often early-warning systems have actually worked. Without measurement, improvement is impossible.
At the heart of this crisis is a moral dilemma. If the state refuses to pay ransom, captives may remain in the bush indefinitely. If the state pays ransom secretly, it fuels the market and endangers future generations. The choice requires honesty, not political performance.
The Kebbi abduction is not merely a news event; it is a national reckoning. Each time children are taken, Nigeria replays the same tragedy with the same official lines and the same institutional weaknesses. The country does not need more condemnations. It needs functioning fences, radios that work at midnight, guard training that is monitored, and a government that tells the truth about what it spends and what it pays.
If Nigeria continues down this path where policies exist on paper but not on the ground, where the kidnapping economy thrives in the shadows, where the security of schoolchildren depends on luck rather than system, then the question “Our Schoolgirls again?” will soon become an annual lament. It does not have to be this way. But to break the cycle, Nigeria must embrace transparency, discipline, and the mundane, unglamorous work of prevention.
