Can Nigerian Education Survive Attack?

The International Day to Protect Education from Attack, marked around the world on September 9, chose a theme this year that reads almost as a direct question to Nigeria: “Can education survive attack? The resilience of human communities.” The United Nations says more than 8,500 attacks on   schools, students and teachers have been recorded globally over the past two years, and Education Cannot Wait, the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies, warns that 258 million children across 87 countries now face severe disruption to their learning because of insecurity and conflict. Nigeria did not invent this crisis, but few countries illustrate its full arc as completely, or as painfully, as ours does.

The country’s own numbers, drawn from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reporting on the peak years of the Boko Haram insurgency between 2009 and 2015, describe an assault on education sustained enough to qualify as a deliberate campaign rather than a series of isolated incidents. More than 910 schools were destroyed or severely damaged, and at least 1,500 were forced to close entirely across Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states.

At least 611 teachers were killed for the offence of teaching, and more than 19,000 fled their communities rather than risk the same fate. The 2014 Chibok abduction, in which more than 270 schoolgirls were taken from their dormitory in a single night, became the incident the world remembers, but it was one entry in a much longer ledger of school raids that stretched across Niger, Zamfara, Kaduna and Kebbi states in the years that followed.

What should trouble Nigerians most about this year’s commemoration is how little that pattern has actually changed since Chibok, despite more than a decade of pledges to prevent its recurrence. Between 2021 and 2026, a fresh wave of mass abductions swept through the country’s north-west and north-central states, driven now by criminal bandit networks operating alongside the lingering insurgency in the north-east.

In March 2024, gunmen abducted 287 students and teachers from a school in Kuriga, Kaduna State. In November 2025 alone, 25 female students were taken in Kebbi State, and more than 300 students and teachers were seized from St Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, Niger State, in a single raid. Further attacks stretched into 2026 across states as far apart as Borno and Oyo, the latter a reference this newspaper does not make lightly, having welcomed the rescue of 44 pupils and teachers from Orire, Oyo State in July after a fifty-six-day siege.

We said then that a rescue, however well executed, is not a substitute for prevention, and the events chronicled around this year’s commemorative day confirm that warning was not excessive caution. It was a description of exactly the pattern Nigeria has continued to live through.

The First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, marked the occasion with a message describing the classroom as “where potential is discovered, dreams take root, and hope is nurtured,” and calling on Nigerians to unite in protecting schools, teachers and every child’s right to learn safely. We do not doubt the sincerity behind those words, and a message of this kind from the country’s highest-profile advocate for children carries genuine value in keeping the issue in public view.

Sadly, the Safe Schools Initiative which was launched after the Chibok school girl’s abduction with international backing and considerable fanfare, promised exactly the kind of protection this year’s commemoration is once again calling for. A decade on, with Kuriga, Kebbi, Papiri and Orire all added to the same ledger Chibok opened, Nigerians are entitled to ask what became of that initiative’s promise, and why a programme launched with such urgency has not prevented the same crime from recurring at this scale, in different states, year after year.

This is not only a security failure. It carries a demographic cost this newspaper has flagged before, most recently when marking World Population Day, when we noted that Nigeria accounts for close to a fifth of the world’s out-of-school children, concentrated heavily in rural and conflict-affected communities. The connection between that statistic and the pattern of school attacks documented here is not incidental.

Parents in regions repeatedly targeted by kidnappers make a rational calculation when they choose not to send a child to school, and no enrolment campaign, however well funded, can out-argue a parent’s fear for their child’s safety. Nigeria cannot meaningfully close its out-of-school children gap while school attacks remain a recurring feature of life in its north-west, north-central and north-east alike.

The global installation UNESCO, Qatar and the Education Above All Foundation unveiled in Paris this week, a visual record of the surge in attacks on schools worldwide, exists to make an abstract crisis visible to audiences who might otherwise never encounter it.

Nigeria does not need an installation to see its own version of that crisis. It has lived inside it for seventeen years, through governments of different parties and different security chiefs, each of whom inherited the same unresolved failure from the one before.

What the country needs now is a national school security framework with a published budget, a genuine multi-year commitment that outlasts the news cycle each attack generates and survives whichever administration happens to be in office when the next one occurs, and an honest public account of what happened to the Safe Schools Initiative’s original promise more than a decade after it was launched with such confidence. The theme of this year’s commemoration asks whether education can survive attack. Nigeria’s answer, seventeen years and thousands of kidnapped children after Chibok, cannot keep being another message of resolve. It has to be a policy that finally holds.