Fourteen States of the Federation as well as the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, are at risk of attacks by insurgents and bandits targeted at schools, the Federal Government has said.
The warning is coming as the torrent resurgence of the mass abduction of pupils recurs in the country.
The National Coordinator of Financing Safe Schools in Nigeria, Hajia Halima Iliya, made the disclosure to The PUNCH on Sunday, while noting that the data of at-risk schools had been collected for intervention.
Iliya, according to the PUNCH, declined to identify the states, but the Commander of the National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre, Nigeria Security, and Civil Defence Corps, Hammed Abodunrin, said they included Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Benue, Yobe, Katsina, FCT, Kebbi, Sokoto, Plateau, Zamfara and three others.
No fewer than 465 pupils, teachers, and women abducted in the past week are still in the custody of their captors.
Fifteen pupils of an Islamiya school in Sokoto State were kidnapped in the early hours of Saturday, less than 72 hours after 287 schoolchildren and teachers were abducted from the LEA primary school and the Government Secondary School both at Kuriga, in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State.
However, 28 of them were on Sunday reported to have escaped, while 259 are in captivity.
A few days before the Kaduna incident, 200 female Internally Displaced Persons were taken away by terrorists in Borno State.
The women were kidnapped in Ngala, the headquarters of Gambarou Ngala in Borno state while fetching firewood in the bush.
On Sunday, there were reports that nine of them had regained freedom remaining 191 in captivity.
Penultimate Thursday, bandits abducted an undisclosed number of people in the Gonin-Gora community in the same Chikun LGA of Kaduna, prompting residents to barricade the Kaduna-Abuja Expressway in protest.
As a response to the April 2014 abduction of the Chibok school girls, the Safe Schools Initiative was launched by the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, alongside the Nigerian Global Business Coalition for Education and private sector leaders at the World Economic Forum Africa.
The Federal Government had earlier inaugurated the Safe Schools Fund with a $10m contribution and another $10m pledge from the private sector.
In further support for the programme, the Federal Government budgeted N15bn for the SSI in the 2023 fiscal year.
Meanwhile, the Presidency has described the recent cases of kidnapping across the country as efforts by ‘’sub-regional geopolitical forces conspiring to undermine the government of President Bola Tinubu.’’
Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr Ajuri Ngelale, mentioned this when he spoke on TVC’s Politics on Sunday.
On the programme titled ‘Counting the Cost of Presidents Tinubu’s Reforms,’ Ngelale revealed that the Federal Government was already receiving support from the United States government for the release of students kidnapped in Kaduna.
“I will say this: across the north, we understand that some of the sub-regional geopolitical forces that are currently at play are actively conspiring against the stability of Nigeria,” the President’s spokesman had said.
Comments are closed.