Alkasim Abdulkadir: Citadels of learning, Boko Haram’s new slaughter fields (Y! FrontPage)

by Alkasim Abdulkadir

Alkasim Abdulkadir Y! FrontPage

The insurgency in Nigeria’s North Eastern corner has once more thrown up the precarious balance between life and death, these days’ scores of people are killed on a daily basis and the frequency has also ensured a sense of tragedy fatigue amongst the country’s populace.  

No doubt it is the sustained escalation of the attacks by the Nigerian army on insurgency hideouts that has made the insurgents retaliate targeting areas regarded as soft targets like schools and travelers who are at best defenseless against the ever changing strength of Boko Haram’s cache of weapons. This became more notable after the offensive at Kasiya forest which left about 16 soldiers dead alongside 150 insurgents; this by far was one of the most deadly reported face offs between the Nigerian Army and the insurgents.

The entire strip of the 1,250 square meters that make up Gujba emirate had never seen the kind of the violence that tore up the College of Agriculture located in the sleepy town. The attack at Gujba concentrated on the College of Agriculture, where they rounded up scores of students and shot them dead, with phone networks switched off by the authorities, it became impossible to call for help from Damaturu, some 30 kilometers away. Most of the dead were discovered the next morning beside the fence of the institution. And those who survived have gory tales as tragic testimonies of the slaughter that lasted for almost two hours.

One of the survivors, Idris, who was widely quoted, said they started gathering students into groups outside, and then they opened fire and killed one group and then moved onto the next group and killed them. In the words of the Provost of the College, those killed were between the ages of 18 and 22. This also shows that the demography of the victims of the insurgents is changing; they are killing the youths, Nigeria’s future.

Similarly, the most horrific and gut wrenching of these attacks was the one that occurred in the town of Mamudo near Potiskum  in Yobe State where on the 6th of July; insurgents attacked a secondary school in Mamudo and killed 41 students and their teacher. The average age of leaving secondary school in Nigeria is around 18, which means the average age of those who were killed is around 15. This exemplifies the war being waged against young defenseless people in the raging insurgency in North Eastern Nigeria. It is interesting to note that the targets have metamorphosed over time and is settling into a pattern, from policemen who were the initial targets to churches, to government officials and administrative buildings to soldiers, markets, mosques -to commuters on the highway and educational facilities and students. In the last 30 months the trajectory of the raging insurgency has swung like a vicious pendulum amongst the listed targets.

According to Lucy Freeman, Amnesty International’s deputy Africa director “Hundreds have been killed in these horrific attacks, thousands of children have been forced out of schools across communities in northern Nigeria and many teachers have been forced to flee for their safety,”

“Attacks against schoolchildren, teachers and school buildings demonstrate an absolute disregard for the right to life and the right to education.”

In its report Education under attack in Nigeria, Amnesty International said this year alone at least 70 teachers and scores of pupils have been slaughtered and many others wounded. Some 50 schools have been burned or seriously damaged and more than 60 others have been forced to close.

The total number of those killed at Gujba came to 90 students, by far one of the most violent attacks on education by virtue of casualties since the insurgency started.

On May 16, BH gunmen fired on a student dormitory in Damaturu, killing seven students and two teachers. On 17 May BH opened fire on an examination hall at Ansaruddeen Private School in the Jajeri area of Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, killing 15 students. According to Yobe State officials BH has burnt down 205 schools in the state in the past year.

In Adamawa State too, one of the state’s initially under the veil of the State of Emergency, last year in the town of Mubi, the Federal Polytechnic at its Wuro Patuje off-campus residence was faced with its most deadly case of insecurity. Though the incident happened on the 1st of October 2012, a year later it is still not clear, if the motive of the attack was student cultists or a student union election gone wrong or a soft target attack by Boko Haram insurgents.

The greatest fall out of this tragedy is its draw back impact on the state of education, in a region already grappling with low student enrolment. Already in Borno State the epicenter of the insurgency, an estimated 15,000 thousand students have been forced out of school.The army already grappling with the insurgency cannot guarantee the safety of those who seek an education nor guard all the schools in the states of Yobe and Borno, a major criticism they have faced from parents who have lost their wards Gujba.

In major Northern capitals the ubiquitous Almajiri child –the itinerant Koranic scholar is a familiar feature with kids as young as 3 year olds, armed with begging bowls, begging for food and abandoning the Koranic study for which they have embarked to seek in the arduous terrain that is Nigeria’s urban areas. The Almajiri children aside, Nigeria as a country already has one of the worse and highest out of school children in the world with the figure hovering around 10 million kids who are supposed to be within the four walls of a class room, but are outside it.

With the recurring attacks, the impact of these attacks on education and its attendant infrastructure has set back the North Eastern corner several years. Most tragic, it is the lives the insurgents have cut short in bloom, young Nigerians whose only crime was to seek an education, to search for the illumination that enlightenment brings about. Instead of a certificate of completed education; students are being handed death certificates by Boko Haram insurgents.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

One comment

  1. A good day to join hands across the globe with those undergoing the same type of terrorism, Taliban and co.

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