Nigeria is inching into a troubling chapter where insecurity is no longer a distant concern but a daily shadow stretching across communities, highways, markets and now, the country’s schools. The recent surge in kidnappings has unsettled citizens and raised serious questions about the effectiveness of national security frameworks. What used to be episodic attacks have evolved into a sustained campaign of abductions, village raids and highway banditry that expose deep cracks in the country’s ability to protect its people.
Across many states, residents speak of fear as a constant companion. Travellers avoid certain routes, farmers abandon farmlands and families adjust their routines around the unpredictability of violence. Security agencies, though making efforts, continue to appear overstretched and often reactive. Attackers strike quickly, vanish into unmapped forests and resurface in another location days later. Communities are left grieving while government assurances rarely transform into long-term relief.
In a development that underscores the urgency of the situation, several states have now moved to shut down schools as a precautionary measure. Katsina State has ordered the closure of all public schools, following credible threats linked to the activities of kidnapping gangs. In Kwara State, schools across Ifelodun, Ekiti, Irepodun, Isin and Oke-Ero LGAs have been closed over rising concerns of attacks on vulnerable institutions.
Plateau State has taken similar steps, placing selected schools on indefinite shutdown. Findings across the northern region show that over 180 schools have been affected by either temporary or ongoing closures linked directly to insecurity.
This trend represents one of the most alarming signals yet. When schools begin to shut down not because of strikes or infrastructure decay, but due to the inability of government to guarantee the safety of children, the crisis deepens. The consequences are severe: disrupted learning, displacement of pupils, psychological trauma, reduced enrolment and widened educational inequality. Children bear the heaviest burden of a battle they did not choose.
The broader insecurity plaguing the country is not without roots. Years of ungoverned spaces, porous borders, arms proliferation, youth unemployment and an over-centralised policing system have created fertile ground for criminal groups to thrive. Banditry has become organised; kidnapping has become transactional. The combination of economic desperation and weak local intelligence systems has allowed small groups of armed men to wield disproportionate influence in rural communities.
Still, this moment calls for more than routine condemnations. What Nigeria faces requires a recalibration of its security priorities. Intelligence must take precedence over brute force. Communities need to be integrated into early-warning mechanisms. Technology—especially aerial surveillance, communication tracking and real-time mapping of forest corridors—must shift from policy statements to operational deployment. States must also be allowed clearer, legally backed roles in security management, as the current centralised structure is no longer sufficient to address a crisis spread across vast territories.
Public trust, already weakened, can only be rebuilt through visible, sustained action. Citizens want coordinated operations, not conflicting statements. They want preventive measures, not post-attack visits. They want accountability in security spending and clarity in strategy. Above all, they want assurance that their children can sit in classrooms without fear.
Nigeria stands at an inflection point. The closure of schools is more than a temporary safety measure—it is a national alarm, a stark reminder that insecurity is now undermining the very foundations of development. Whether the country reverses this trajectory depends on how decisively and intelligently the challenge is confronted.
For now, parents wait, communities worry and a nation watches the future of its young people disrupted by forces that should never have been allowed to grow this bold.
Abdulhamid Aliyu, Abuja