The Dean, Faculty of Education, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Prof. Yahaya Korau Kajuru, said the abduction of school children is a grand design to destroy whatever success that the North has recorded in the education sector.
He noted that it was a ploy to prevent Northern children from going to school and the implication was obvious for everyone to predict.
“Unfortunately, our leaders don’t seem to understand what is going on, or they have deliberately refused to understand. There is a need for our leaders to focus and understand what is happening. Failure to do this would mean that those behind these callous acts would at the end achieve their nefarious objectives.
“We are to blame ourselves in the North because we allowed these things to breed while we watched. Our leaders are to take 90 percent of the blame. What is happening in the North, a quarter of it cannot happen in other regions. It is just annoying and unfortunate that despite all these dastardly acts, most of our leaders are quiet. They have not even started thinking of coming together to take a definite stand on the issue.
“Yes, we have bad eggs in the North and we have bad leaders in the North. For me, some people outside the North are using these people to destroy us, because when you destroy education, you are destroying the people. The earlier we realise this, the better for us, otherwise, the future is very bleak”, he said.
On his part, Prof. Ibrahim Ahmad Aliyu of ABU’s Faculty of Law said even without the present bandits’ attacks on northern education, the sector was already in shambles.
He said leaders of the region seem not to be worried about the development because most of them have their children studying abroad.
“Some of these people now take their children to Cotonou, Benin Republic to obtain degrees in less than one or two years. These same children would come back to Nigeria and meet lucrative jobs reserved for them. So, how can these people give a damn because bandits are attacking schools,” he query.
Also, Prof. Musa Abdullahi of the Department of Sociology, University of Maiduguri, said the implication of school abductions could affect different aspects of life including national security, quality education and moral values of the society.
“It is an indication of a failed state and once that happens, the security architecture has been undermined. The security institutions are either non-existent or lack the capacity to respond to incidents,” he said.
He said insurgents had in the past openly discouraged their followers from acquiring western education and that recent rise in abductions in schools was depressing.
Musa said all the recent school abductions happened in public schools with crumbling structures where the majority of children in the Northern region go because their parents could not afford private schools.
“The implication is that people will no longer take their children to public schools. Government should be careful because if the children of the poor people cannot go to school and are not well fed, the rich man will not sleep”, he said.
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