Nigeria’s latest effort to reopen schools in its northern states sounds like a risk, coming after years of mass abductions that turned classrooms into targets and forced hundreds of schools to lock their gates.

Development Diaries reports that authorities have announced a January 2026 reopening under a promise of ‘enhanced security’ even though most parents remain terrified.

That is because the system failure is in school security governance. Nigeria’s Universal Basic Education Act and Child Rights Act enshrine free education for all children. Yet without safe classrooms, those laws are meaningless.

Closing schools has been treated as an emergency fix of moving victims into makeshift learning centres or homeschooling rather than establishing long-term protection. This aftershock approach leaves schools sitting ducks in vulnerable areas.

The federal government’s response has been about optics, not genuine assurance. Abuja issued circulars claiming ‘enhanced security measures’ had made schools safer but offered no evidence, with many reopened schools still lacking fences, security guards or alarm systems.

In towns across Kaduna, Niger and Zamfara states, some of the very places where hundreds of pupils were kidnapped, gates remain open and night-watchmen are few.

It is unclear what ‘enhanced security’ means when kidnappings continue nearby. As one father told Reuters, fear of abduction ‘should not deprive children of their right to education. But it is the responsibility of government to secure the children’.

Worse, kidnappings are concentrated in precisely those weak-governance zones, as bandits and insurgents prey on rural villages far from effective policing.

These attacks hit the poorest families hardest because they cannot afford private tutors or boarding schools. Girls and children with disabilities suffer particularly. Although terrorists often abduct boys in groups, but the mere fear of an attack leads communities to marry off girls early or keep them at home.

A decade of conflict in the north means many families already live in ‘educationally disadvantaged’ areas, with emergency closures exacerbating this.

According to Amnesty International, across seven states, over 20,000 schools were shuttered after mass kidnappings. That means entire cohorts of children, mostly from rural, poor backgrounds, are losing years of learning.

And when schools close, female enrolment plummets, with UNICEF and local NGOs reporting skyrocketing rates of early marriage and teenage pregnancy whenever schools are shut.

In one district in Zamfara, a community leader noted, every time schools were attacked, almost all the girls in the village were married off within months. Reopening without clear security plans risks reversing progress on girls’ education and trapping women in poverty.

Responsibility lies with the state at every level, and the Federal Ministry of Education, state governors and security chiefs have constitutional duties to safeguard learners.

The government itself acknowledges it is their duty to protect children, but there are reports that ‘the authorities are grossly failing in their constitutional and international obligations to protect lives’, including the right to education. 

As citizens, we can take action now by demanding transparency and insisting that every reopened school disclose its security plan. For example, we need to know the number of guards, fences, and communication equipment. It is against this backdrop that budgets need to be made public.

Let us use Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to track how ‘Safe Schools’ funds are allocated. Ask your state legislators and education boards how much was spent on each school’s security.

Specifically, parents and teachers have a crutial role to play here. They can form elected safety committees that report directly to state assemblies or education offices about threats and needs.

For their part, institutions must also act decisively by implementing the Safe Schools Declaration by training specialised units for school protection and enabling military support for education security.

They should also ensure a dedicated budget line for school protection, such as fencing, surveillance, and emergency alarms, that cannot be diverted.

And very importantly, officials must be held accountable through investigation of every failure and prosecution of negligent leaders in security and education who put children in harm’s way.

Without robust, well-funded protection measures and accountability, reopening schools only deepens insecurity and inequality. True safety requires sustained commitment from government, not just temporary closures or public relations statements.