”Put an End to School Abductions, Bring them Home safe”, Ms Idris-Etanami, SING ED Tells FG.

The Executive Director of the Sustainable Initiative for Nurturing Growth (SING) Ms. Mercy Ehi Idris-Etanami has called on the Federal Government to put an end to the continued and deeply disturbing pattern of kidnappings targeting school children, teachers in their communities across Nigeria.

Ms Idris-Etanami in a statement on Friday noted that the abductions of school children from their classrooms and from the gates of institutions that exist primarily to prepare them for a future that their abductors are trying to steal is a threat that must be confronted with immediate effect.

She said: “This is not a new crisis but its persistence and the insufficiency of the national response to it, has made it a chronic emergency that demands fresh outrage, fresh urgency, and uncompromising accountability.

“Families across multiple states wake each morning not knowing whether their children will return home from school, a fear that no parent anywhere in the world should have to face. Teachers are not spared. Communities are grieving. Yet across the corridors of power the pace of meaningful intervention remains tragically mismatched to the scale of suffering on the ground.”
Ms Idris-Etanami stressed that the abduction of school children is not a security statistic, it is an attack on the soul of this nation, and it must be treated with the same gravity that an attack on a nation’s institutions would be. “For every time a child is taken from a school gate or a classroom, Nigeria loses something that cannot be quantified in any budget or restored by any rescue operation alone, it loses the trust of a generation and the confidence of families.”

Ms Idris-Etanami called on the Federal Government to ensure that this heinous act must stop immediately.

“This must stop. Not next year. Not after the next committee report. Now. The children of Nigeria are not bargaining chips. They are not leverage. They are human beings with rights, with dreams, and with the full protection of every law that governs this country laws that must be enforced.” said the SING ED.
She also painfully stressed that enrolment is declining in high-risk areas as parents make the agonising decision to withdraw their children from school rather than risk their lives for an education that should be free, safe, and guaranteed. Girls, as has been documented in every protracted security crisis on this continent, bear a particular and devastating burden facing not only the threat of abduction but the downstream harms of early forced marriage, sexual violence, and permanent educational exclusion that follow when communities collapse inward under fear. Boys are not spared either; young men in communities ravaged by insecurity face recruitment into the same criminal and armed networks that terrorise their families, they are brainwashed, drawn by the absence of any visible alternative future.”

Ms Idris-Etanami also highlighted that the psychological damage inflicted on surviving children those who witnessed attacks, those who were taken and returned, and those who live under the permanent anxiety of a community at war with its own safety is real, it is severe, and it is largely unaddressed by any structured state support.

SING calls on the federal and state authorities to treat child trauma resulting from insecurity as a public health emergency, with dedicated, adequately funded mental health and psychosocial support systems embedded in schools and community health structures across affected areas.
SING is also calling on the Federal and state governments and all the stakeholdes responsible for the safety of Nigerian citizens to ensure that schools in high-risk communities must be equipped with functioning security infrastructure, and security personnel must be deployed with both the capacity and the mandate to protect children not as an afterthought, but as a standing operational priority.

“The Safe Schools Initiative, which has been announced and re-announced with great fanfare and little implementation, must be fully funded, transparently executed, and independently monitored with civil society involvement. Every individual arrested in connection with kidnapping operations must face swift, thorough, and impartial prosecution without political interference, ethnic calculation, or elite protection. The ransom economy that funds kidnapping networks must be dismantled through targeted financial intelligence operations that choke the incentives driving this crime. And the communities most affected by insecurity must be treated as partners in their own protection consulted, resourced, and trusted with the information and tools needed to keep their children safe.”

SING is also appealing to the international community – UNICEF, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, African Union, and to Nigeria’s development partners to “intensify technical and diplomatic support for Nigeria’s child protection architecture and to hold the government accountable to the international conventions on the rights of the child to which Nigeria is a signatory. We will not be moved from this position by diplomatic silence, by political fatigue, or by the slow machinery of bureaucratic process,” says Ms Idris-Etanami.

Recall that armed attackers on May 15, 2026, invaded Community High School, Ahoro-Esinele, and abducted a school principal, teachers, and dozens of pupils.

In Borno, pupils were reportedly abducted by armed bandits from Mussa Primary School and Junior Day Secondary School in Askira-Uba Local Government Area during a separate attack on the same day.

She concluded by saying “every child who is taken, every teacher who falls victim , every citizen who is afraid to leave their home, and every family who is fractured by the scourge of kidnapping is a verdict on our collective failure”.