Gunmen Kidnap School Children in Kaduna Nigeria
At 8.03am New York time today, BBC global feed dropped a really devastating news: school children have been kidnapped again in Nigeria. The reporter, Alli, was surgical in explaining how the school was located close to the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), Nigeria’s premier military school. He did not stop there, explaining and explaining - and at the end, I shouted “What is the problem with Nigeria now?”
Yes, another set of school kids has been kidnapped, and this one in Kaduna, close to Nigeria's most critical military infrastructure - the military school. Good People, what are the options now?
A total of 180 persons have been rescued after gunmen attacked and undertook mass abductions in a federal college in Kaduna StateThursday night, the state government has said.
In a statement Friday afternoon, the state’s Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, said many of the rescued victims were students but “several students” are still missing.
PREMIUM TIMES reported the kidnap, the latest in a series of mass kidnapping of students from a school.
If we scare these kids from attending school, many bad things will happen in the future. Nigeria needs solutions fast.
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Even in wartimes, part of the rules of engagement is that women and children must be protected, but in northern Nigeria, we have become so shameless that kidnapping kids who are in school is now something to brag about.
A hardened criminal or hired assassin knows a kid when he sees one, so how can a society become so decrepit that it now sees kidnapping and frightening school kids as a virtue?
From time immemorial, the long held maxim is, 'no one can hate a child, innocence is transparent in his (or her) eyes'; does this statement hold any value in some parts of Nigeria today? We can play politics as much as we want, become terrorists and bandits as we deem fit, become as corrupt as anything out there; but we must find a way to excuse kids from this malady and show of shame.
It's understandable that we have failed as society, but to minimise the punishment due to us, we must never allow kids to become part of this mess. If the agenda is to cripple formal education in a region already swimming in illiteracy, then they need to come out straight, so that we know where next to channel our remaining and waning energies.
Children are dependent on the their parents (adults) to keep them safe, any adult still left in Nigeria?