A classroom should be the safest place a child knows outside the home. In Nigeria today, it has become a hunting ground. When students are dragged from their desks and a teacher is killed on camera, the shock is brief and the cycle resumes. The question is no longer whether schools are vulnerable, but why the state continues to lose ground to armed groups that plan, film, and broadcast their crimes with confidence.
The speed and coordination of the security response matter, but they also expose how thin the system is. In the latest South West attack, tactical and intelligence units were mobilised and a joint federal-state operation was announced. That shows capacity exists on paper. Yet the ability of kidnappers to strike, retreat across state lines, and reappear weeks later points to a structure that cannot track movement, share intelligence in real time, or hold territory once the convoy leaves. Without sub-national policing units that know the terrain and answer to local accountability mechanisms, the state will keep arriving after the damage is done.
The boldness to record a murder and circulate it publicly is not bravado alone. It is a calculation that punishment will not follow. That calculation is built on years of kidnappings that end in ransom payments, not arrests, and on operations that disperse criminals without dismantling their networks. Posting the video is both a threat and a recruitment tool. It tells communities that resistance is futile and tells the state that its deterrence has collapsed. It only works where impunity has become routine.
Beneath that impunity lies a professionalised criminal economy. These groups run with scouts, negotiators, financiers, and media handlers. They have communication equipment, internet access, and a division of labour that looks more like a startup than a band of drifters. Cutting them off means following the money, seizing assets, and disrupting the communications that coordinate ransom negotiations and propaganda. Raids without financial and digital interdiction are temporary setbacks, not solutions.
The environment makes it worse. Where youth unemployment is high and lawful livelihoods are scarce, recruitment into armed groups becomes a rational choice for some. Security operations can scatter gangs, but unless they are matched with jobs, skills training, and agricultural support, the pipeline refills. You cannot secure schools by policing alone while the economic conditions that feed violence remain unchanged.
Network providers share in this failure. Despite years of SIM registration and NIN linkage, ransom calls connect, videos go live, and investigators are told the numbers cannot be traced. If operators cannot proactively flag bulk registrations, monitor numbers linked to past crimes, and release data promptly to security agencies, then the system exists only for compliance forms. Their slow response makes them enablers, whether by design or neglect.
Political actors must also check their role in the narrative. It is legitimate to question government capacity after an attack, but turning each incident into a partisan weapon disrespects the victims and distracts from rescue efforts. Accountability requires facts, not slogans, and it requires officials to welcome scrutiny while protecting ongoing operations.
None of this works without trust on the ground. Communities will not share intelligence if they believe informants will be exposed, or if they see offenders released without trial. Trust is built through transparent investigations, integration of traditional rulers and vigilantes into early warning systems, and visible consequences for those arrested. Where trust is absent, security forces operate as outsiders, and armed groups set the rules.
Nigeria is losing the fight for its schools because the response remains narrow and reactive. Securing learning requires layered action: practical safety measures in schools, immediate psychosocial support for victims, disruption of criminal finances and communications, accountability for telecom providers who enable anonymous violence, and local policing structures with clear oversight.
Until these are in place, parents will keep sending children to school with dread, and teachers will keep teaching with one eye on the gate. A country that cannot guarantee safety in its classrooms has not failed in one sector alone. It has failed in its most basic promise to the next generation. The measure of success will not be another press statement, but the day a school bell rings and no parent wonders if it will be the last sound they hear from their child.
