By Shu’aibu Usman Leman
The swift decision to temporarily close schools across Northern Nigeria, although framed as an urgent response to worsening insecurity, carries a symbolic and psychological weight the nation cannot afford to ignore.
What may appear as a straightforward safety measure risks being interpreted by citizens and adversaries alike as a concession to extremist ideology, a retreat from principles once declared immovable.
Groups such as Boko Haram, whose name itself denotes a rejection of Western education, have built their insurgency on an explicit disdain for modern learning. Their campaign of terror is rooted in the belief that enlightenment threatens their worldview, and their strategy depends on dismantling educational structures that form the backbone of personal development and societal progress.
Each time authorities shut down schools because they cannot guarantee basic safety, the country edges dangerously close to fulfilling the objective these extremists have pursued for more than a decade. Without firing another shot or detonating another explosive, they are able to cripple learning through fear alone, achieving with little effort what years of violence struggled to accomplish.
Even when closures are undertaken solely to protect children and teachers from harm, the symbolism remains unsettling.
A nation that once declared it would never bow to terrorists now appears to dim the lights of its own classrooms, inadvertently reinforcing the perception that insecurity can dictate national policy and disrupt sanctuaries of learning.
This sends a perilous message to insurgents and to the wider public. It suggests the state struggles to defend one of its most fundamental institutions.
The impression of retreat erodes public confidence, weakens national morale, and emboldens adversaries who thrive on any appearance of governmental hesitation.
Today’s emergency is not an isolated event. It is an eruption sitting atop a decades-long educational crisis that has plagued Northern Nigeria and left millions of children outside the gates of formal schooling. The current security panic merely exposes, in raw form, structural vulnerabilities long ignored.
This chronic dysfunction did not develop overnight. It emerged from years of insufficient investment, wavering political commitment, failing infrastructure, and the dangerous normalisation of mass illiteracy in several communities, conditions that created fertile ground for insecurity.
The present atmosphere of fear is, therefore, not simply a reaction to recent kidnappings. It is the predictable outcome of a long-ignored problem. Experts warned for years that the combination of poor education and widespread poverty would generate instability and leave young people susceptible to manipulation.
Yet successive administrations, federal and state, failed to launch the bold, sustained policies required to reverse the trend. The result is a generation dangerously exposed, with millions lacking the skills, protection, and resilience needed to resist recruitment by violent non-state actors who prey on vulnerability.
Nigeria is now trapped in a vicious cycle, a form of double jeopardy. Insecurity pushes children out of the few functioning classrooms that remain, while decades of educational neglect ensure that millions more never enter those classrooms at all. Both forces reinforce each other, deepening a crisis of immense proportions.
The scale of panic across the North is unprecedented. From the North East to the North West and into the North Central region, schools are being closed abruptly as state governments scramble to avert further mass abductions. The anxiety touches every layer of society.
These shutdowns carry profound social and psychological consequences. Classrooms that once symbolised hope, mobility, and opportunity are increasingly perceived as danger zones, places where vulnerability rather than promise resides.
Once parents begin to associate their children’s education with physical danger instead of empowerment, society crosses a dangerous threshold.
Fear starts to distort the collective value placed on education, weakening its cultural significance and undermining its role as a driver of national development.
In the midst of this crisis, attempts to blame international comments or foreign governments are misguided.
No external statement created the conditions now plaguing Nigeria’s schools. This insecurity is home-grown, demanding home-grown accountability.
Extremists and criminal networks are not motivated by what foreign leaders say. They exploit domestic gaps,including inconsistent intelligence gathering, slow operational responses, porous borders, internal corruption, and the vast pool of uneducated, frustrated youths left for years without meaningful opportunities.
The resurgence of attacks across the North reflects Nigeria’s inability to sustain earlier counter-terrorism gains or modernise its security architecture.
As operational discipline weakened and political attention drifted, violent actors re-emerged, exploiting the vacuum with precision.
The tragic incidents in Kebbi and Niger States, following an ever-growing list of attacks stretching from Chibok to Kuriga, highlight the fragility of Nigeria’s security environment.
Community alerts often went unheeded, yet the warnings were clear, pointing to systemic failure rather than sudden shock.
Although the President’s recent directives on reinforcing school security show acknowledgement of the problem, what Nigeria urgently needs is a comprehensive, long-term reform strategy. Episodic firefighting, however well-intentioned, cannot resolve a crisis of this scale.
Sustainable solutions require consistency, investment, and political courage.
Securing the physical spaces where children learn, while essential, is not enough. Nigeria must address deeper structural deficiencies, drastically reduce the staggering out-of-school population, rebuild public trust in the state’s ability to protect learning environments, and restore education as a credible pathway to stability and prosperity.
The nation must now confront a defining question.
Will it continue relying on reactive school closures and symbolic retreats, or will it summon the will to defend education as a non-negotiable pillar of national survival?
If fear continues to shape educational policy, Nigeria risks conceding victory to extremists who have long sought to extinguish intellectual and social progress.
The safety, dignity, and future of Nigeria’s children must take primacy in national strategy. Protecting classrooms, guaranteeing uninterrupted access to learning, and reaffirming education as a constitutional right are not optional acts of governance. They are moral imperatives for a nation determined to endure.
Anything less amounts to a profound betrayal of the generation that will inherit this country. History will record how Nigeria responds to this moment, whether it retreats into fear or rises with determination to defend the minds and futures of its young people. The country cannot afford to choose wrongly.
Leman is a former National Secretary of the Nigeria Union of Journalists.
