NIGERIAN STUDENTS AS EXPENSIVE COMMODITIES
Business has never been better for those whose high-value commodities are Nigerian students.
In the week following the release of the hundreds of pupils kidnapped from the LEA Primary School Kuriga in Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State, more students have done time in kidnappers’ den. About nine students were kidnapped in Ughelli, Delta State as they returned from their school in Calabar. They were freed after spending some days.
Three students kidnapped from their hostel in the University of Calabar are still being held. Their families have been asked to pay N14 million as ransom for their release.
While the crimes were committed in different locales of a crime-scarred landscape, the connection is unmistakable and the implication inescapable that Nigerian students have become expensive commodities in an outrageously profitable but rather execrable business.
The Nigerian state refuses to disclose whether it paid for the release of the Kuriga school children, but indications are that it did. It is highly unlikely that the kidnappers who had the audacity to demand for one billion Naira got nothing for their considerable investment at the end of the day. A country which has more cash to pay than cards to play in such a situation could not have got off as lightly as the government’s reticence suggests.
Kidnapping for ransom is a terrorist tactic that has proven its ability to serve as a tool of unbearable pressure as well as rake in money. The ability of non-state actors to snatch people, keep them and use them as bargaining chips to much publicity has often proven paralyzing and demoralizing for governments around the world. Throw in the convoluted dynamics of ransom negotiation and rescue operations, and the nightmare is complete.
There are lessons to be learned from the levity with which non-state actors continue to treat the Nigerian state and their individual victims, with the biggest lesson being that Nigeria is failing to learn its lessons. Kidnapping for ransom in Nigeria first came to prominence as a favorite tactic of militant groups in the Niger Delta Area. It was further refined by Boko Haram even if kidnappings orchestrated by the group has been for other reasons too. But it is the bandits waltzing through much of northeast and northwest Nigeria that have taken the crime to another level. This has taken many years to fine-tune, yet Nigeria, as incorrigible as ever, has not developed a security architecture that can be precisely deployed to dismantle what is a devastating menace. What does it all mean? Business — a trade in vulnerable Nigerians, presumably by a collection of ragtag criminals conducted like an orchestra by well-heeled sponsors in the cover of high places.
As for Nigerian students who have become high-value targets in the kidnapping business, the never again said by Nigerian authorities when students were abducted in the past have been nothing more than reassurances that it will happen again, the question being where next?
In the bargain of life, cost is relative to value. What one can get should be commensurate to what is giving up to get that thing. If this premises holds, the current cost of acquiring education in Nigeria is irreconcilable with the value it confers in the Nigeria situation. It is not simply a situation of harder circumstances yielding a higher value.
Kidnapping students was never the major obstacle facing education in Nigeria. Suddenly cast into such calamitous company by Nigeria’s inclination to coddle insecurity, it is ferociously leading the pack of the mountains Nigerian students must climb if they consider education a luxury worth their painstaking pursuit.
For years, a lack of investment in teachers and infrastructure which make quality education possible and accessible was among the gravest accusations levelled against the Nigerian state. Today, however, insecurity makes a mockery of those persistent challenges.
The vehement Insecurity victimizing Nigerian students is yet more violent disavowal of the express and implied commitments Nigeria consented to when it signed the Safe Schools Declaration of the United Nations.
The criminals instigating insecurity in the country are determined to shred Nigeria’s shrinking obligations to its citizens and the international community, stir the shreds into a solution of humiliation and force it down the throat of a shamefaced country.
The question of how can Nigeria keep students safe is not as immediate as whether Nigeria can keep them safe. It is appropriate to seek to answer this question with more questions. Can Nigeria, which has greatly struggled to secure communities around the country, offer students who are a community within its beleaguered communities what it has consistently failed up to provide to this point? It will be asking too much.
The government In Nigeria is failing to reinforce its legitimacy and validity by securing all those who place themselves under its provision and sanctions. The worst kind of failure is that delivered by the stronger party in a social contract. This kind of failure which snacks at betrayal is at once unbearable and unforgivable. It remains to be seen if Nigeria can recover, or if it is Nigerians who must seek respite elsewhere.
Kene Obiezu,
