The “bandits” who kidnapped 14-year-old Hafsat and 13-year-old Aisha in northwestern Nigeria, presumably for ransom, not only wrested their zest for life and carelessness. They also undoubtedly ruined their future.
The two sisters were abducted at the end of February and held for a week in Zamfara state, along with more than 250 of their classmates after a series of similar mass abductions of children and adolescents.
In this region, nearly 700 students, children and adolescents, have been kidnapped by armed groups, known locally as “bandits”, in exchange for ransoms since December.
Just a month ago, 39 young men and women were kidnapped after the attack on their vocational school in Kaduna, and so far only ten have been released.
No perpetrator of these mass kidnappings has yet been apprehended or brought to justice, but to prevent further attacks, six states in the North and North-West have closed their schools, dismissing hundreds of thousands of children. children at home.
“My daughters are worried that their school will remain closed forever,” Mustapha Muhammad, the father of Jangebe’s two teenage girls, told AFP in Zamfara. “It would mean the end of their education and the promise of a better future.”
– Sacrifice –
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimates that 10 million children are already out of school in Nigeria, although in theory it is free and compulsory. More than 60% of them are in the north of the country where the dropout rates, especially among girls, are alarming.
In these regions, where extreme poverty is close to 80% of the population, where the number of children per woman is among the highest in the world, and in this conservative Muslim society, sending children to “Western” school is an effort and a sacrifice that few parents can offer their children.
Asked by AFP, Unicef considers that the education and studies of 5 million children are threatened in a region where already, “more than half of the girls do not go to school”.
“With the acceleration of attacks and kidnappings aimed specifically at students, the whole school system will collapse if nothing is done very quickly,” explains Unicef.
For more than ten years now, in the North-East, education has been directly targeted by the jihadist group Boko Haram, whose very name means “Western education is sin”.
Nearly 3,000 teachers were killed, especially at the start of the rebellion in 2009, and the jihadists destroyed some 1,400 schools, according to Unicef.
It was also Boko Haram that carried out the first kidnappings in schools, with the kidnapping of more than 200 young girls in their dormitory in Chibok in 2014, causing the stir of world public opinion.
In 2018, the group Islamic State in West Africa (Iswap), dissident of Boko Haram had in turn kidnapped more than 120 girls from the school of Dapchi, releasing them shortly after on the condition that they do not not go back to class.
From now on it is all the North which is targeted by these criminal groups, no longer acting out of ideology but solely out of greed. The consequence, however, remains the same.
“The situation is very complicated with all the schools closed and the children who have to stay at home”, told AFP Mustapha Ahmad, professor in Kano, a huge city in the North, where twelve large public boarding schools were closed in February in the sequel to the latest mass kidnappings.
– Married after puberty –
Another teacher, Yusuf Sadiq, notes that it is the public institutions that have closed their doors. These schools, free or inexpensive, welcome the poorest children.
“These attacks destroyed all efforts to get them to go to school,” regrets the professor, for whom education is their only hope to “climb the social ladder”.
These establishments are also, for many families, the only way to feed their children, thanks to food distributions.
“If the girls stay too long at home because of the insecurity, the only option left for them is to be married,” he laments.
Indeed, young girls are married from puberty, sometimes from the age of 12, in the Muslim North where Sharia, Islamic law applies.
In Jangebe, Hafsat and Aisha’s father assures us that five parents of students have already received marriage proposals for their daughters.
“Girls are even more touched by this sad story,” he sighs. “Because a lot of parents are going to force them to marry rather than keep them doing nothing at home.”
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