Just before dawn in Kebbi State, the morning bell never rang; gunfire did.
Armed men stormed Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School, scaling the fence and shooting their way past police posted near the dormitory, before disappearing into the dark with 25 students.
By the next day, one girl had managed to escape and make it back home, a rare sliver of good news in a story that feels depressingly familiar to families across northern Nigeria.
For the parents still waiting in the town of Maga, the school’s name now sounds like a cruel joke: “comprehensive” education has been replaced by a crash course in fear and uncertainty.
The details from Kebbi read like a mash-up of every kidnapping Nigerians hoped they would never see again.
Witnesses describe attackers who knew the terrain, overwhelmed the school’s limited security and moved with professional speed, all hallmarks of the bandit gangs and jihadist factions that have refined the business model of mass abductions over the last decade.
Local officials admit the school sits perilously close to forested areas used as hideouts by armed groups, an open secret that everyone discussed but no one fully acted upon before the raid.
Now, as troops, police units and local hunters sweep through nearby bushland in a “round-the-clock pursuit,” the question is less how this happened than why it keeps happening.
In the immediate aftermath, Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Waidi Shaibu, flew to Kebbi to issue a battle‑hardened pep talk, telling soldiers that “success is not optional” as they searched for the missing girls.
His visit was meant to project resolve, but parents listening under the school’s broken windows could be forgiven for hearing something else: yet another high-ranking promise layered on top of years of unfulfilled vows to make schools safe.
Residents in Maga say the attack was “fast and overwhelming,” with gunmen even assaulting staff housing and shooting the vice-principal’s husband, a reminder that adults are collateral damage in a war that increasingly targets classrooms.
When your child’s dormitory can be turned into a battlefield in minutes, the notion that education is a guaranteed public good starts to feel like fiction.
The Kebbi kidnapping is not an isolated tragedy; it is part of a long, bloody pattern.
Since the 2014 Chibok abductions burned the phrase “bring back our girls” into global consciousness, dozens of copycat attacks on schools in northern states have turned students into bargaining chips for ransom, prisoner swaps or political leverage.
Analysts say the latest raid fits a familiar logic: boarding schools offer a concentrated pool of young hostages, large compounds with patchy security, and the kind of national outrage that can be monetised by groups seeking cash or concessions.
The result is a perverse incentive structure where a single night’s work can yield both international attention and a potential payday big enough to bankroll more weapons.
Government responses have oscillated between crackdowns and negotiations, none of which seem to change the calculus for gunmen stalking the hinterlands of Kebbi, Kaduna, Zamfara or Niger states.
In some past cases, ransom payments—often laundered through community intermediaries or quietly arranged by local officials—secured the release of students but also legitimised kidnapping as a business model.
Heavy-handed military operations, meanwhile, sometimes scatter bandits into neighbouring districts without dismantling their networks, increasing insecurity along rural roads and in farming communities.
Caught in the middle, parents must decide whether the promise of education is worth the risk of sending their children back to boarding schools that look more like soft targets than safe havens.
The psychological toll is harder to quantify, but it may prove even more corrosive than the immediate violence.
Girls who escape abduction often return to towns buzzing with rumour and suspicion, where trauma counselling is rare and stigma is common, particularly in conservative communities worried about sexual violence.
Teachers, already underpaid, now find themselves balancing lesson plans with security drills, while some schools quietly shorten terms or close boarding facilities altogether.
When classrooms empty out, extremist narratives that paint modern education as dangerous or un-Islamic gain space to breathe, and that ideological victory costs nothing more than the fuel for a few motorcycle convoys.
What makes the Kebbi case especially alarming is that it unfolded while Nigeria’s security forces are already stretched thin by parallel crises.
In Borno State, the Islamic State West Africa Province recently claimed responsibility for an attack that allegedly led to the abduction and killing of a senior army general, boasting in its propaganda that it had humiliated the military hierarchy.
Although Nigerian authorities dispute parts of that account, the very fact that such a narrative is plausible illustrates how emboldened insurgent groups have become.
From the bandit-ridden northwest to the jihadist-plagued northeast, security agencies are fighting on multiple fronts, leaving plenty of gaps for opportunistic kidnappers to exploit.
Civil-society groups and education advocates have sketched out a familiar list of remedies: perimeter walls, CCTV cameras, trained guards, early-warning systems, and community‑based intelligence networks that can spot suspicious movements before gunmen reach school gates.
Some suggest relocating the most exposed boarding schools closer to urban centres or using staggered timetables to reduce the number of students sleeping in large dormitories.
Yet all these measures cost money and political capital, two resources that often evaporate once media attention moves on to the next crisis, whether it is a fuel price protest in Lagos or a coup rumour in a neighbouring country.
Without sustained investment, “safe school” plans risk becoming binder-bound relics gathering dust in ministry offices.
Meanwhile, families in Maga are living through a slower, more intimate emergency as they wait for news that may come by phone call, military briefing or social‑media leak.
Each day that passes without confirmed rescues chips away at trust in both local and federal authorities, feeding the sense that rural communities are essentially on their own.
Some parents privately admit they are considering pulling their children out of school permanently, a decision that would quietly achieve what militants and criminals could only dream of: shutting down education without firing a shot.
If Nigeria cannot find a way to make classrooms less attractive to kidnappers than cattle markets or highways, it risks graduating a generation whose main lesson from their school years is that learning is dangerous.
