We Send Our Children To School, But Who Protects Them At Night?

I woke up this morning and saw the news about Ogun Polytechnic. Five students taken from their hostel in the middle of the night. My heart just sank. These are children, some of them barely 18, sent away from home to learn. Their parents are somewhere in Ibadan or Lagos or Kano, sleeping peacefully, thinking their child is safe in a school environment.

In my time in the civil service, we used to say that a school is a sanctuary. The Nigeria of my youth, we had our problems, but a student could walk from the hostel to the library at 10pm without fear. Now, these boys and girls are being kidnapped like they are commodities. What is happening today is not new, but the scale of it, the boldness of it, it is something else. The Yoruba say, a word is enough for the wise. But these criminals are not listening to words.

I am not a parent of a polytechnic student, but I have five children. I know the prayers we pray when they travel. I know the fear that sits in your chest when you hear of an abduction in a town where your child is schooling. We must ask ourselves, what is the school doing about security? What are the parents doing? What are we all doing? It is easy to point fingers, but as we used to say in the ministry, we must be methodical. We need to secure the hostels, we need to know who is coming and going. But more than that, we need to pray. Because if we cannot protect our children in a place of learning, then where can we protect them?