NUT advocates community policing to tackle school attacks

As the rate of armed attacks on schools is increasing each day nationwide and with students and school workers abducted for ransom payment, the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) has again, called on the Federal and state governments to adopt community policing as an effective way to tackle the menace.

The Secretary-General of the union, Mike Ene, made this call in an exclusive interview with the Nigerian Tribune on Tuesday.

He was asked to assess the security situation in schools in the last one year of Bola Tinubu’s led administration.

According to him, schools from primary to university levels have increasingly become a soft target in Nigeria for bandits and kidnappers, seeing them as where to get cheap money and this development is totally unacceptable.
He said the government now at all levels would need to wake up from their sleep and make the safety of students and teachers and other Nigerians and their property a priority.

He said it’s high time that the government declared a state of emergency in security in and around schools across the country.

He pointed out that it was unfortunate that Chibok school girls, for example, could still be in captivity of their abductors 10 years after they were forcefully taken away from their hostels.

He said aside the direct implications of armed attacks and mass abduction on students and their parents, the situation is also increasing the number of out-of-school children, particularly in the northern states.

He declared that many parents nowadays especially in the Northern states known to be more troubled such as Borno, Katsina, Zamfara, Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Adamawa, and so forth do not want to enroll their children in schools again just because they are afraid those children may be kidnapped for ransom payment which they don’t have.

Ene, therefore, re-emphasised that the government would need to create community (and not state) policing to be able to effectively tame the menace, arguing that such a step will be the most effective way to guarantee the safety of people and their property anywhere they are.

He said people at the grassroots would be better at policing their communities than outsiders, who may not be familiar with the terrains of their duty posts.