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A total of 5,474 primary and secondary schools across Nigeria have joined the Safe School Project in the past 11 months in a significant move to enhance the safety of students and teachers.
However, an alarming 2,851 of these schools lack basic security measures, The PUNCH gathered.
The Safe School Project is domiciled under the operation of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps.
Following the abduction of 276 girls from their school in Chibok, a town in northeastern Borno State in 2014, the Safe Schools Initiative was launched by the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, alongside the Nigerian Global Business Coalition for Education and private sector leaders at the World Economic Forum Africa.
The initiative entails a combination of school-based interventions, community interventions to protect schools, and special measures for at-risk populations.
The project also includes training for teachers, students, and other school community members in basic safety and security skills.
Due to the resurgence of the mass abduction of pupils, the Safe School portal, www.nssrcc.gov.ng, was introduced last September to facilitate the registration of schools and enable swift and coordinated responses from security agencies in the event of an attack.
According to data from an app developed to monitor school registrations for the project via its portal and sighted by our correspondent on Sunday, nearly half of the registered schools lack essential security features such as fences, gates, and security guards.
It reads, “5,474 registered schools – 2,623 schools with basic security measures and 2,851 schools without basic security measures.”
The Commander of the National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre, Hammed Abodunrin, highlighted the challenges faced in encouraging schools to register and comply with security requirements.
“What we do now is to go to schools ourselves. It appears that many school managers do not understand the process or do not want to register,” Abodunrin explained.
The Commander further noted, “Out of the 5,474 schools, over 4,000 were registered by our personnel from various local governments across the country.”
A Security consultant and the Managing Director, Beacon Security and Intelligence Limited, Kabir Adamu, emphasised the heightened vulnerability of schools lacking basic security measures.
“The vulnerability exists. The threat elements exist in those schools. It is not acceptable. Risk management says where you have a viable threat; your mitigation measures or security systems must be adequate to lower the risk.
“The students in those schools are easily exposed to attacks and abductions because of security management practices,” Adamu stated.
