Nigerian sisters Hafsat, 14, and Aisha, 13, were asleep in their dormitory when gunmen overran their school in a remote northwest village and snatched them along with 250 other students.

After a week in captivity, they were freed in early March after a truce with their abductors. But that was just the beginning of their ordeal.

Already traumatised, now they fear their chance of an education is slipping away as hundreds of schools shut across northwestern Nigeria following a spate of abductions of students.

“My daughters are worried the continued closure of their school means the end of their education and their future,” said Mustapha Muhammad, the girls’ father in Jangebe, Zamfara state.

Since late last year, Nigerian gangs have increasingly targeted schools and colleges for kidnap attacks, hoping to squeeze ransom payments out of authorities.

Disruptions to classes in the northwest are compounding education woes in Nigeria, where a jihadist insurgency in the northeast has already curtailed teaching.

In the latest incident last month, gunmen kidnapped 39 students from a college outside the northwestern city of Kaduna. Most of those students are still being held.

“Education is under attack in northern Nigeria,” said Osai Ojigho, head of Amnesty International in Nigeria, in the wake of a December abduction of 344 schoolboys in the town of Kankara in Katsina state. 

Northwest and central Nigeria are now a hub for heavily armed criminal gangs of cattle thieves and kidnappers who raid villages, killing and abducting residents after looting and burning homes. 

Schools targeted in the north are usually in remote areas where students stay in dormitories with only watchmen for security, making them easier targets.

Recent abductions by gunmen, known locally as bandits, have prompted six northern states to shut public schools to prevent further attacks.

– Deeper mess –

Since December 2020, some 730 students have been abducted, disrupting the studies of more than five million children, UN agency UNICEF said. 

“With increasing incidents of school attacks and kidnapping of students, the education system will ultimately collapse if nothing is done urgently,” UNICEF said. 

The more-than-decade-long Islamist insurgency in northeast Nigeria has also impeded education in the region where literacy rates and school enrolment were already very low. 

According to a 2018 UNICEF report, jihadists killed at least 2,295 teachers and destroyed more than 1,400 schools in the northeast, with most of the schools yet to reopen due to “extensive damage or ongoing insecurity.” 

More than 120 students have been killed in jihadist raids on schools in the region, according to an AFP tally. 

Boko Haram was behind the 2014 abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok in Borno state while rival group Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) led another kidnapping of more than 100 schoolgirls in Dapchi in nearby Yobe state.

The abductions and deadly school attacks shocked parents and students, leading to a drastic drop in school enrolment. 

Partly in response to the Chibok kidnapping, in May 2014 Nigeria launched a $20-million Safe Schools Initiative with support from the Global Business Coalition for Education.

But that project lost steam as soon as it took off.  

With UNICEF estimating the north accounts for 60 percent of the 10.4 million out-of-school children in Nigeria, school attacks risk worsening education in the region already struggling to catch up with standards in the more prosperous south. 

“We are already in a deeper mess considering the number of schools closed and the huge number of children staying at home,” Mustapha Ahmad, a teacher in northern Nigeria’s largest city of Kano, told AFP. 

In February, Kano shut down a dozen boarding schools and sent students home for fear of attacks.  

Those shut down were public schools attended by students from poor families, while children from richer homes attend private schools, said Yusuf Sadiq, a teacher.

“This further deprives poor children’s education, the only vehicle for social mobility,” he said. 

– Undoing successes –

According to UNICEF, girls account for 60 percent of the six million out-of-school children in mostly Muslim northern Nigeria, where early marriage due to religious and cultural practices often deprives girls of education opportunities.  

Aggressive education campaigns for girls and free school meals have helped to shore up enrolment in the north, but the rising kidnappings were “undoing all the successes recorded”, Ahmad said.  

“If the girls’ stay-at-home is prolonged due to the state of insecurity, the next option of parents is to marry them off,” he said. 

Father of the two girls Muhammad agrees, saying five parents in Jangebe had been approached to marry off their daughters since their release last month. 

Authorities in Zamfara asked the Jangebe schoolgirls to transfer to any day school in their locality, but schools have refused to take them in due to lack of space, said Muhammad.

“Girls are more affected by this sad development,” he said. “Because many will be married off by their parents who can’t keep watching them at home doing nothing.”   

Nigeria will restart issuing new mobile subscriptions from next week, the government said, four months after it halted the process in an attempt to curb growing insecurity in the country.

Africa’s most populous nation is battling a surge in violence, including a jihadist insurgency in the northeast, banditry in the northwest and separatist tensions in the southeast.

Worried that that criminals and insurgents were using unregistered SIM cards, the authorities in December ordered telecoms firms to suspend issuing new mobile lines while companies carried out a registration of existing users.

Telecoms operators were also directed to block subscribers who failed to link their SIM cards to their national identity numbers. 

In a statement late Thursday, Nigeria’s communications ministry said issuance of new mobile subscriptions would resume on Monday.

“The implementation of the policy will commence on Monday, 19th of April 2021. The issuance of new SIMs and other suspended activities will resume on the same date, as long as verification is done and the guidelines are fully adhered to,” it said.

There are nearly 200 million mobile phones in use in Nigeria — a statistical average of around one per person.

The government argues that registering the phones will help to tackle insecurity and build a unified database.

In 2015, Africa’s biggest wireless operator MTN was sanctioned after failing to disconnect 5.1 million subscribers in Nigeria, over concerns the lines were being used by Boko Haram insurgents.

The company was initially fined 3.2 billion euros ($3.9 billion) but after negotiations, the punishment was reduced to 1.2 billion euros.

As many as 65,000 people have fled the northeastern Nigeria town of Damasak following a series of jihadist attacks, the UN refugee agency said on Friday.

Fighters from the so-called Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) stormed the town in Borno state three times in a week to strike a military garrison, burning homes and a UN office and killing at least 12 people. 

In the latest violence on Wednesday, militants attacked the garrison before being forced back into the town itself, military sources and residents said. 

“Following the latest attack on Wednesday 14 April, the third in seven days, up to 80 percent of the town’s population —- which includes the local community and internally displaced people — were forced to flee,” UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch said.

Some have fled towards the regional capital Maiduguri and other nearby towns while others have crossed the border into Niger’s Diffa region, itself vulnerable to jihadist violence.

“Due to insecurity, however, humanitarian access is increasingly challenging in many parts of Nigeria’s Borno State, including for UNHCR staff, who were forced to temporarily relocate out of Damasak in the past seven days,” the UNHCR said.

Nigeria’s army dismissed reports militants had overrun Damasak and said on Thursday troops were in control of the area.

At least four people, including a soldier, were killed in an attack Monday. The UN said eight others were killed Wednesday, while locals said ten bodies were burried and 20 people were injured. 

The attacks have underscored the jihadists’ continued ability to hit the armed forces more than a decade into Nigeria’s grinding insurgency.

More than 36,000 have been killed and two million displaced by the fighting in Nigeria that has spread into neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

Damasak is host to one of the military’s so-called “super camps” — fortified garrisons the army has set up in an attempt to better defend against attacks.

Critics and local residents say the strategy to close smaller bases and pull back into larger camps has left jihadists freer to roam unchallenged in rural areas.

Due to worsening security in the region, humanitarian workers are struggling to provide aid, with the number of people requiring urgent assistance expected to rise to 8.7 million this year. 

ISWAP, which split from the jihadist group Boko Haram in 2016, has become a dominant threat in Nigeria, attacking soldiers and bases while killing and kidnapping civilians.