Nigeria is Failing its Children

Nigeria is failing its children. Governance has been reduced to a series of political performances staged for the benefit of those in power, while children, who are the most vulnerable members of society, who cannot vote, protest, or negotiate their own safety bear the consequences most severely. They are growing up in a country that is stripping away structures meant to protect, educate, nourish, and prepare them for the future. The Nigerian government’s failures are not abstract, they are very tangible. We see these failures in malnourished toddlers, the eyes of traumatised schoolchildren, and classrooms ruined into sites of terror. By any measure, Nigeria’s government has failed woefully and without remorse.

The kidnapping of schoolchildren has become one of the clearest hallmarks of governance failure in Nigeria. In April 2014, the abduction of 276 girls from Government Secondary School, Chibok in Borno State  occurred and shocked both Nigerians and the world. 12 years later, kidnapping children has continued to be a national tragedy that the government has proven utterly incapable of addressing. For years, mass school kidnappings were largely associated with the volatile north, a terrible but geographically contained crisis that the government could gesture at while attributing it to regional insecurity. In recent years, that idea has been shattered due to several attacks on previously “safe” parts of the country.

On May 15, 2026, two mass school abductions occurred on the same day in Borno and Oyo states, making clear beyond any reasonable argument that no part of Nigeria is safe for a child trying to get an education.

On Thursday, May 15, 2026,  gunmen dressed in military camouflage stormed three schools in the Oriire Local Government Area: Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yawota, Community Grammar School in Ahoro-Esiele, and L.A. Primary School, also in Ahoro-Esiele. During the raid, assistant headteacher Mr. Joel Adesiyan and a motorcycle rider were shot dead before the attackers fled with their 46 captives. The horror deepened when a video circulated by the kidnappers showed that Mr. Michael Oyedokun, one of the abducted teachers, had been killed.

In Borno State, gunmen stormed Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School in the Mussa-Biri community of Askira-Uba Local Government Area. Witnesses say  the attackers arrived on motorcycles, forcing children and residents to flee into nearby bushes. Over 42 children were taken, several of them below the age of ten. The attack closely mirrored tactics used by Boko Haram in school kidnappings. Though this incident has yet to command the same level of urgent national attention, civil society organisations in Borno State have spoken out forcefully against the attack and decried what they describe as a troubling silence from the Presidency.

The security operatives did not make any leeway before another attack occurred on the night of June 3, 2026. Suspected bandits invaded the off-campus residence of students of the Federal Polytechnic in Kaura Namoda, Zamfara State, abducting seven students. One managed to escape during the attack, leaving six others, three males and three females, in captivity. Police confirmed the attack and said it was not yet clear where the students had been taken, though efforts were underway to secure their rescue. This latest abduction in Zamfara, a state that has effectively become synonymous with banditry and mass kidnapping, serves as a reminder that the crisis is not episodic but continuous, a permanent condition of life for students in most parts of Nigeria that the government has seemingly accepted as normal.

The Safe Schools Initiative was launched in May 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the Chibok abductions, as Nigeria’s formal commitment to ensuring that schools across the country, particularly in the volatile north, would never again be used as hunting grounds by terrorists and bandits. The initiative was framed as a comprehensive framework for protecting educational facilities, training personnel, and securing the learning environments of Nigerian children. It was presented with urgency, international backing, and 30 million dollars in funding, but from the beginning it was more performance than policy.

Over a decade later, the evidence of the initiative’s failure is staggering and deeply shameful. More than 1,680 schoolchildren have been kidnapped since the initiative was launched. Over 180 educational facilities have been attacked. More than 800 schools in northern Nigeria have been forced to shut down entirely, with several of them repurposed as displacement camps for communities torn apart by the very insecurity the initiative was supposed to prevent. These are not numbers that suggest a programme that tried and fell slightly short. They are numbers that describe a programme that existed in name only.

In 2023, the Safe Schools Initiative was relaunched with an allocation of 144 billion naira, accompanied by the usual fanfare and self-congratulation that follows government pledges in Nigeria. There were speeches,  promises, and assurances that this time would be different, yet things have gotten worse. Schools remain unprotected, bandits and insurgents continue to operate with impunity in communities where schoolchildren are the most vulnerable targets. The 144 billion naira exists as yet another entry in the long ledger of public funds directed towards initiatives that serve the political optics of those in office rather than the safety of ordinary Nigerians, and in this case, children.

When these children are eventually released by their captors, either through ransom payments that the government routinely denies making or through the efforts of negotiators working largely outside official channels, the ordeal is far from over. The psychological damage inflicted on children who have been held in captivity, subjected to violence, deprivation, and fear, is severe and lasting. Post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and an inability to return to normal life are well-documented consequences of kidnapping, particularly for children whose brains are still developing.

In Nigeria, there is virtually no formal structure in place to provide these children with the mental health support they desperately need. They are released, returned to their families, and expected to resume their lives as though the trauma simply evaporates upon reunion. What makes this failure more difficult to stomach is the manner in which the government chooses to engage with rescued children before they are returned to their families. Rather than prioritising the privacy and psychological recovery of the children, officials routinely parade these children at press events, positioning them in front of cameras and microphones. The children, visibly exhausted and distressed, are presented as evidence of the government’s “job well done.”

It would be a mistake, however, to limit the conversation about children’s mental health in Nigeria to those who have been directly kidnapped. The psychological toll of growing up in Nigeria’s current conditions is far more widespread and far less visible. Children still grow up in communities paralysed by insecurity, in households crushed by poverty, and in a country where the everyday experience of life is defined by scarcity, unpredictability, and institutional abandonment. Children who are raised in environments of chronic stress, instability, and fear, suffer lasting damage to their psychological architecture. Anxiety disorders, depression, hypervigilance, difficulty forming trusting relationships, and an impaired sense of self-worth are among the documented outcomes for children who grow up without safety, stability or hope. Nigeria produces these conditions at scale, across every region and demographic, while doing almost nothing to address the consequences.

The implications of this for Nigeria’s future are not only sad but also catastrophic. Mental health infrastructure in Nigeria is virtually nonexistent for the average citizen. A generation of Nigerian children is growing up carrying unprocessed grief, undiagnosed trauma and mental illness, with no pathway to healing or no institutional acknowledgment that their suffering exists. When this generation reaches adulthood, the consequences of these unaddressed psychological damages will shape how they parent, work, relate to institutions, respond to conflict, and participate in civic life. A country cannot build a functional future on the foundation of a psychologically broken generation, and Nigeria is well on its way to doing exactly that.

Beyond insecurity, Nigerian children are facing a quieter, slower catastrophe in the form of chronic hunger and malnutrition. Nigeria is home to one of the highest rates of childhood malnutrition in the world, with 40% of Nigerian children below the age of 5 being stunted. Stunting impairs cognitive development, reduces learning capacity, weakens immune systems, and limits the physical and intellectual potential of children in ways that cannot be fully reversed even if circumstances improve in later years. Nigeria is quite literally producing generations of children whose futures have already been diminished by hunger before they are old enough to understand what a future means.

The food insecurity driving this crisis is the direct consequence of policy failures, economic mismanagement, and a government that has not treated the feeding of its children as a priority. With 30.9% of Nigerians living below the poverty line, millions of families cannot afford adequate nutrition. The removal of the fuel subsidy, one of the most disruptive of President Tinubu’s reforms, triggered cascading price increases across food, transport, and energy that hit the poorest households hardest.

The state of education in Nigeria is a national emergency that is rarely treated as one. The country has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world. In every five of the world’s out-of-school children, one is Nigerian. For those still in school, the quality of education they receive is severely compromised by overcrowded classrooms, undertrained teachers, crumbling infrastructure, and shortage of adequate learning materials. In northern Nigeria, the combination of insecurity and poverty has made education nearly inaccessible for entire communities. Girls in particular face compounding barriers, with cultural pressures, early marriages, and the threat of targeted kidnapping making school attendance a danger. The right to education, guaranteed on paper, is not a reality for tens of millions of Nigerian children.

The funding that should be directed towards education is perpetually inadequate and frequently mismanaged. Nigeria’s education budget has consistently fallen below the UNESCO-recommended benchmark of 15 to 20 % of national expenditure. What is budgeted is rarely fully disbursed, and what is disbursed does not always reach the classrooms. The country’s 56,000 abandoned projects include numerous school buildings and educational infrastructure that were funded, started, and left unfinished. A pattern of waste and negligence that has concrete consequences for children who attend schools with leaking roofs, no toilets, and no electricity. A government that can allocate 15 trillion naira to a coastal highway but cannot adequately fund the children’s education has made its priorities unmistakably clear.

Healthcare for children in Nigeria is in a similarly alarming state. Nigeria consistently ranks among the worst countries in the world for child mortality. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Nigeria accounts for approximately 10% of all global under-five deaths, a figure that reflects the combined failure of healthcare infrastructure, public health policy and government investment in the lives of its youngest citizens. Vaccine coverage remains dangerously low in many parts of the country, particularly in the north where a combination of insecurity, misinformation, and lack of access has left children exposed to preventable diseases.

The collapse of the public healthcare system is felt most acutely by children from poor families, which in Nigeria means the majority. Those who can afford private healthcare access it, while those who cannot are left to navigate a public health system defined by shortages of drugs, broken equipment, absent doctors, and facilities that in many cases, are not equipped to handle basic paediatric emergencies. Maternal and neonatal healthcare is equally dire, with Nigeria recording one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. 

At every turn, the compounding failures of Nigerian governance create conditions in which children suffer disproportionately, and the government continues to govern as though none of this is happening. The current administration, now busily angling for the leadership position ahead of the 2027 elections, has shown no meaningful interest in the crisis facing Nigerian children. There are no serious national implementations being led by those in power on child welfare, educational reform, or the protection of schools from armed groups.

What is owed to Nigerian children is not charity or sympathy. It is accountability, the full and functional delivery of every right they are given by the constitution. Nigerian children need an educational system that works, nutritional programmes that actually reach hungry children, healthcare facilities with drugs, good doctors and equipment, and protection from harm. No government achievement can gloss over the reality that a country willing to abandon its children has already abandoned itself. A nation that sends traumatised, malnourished, and undereducated children into adulthood and then expects them to build something functional from the wreckage they have inherited is not being optimistic. It is being delusional. Nigerian children are paying the price for bad governance.