[The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck
a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected
officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other
perceived supporters of the Nigerian government.]
By
Adam Nossiter
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria
— The teenager in the immaculate white robe stood in the ruins of what had been
his school. There were no classrooms, no desks or chairs, no intact blackboards
— there was, in fact, no longer any reason for him to be there.
Yet the teenager, Aruna Mustapha, and a friend had come to
sign in anyway, just as they did every morning before the fire, expressing a
hunger for education and a frustration with the insurgents bent on preventing
it.
“We can’t stay at home any longer; we want to come to
school, to learn,” explained Aruna, 16. “I’m fed up. I want to be in school.”
The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck
a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected
officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other
perceived supporters of the Nigerian government.
Now it has an ominous new front: a war against schools.
Public and private schools here have been doused with
gasoline at night and set on fire. Crude homemade bombs — soda bottles filled
with gasoline — have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria
offers its children.
The simple yellow facades have been blackened and the plain
desks melted to twisted pipes, leaving thousands of children without a place to
learn, stranded at home and underfoot, while anxious parents plead with
Nigerian authorities to come up with a contingency plan for their education.
Today, this dusty metropolis in northeastern Nigeria’s
desert scrub is dotted with the burned-out shells of what were school
buildings. The sun pours in as sheets of charred corrugated metal roof hang
down into empty schoolrooms, clanging in the hot wind. In the sunny afternoons
small children play in the ruins.
In recent weeks, at least eight schools have been
firebombed, apparently the work of Boko Haram, the Islamist group waging a
deadly war against the Nigerian government and suspected of cultivating links
with Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the region. The group’s very name is a rallying
cry against schools — “Boko” means “book” or “Western learning” in the Hausa
language, and “haram” is Arabic for forbidden — but it has never gone after
them to this degree before, analysts say.
“‘We are Boko Haram, and we will burn the school,’ ”
the elderly watchman at Aruna’s school, the Abbaganaram Primary School,
recounted the arsonists saying after they appeared out of the darkness, ordered
him at gunpoint to lie down, doused the school with gasoline and set it on
fire, lighting up the night sky.
A self-described spokesman for Boko Haram who frequently
phones journalists in Maiduguri recently claimed responsibility for the school
attacks. The spokesman, who calls himself Abul Qaqa, said they were in response
to what he called a targeting of this city’s abundant open-air Islamic schools
by authorities. Officials here have denied any such campaign. Indeed, young
boys can be seen receiving Koranic lessons, untroubled, all over Maiduguri.
Around 2,600 students had gone to school at Abbaganaram, at
the edge of a neighborhood considered a Boko Haram stronghold. Now, the
quadrangle enclosing a sandy courtyard looks like a roofless war ruin.
Fragments of a lesson, scrawled on what remains of a blackboard, can be
glimpsed through a windowless opening.
A lone teacher, as eager to resume work as young Aruna, hung
about in the school’s remains. “There is no public holiday. We are on duty,”
said Babagana Kolo, who had taught primary school there. “We are supposed to be
on duty.”
For several days after the attack in early March, students
had come to be taught in the open air, under the hardy light-green neem trees
in the courtyard, Mr. Kolo said. But he said the government had failed to
provide materials, like chalk for a remaining blackboard, so the students had
stopped coming.
“They bombed everywhere,” said Aliyu Adamu, a longtime
teacher at Abbaganaram. “Everything. All the classes.”
Nobody has been killed in the school attacks, a notable
exception amid a campaign of shadowy aims in which virtually anything
associated with the Nigerian state is considered fair game. More than 900
people have been killed by Boko Haram in the last two years, according to Human
Rights Watch.
Maiduguri, the birthplace of the Boko Haram insurgency, has
become used to living under siege over the last two years. Fear and an
army-enforced curfew empty the scruffy low-rise streets well before dark.
Nervous public officials — prime assassination targets of the insurgents —
avoid speaking the group’s name or blaming it. Army checkpoints are
omnipresent. The soldiers, also a favorite target of snipers, are grim-faced
and brusque.
“The Boko Haram are the ones controlling the state here,”
said one of the lone human rights activists in Maiduguri, Maikaramba Sadiq of
Nigeria’s Civil Liberties Organization. Residents fear that Boko Haram and its
informants are everywhere.
“They are working 24 hours, looking, observing,” said Mr.
Sadiq, who has been an intermediary between suspected Boko Haram members here
and lawyers willing to represent them.
Yet the destruction of Maiduguri’s schools has bewildered
and demoralized students, parents and teachers here in a way that the
near-daily attacks, including one on a crowded market in February that killed
30, have not. The targeting of children, even indirectly, is seen as a new and
sinister twist.
“I can’t even explain this,” said Musa Adam, a teacher at
the Gwange III school, which endured a firebombing attempt but was not
destroyed. “Is it an act of wickedness, or what? How can somebody destroy a
school where children come to learn?”
Meanwhile, thousands of parents have seen one more prop
supporting the illusion of normal life here destroyed.
“No one knows what this thing is all about,” said Musa
Abakar, 39, father of two boys and a girl, ages 8 to 15, who attended the
Abbaganaram Primary School before it was destroyed. “Burning schools, burning
markets. How can one understand these things?”
Parents also wonder what to do about their marooned children
since the Nigerian government has made no provision for them. The official in
charge, Abba Ali Tijjani, the commissioner of Borno State schools, acknowledged
as much in an interview.
“All our children are just staying at home,” said Isa Dauda,
27, who works in an open-air mattress workshop and has four children. “We don’t
know what to do now. It’s more than a difficult situation.”
Opposite the Kulo Gumna Primary and Junior day school, where
eight classrooms were destroyed in the heart of a Boko Haram-infiltrated
neighborhood, Mamadou Youndusa, a barber cutting a child’s hair, lamented his
own children’s newly imposed idleness.
He had children in both sections of the school. Now, “They
are all at home. Which means a bleak future for them.”
A few of the classrooms at Kulo Gumna were untouched, but
most of the students in them have not returned.
“They are afraid something will happen; that is why they are
not coming back,” said a teacher, Fatouma Tujjani. Fewer than half of her 46
students have returned, she said. “They are just afraid.”
Elsewhere in Maiduguri, though, the will to resume schooling
is overcoming fear, government lethargy and the absence of a plan. Early this
month, several hundred children — laughing girls in blue-checked head scarves,
and some white-shirted boys as well — showed up at the Abbaganaram ruins,
preparing to trek a mile or so to another school that had agreed to take them
in.
One of the older students, Adam Abagana, 18, expressed
outrage at what had befallen his school.
“It’s an abomination. There is no justification for it,” he
said. “We never thought the excesses of the gunmen would come down to burning
schools.”
He added, “The only hope is, God has destined it.”
