By Dayo Adesulu

As cases of kidnapping have become rampant in schools across the nation, experts in security are calling on government at all levels to be proactive in curbing insecurity cases bedevilling our innocent students.

File: Students during break

Instead of waiting for kidnappers to strike in our schools before security personnel swing into action, security experts and stakeholders are urging the state and federal governments to put adequate security measures in place to curb incursions and insurgencies.

In February, 2016, three school girls were taken from their hostel at the Babington Macaulay Junior Seminary, Agunfoye Lugbusi , Ikorodu at about 8 p.m.

Two weeks ago, four students, a teacher and the principal of Lagos State Model Secondary School, Epe were kidnapped. Besides, the story of the abducted 214 Chibok school girls in 2014 is still fresh in the bowel of our memories.

These are just a handful of cases of kidnapped reported in the media. I am sure there are many more that were not brought to the public notice.

In his submission, Director, Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ibadan, UI, Professor Isaac Olawale Albert said there were three main scientific explanations for kidnapping and hostage taking. He said: ‘’The first is to achieve political objectives by insurgents. The economic explanation is when the victim is taken with a view to collecting ransoms from his or her relations. The “hybrid” reason is where it is done to obtain ransom for pursuing political objectives.

‘’What we see around us nowadays is the purely criminal type. The ongoing attack on Nigerian schools is pretty difficult to manage. ‘’How many schools do we have in Nigeria? How many policemen and women do we have for policing the society? How many schools can we provide with adequate security for stemming future kidnap attempts?

‘’Nigeria needs to face the problem realistically. So long as the social, economic and political systems in Nigeria continue to fail the citizenry as we increasingly witness across the land some deviants in the society would continue to turn in the direction of situational and career criminality such as armed robbery, kidnapping and other social vices.

‘’With a more responsible management of the Nigerian society the problem would go there. The available short term measure for contending with the frightening situation is for the police (assisted by Civil Defence and the others) to step up the surveillance of our cities, focusing more particularly on schools having children with high hostage value: namely children from rich homes.

‘’With such regular policing of our communities, the chances of the kidnappers getting away with their victims would be reduced. It would be recalled that the kidnappers are successful in most cases. They successfully take their victims and successfully get them to wherever they seek to hide them until ransoms are paid.’’

On his part, Oyesoji Aremu, a professor at the Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ibadan, UI,lamented that the resurgence of kidnapping of school children after the much orchestrated one (Chibok Girls’ Abduction) has brought a new dimension to school insecurity.

He said: ‘’Primarily, school safety should promote learning. And basically, that should be the first thing. Where learning environment is not secured, learners and teachers would not only be emotionally dysfunctional, parents would also be apprehensive.

School security architecture

“Given the recent resurgence of school children kidnapping, it becomes more instructive to reappraise the entire school security architecture. This is with a view to providing a safe school environment for all.

“One, every school should re-engineer school- community relationship. In effect, this would promote school policing. Members of the communities are not only stakeholders, schools in their communities exist for the commonwealth of such communities. “Therefore, securing their cooperation by the school management is the right security thing to do.”