Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, has said that the recurring abduction of students in their dormitories was enough warning to the government to deploy required resources to protect schools against attacks.
He said the abduction of hundreds of schoolboys in Kankara, Katsina State, last week exposed Nigeria’s continued vulnerability to heartless crimes.
Lawan, however, said he was relieved at the news of their release, noting that the past few days had been harrowing for the parents of the students, their teachers and the country at large.
“The nightmare sadly reminds us of our country’s continued vulnerability to heartless crimes such as the kidnap of hundreds of schoolgirls in Chibok in 2014 and the Dapchi incident of 2018.
“The blemish of those earlier incidents is still on us as a country and we had hoped that the outrage that they sparked would mean such never happened again in Nigeria.
“This sad recurrence is, therefore, enough warning to us as a nation to deploy all the resources required for the security of our educational institutions, and indeed of everywhere else where our children gather, to protect them against cowardly attacks by primitive terrorists,” Lawan was qouted as saying in a statement by his media aide, Ola Awoniyi.
Lawan said the news that all the kidnapped boys regained their freedom unharmed would delight their parents and all people of goodwill in Nigeria and across the world who had been horrified by the ordeal of the innocent children.
He, therefore, commended the prompt intervention and productive engagement of President Muhammadu Buhari, Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina State and others which resulted in the release of the children.
He also praised the security forces and the intelligence community for their coordinated efforts that brought this saga to early closure and urged them to continue in the same spirit and with the same approach in addressing other security issues across Nigeria.
