- More must be done to stem a growing menace
The recent abduction of students and staff members of the Nigerian-Turkish International College (NTIC), Ogun State, is only the latest in a series of school-targeted kidnappings that have beset some parts of the country and demands a comprehensive response aimed at reducing them to the barest minimum.
The NTIC operation was undertaken with an outrageous impunity that has come to define school abductions. The kidnappers got into the premises through a perimeter fence around 9.30 pm, seized five students, a hostel mistress, a cook and a Turkish teacher. Firing upon security personnel who accosted them, they escaped into the surrounding swamp with their captives.
An initial ransom demand of about N1.2 billion was made by the abductors, and later reduced to N750 million. The N7.2 million offered by parents at NTIC was rejected. Two of the kidnappers have been apprehended, but there is as yet, no word of the captives.
After kidnappings that have involved educational institutions in Ikorodu and Epe, Lagos State, as well as other states across the federation, it has become obvious that a coherent response must be developed to what has become an extremely worrying situation. Lagos is home to more schools than any other state; its students are thus at greater risk of abduction by criminals who have now resorted to kidnapping as a means of making quick money.
Perhaps the first thing that must be done is to identify the ways in which schools can be constructed to make them less vulnerable to hostile incursions. Many school abductions show that kidnappers only had to breach the perimeter wall surrounding the school to get into the premises and have the school at their mercy.
The traditional model of a perimeter wall surrounding isolated buildings is obsolete, and will need to be replaced by designs that offer concentric obstacles to intruders. Dormitories, classrooms and administrative buildings must be built with sturdier doors and walls such that it becomes harder for kidnappers to gain entrance to them even if they are already within the premises.
Schools will also have to develop new protocols and procedures to deal with the grim reality of kidnapping. When the school alarm goes off, what are students and staff supposed to do? Where do they congregate? How do they stay in touch with one another? Working with the police and other security agencies, a set of standard procedures should be worked out to govern attitudes and reactions to kidnappings aimed at ensuring that unnecessary risks are avoided.
It is also essential that governments and schools take a closer look at the ways in which technology can make it less easy for school kidnappings to be carried out. It is significant that in the NTIC case, CCTVs alerted the authorities to what was going on. Greater use must be made of surveillance cameras, motion sensors and alarm systems in protecting schools, and they must be deployed in such a way as to complement each other; the visual intelligence provided by CCTVs, for instance, would be inadequate without alarm systems that can provide auditory warnings to everyone.
Investigations should utilise phone-tracking to a greater degree in locating kidnappers and their collaborators. Since the mandatory registration of all operating phone numbers has become the norm, there should be more effort in ensuring that the phones used by kidnappers are properly monitored. Security agencies should be more circumspect when giving updates; unwittingly alerting kidnappers about the progress made could hamper rescue efforts. Hostage-negotiation techniques must become part of the standard training of investigators.
Kidnapping has become a tragic reality of modern-day Nigeria, but comprehensive attempts to make targets less vulnerable and enhance the possibility of rescue and apprehension of the perpetrators will help to make the phenomenon more manageable.
