Gordon Brown has urged governments across the world to urgently step up their support for Nigeria after hundreds of children were abducted by gunmen from their schools.
The former UK prime minister called on the international community to “super-charge” efforts by President Bola Tinubu to install high-tech tracking systems to find the missing pupils.
He also wants world leaders to support the installation of school-side, secure perimeter fencing, telecommunications, security cameras and alarm systems needed to better defend children from future abduction threats.
The appeal from Mr Brown, who is the United Nations’ education envoy, comes amid a wave of kidnaps this month, which has seen hundreds of children snatched from their schools by gunmen holding them to ransom.
Some 303 pupils were taken from St Mary’s School in Papiri last week, while more than 20 schoolgirls were kidnapped from a boarding school in neighbouring Kebbi state.
The former Labour leader said: “These children need to be returned to their families unharmed as quickly as possible, and we across the international community must do our utmost to back the efforts by President Tinubu to ensure that the children are returned.
“But it’s also incumbent on us to ensure that Nigerian schools are safe spaces for learning, not spaces where children can be plucked from their classroom for criminal profit by those who would take, terrorise and hold them to ransom.
“No child should be in fear of going to school, and no parent – worried as their children leave for school that they may never see them again – should need to consider keeping their daughter or son at home because the risk of kidnapping and violence is too high.
“And the international community does not need to stand by while we have at our disposal the means of making schools places of greater safety and can offer the Nigerian government immediately available surveillance support to locate the pupils.
“As UN Envoy for Global Education, I will be in contact with governments asking them to offer help to find the whereabouts of the abducted pupils with a view to their early release.
“This is our first and overriding priority – to get the children safely back to their families.
“But because these abductions may continue to recur, we must work to deter potential kidnappers by reintroducing at every level – federal, state, and local – safe schools measures, and reinvigorating and supercharging them from today, with technical support and international and nationally available funding, to ensure Nigerian schools have significant security and safety upgrades.”
The former prime minister said he would “do everything” he could to raise international funds to help deliver safe schools in Nigeria.
He said: “My message to children is: if you come to school, we will make it safer to do so.
“And my promise, Nigeria, is to amplify what I said some years ago as UN envoy: You have suffered too much from the interruption of schooling because of terrorism and threats; it is now for us, the whole international community, to show solidarity and support your efforts to build back better, to make schools safe and secure, making a reality of the promise of high-quality education for every child.”
