When Fear Enters the Classroom

Tomorrow is Children’s Day in Nigeria. Across many schools and communities, there will be celebrations, performances, speeches, colourful clothing, and reminders that children represent the future of the nation. Yet for many children across the country, childhood is increasingly unfolding under the shadow of insecurity, displacement, fear, and uncertainty.

Since the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, and increasingly over the past decade, insecurity in Nigeria has profoundly affected children’s access to education. School attacks, kidnappings, violent conflict, displacement, and instability across different parts of the country have disrupted learning for millions of children. In some communities, parents are now forced to confront an unimaginable question each morning: is it truly safe to send a child to school?

Education is supposed to represent safety, possibility, dignity, and hope. Schools should be spaces where children learn, grow, socialise, and imagine futures beyond their present circumstances. Yet in many parts of Nigeria, schools themselves have become associated with fear. Some children now learn under the constant threat of violence, while others have stopped attending school altogether because of insecurity, poverty, displacement, or trauma.

What makes this issue particularly painful is that it is not simply an “education problem”. IT IS A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE.

Under international and regional human rights frameworks, children are entitled not only to survive, but to develop, learn, and live in safety. Article 28 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) recognises the child’s right to education, while Article 6 protects the child’s inherent right to life, survival, and development. Similarly, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) affirms both the right to education (Article 11) and the obligation to ensure children’s survival, protection, and development (Article 5). Nigeria’s Child Rights Act 2003 further reinforces these protections within domestic law, recognising every child’s right to survival, development, dignity, and equal educational opportunities.

Yet for many Nigerian children, these rights remain deeply fragile in practice.

The long-term consequences of insecurity extend far beyond interrupted schooling. When children grow up surrounded by violence and instability, it affects emotional wellbeing, mental health, social development, trust, and future opportunities. Entire childhoods become shaped by survival rather than freedom. And while public conversations around insecurity often focus on politics, elections, or national statistics, it is children who frequently carry some of the deepest and longest-lasting consequences.

On a day meant to celebrate children, perhaps we must also ask more difficult questions about the environments children are being asked to grow up in, and what it means to speak of national progress while so many children remain unsafe, displaced, traumatised, or unable to live and learn freely.

Children deserve more than survival.

They deserve safety, stability, dignity, protection, and the freedom to live and learn without fear.

References

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).
African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990).
Child Rights Act (2003), Nigeria.