Source: www.persecution.org
Date: October 9, 2022
Nigeria (International Christian Concern) – Nigerian authorities are failing to protect the right to education of displaced persons in the country. “Over 500 students are out of school in Kwall County,” the National President of Irigwe Students testified recently. The Irigwe is a heavily persecuted people group in Nigeria’s Plateau State, where Kwall is located. The Irigwe Students official said that Fulani militants have been displacing students from their homes and preventing them from going to school for the past seven years.
The media and governments tend to focus most of their attention on well-organized terrorist organizations like Boko Haran and Islamic State, but think tanks and human rights watchdogs, including ICC, have warned for years that Fulani militancy—decentralized and harder to pin down than terrorist groups—actually present a far bigger threat to the civilian population and a particularly dangerous threat to Christian communities.
Years of sectarian violence in Nigeria have put tens of thousands of Christian families into cycles of poverty that do not allow the luxury of formal education. Whether school uniforms or books or transport or school fees themselves, education costs something. Spending money on optional expenses like schooling just is not an option for some families, many of whom were kicked off their land or suffered the loss of valuable crops at the hands of roaming marauders.
But a lack of resources is not the only problem facing Nigerian Christians trying to get an education. Security is also a problem, most famously in 2014 when Boko Haram kidnapped 276 mostly Christian girls from a school in Chibok. Other criminal groups have followed suit, targeting schools in particular since desperate parents are especially willing to pay ransoms.
Roughly a thousand schoolchildren were kidnapped in the first half of 2021 alone from a range of schools, including government, Muslim, and Christian institutions. When attackers kidnapped over 120 students from Bethlehem Baptist school in Kaduna, authorities shut down thirteen mostly Christian schools in response, citing fears that they could have been targeted next.
In the weeks following that kidnapping, parents of the children gathered funds to pay the roughly $1,200 USD ransoms demanded by the kidnappers. Sums like these can be devastating to families, sending them into a financial tailspin and trapping them in a cycle of poverty that can take years to get out of.
ICC’s work in Christian communities in Nigeria often focuses on this problem of cyclical poverty. Working with community leaders, ICC helps to establish sustainable sources of income in impacted communities. Often this takes the form of large communal farms, as discussed elsewhere in this issue, but it can also mean helping an individual set up a small shop or similar business. In this way, these persecuted individuals can provide for themselves and their families even after the original funding has run out.
HOW TO PRAY: Pray for access to education for school-age children all around Nigeria. Pray for the safety of those in schools as they are targets for kidnappings by radical terrorist groups. Pray for the government to take action to protect the children.