Borno: children in the black hole of public protection

In Borno, school is not only a building. It is supposed to be the place where a child is temporarily protected from the brutality of the outside world. When an armed attack reaches that space, the damage is not limited to the day of the assault. It enters families, classrooms and futures.

School stops being a refuge

Reports of an attack on a school in Borno State must be handled with extreme care. The number of children affected, their status and the identity of the attackers require confirmation. But the political and social lesson is already stark: where public protection retreats, childhood becomes the first exposed body.

A school in a conflict zone is expected to do too much. It teaches, shelters, reassures and keeps families tied to an idea of normal life. When insecurity strikes there, it does not only interrupt lessons. It teaches fear. It tells parents that the road to class can become a corridor of danger.

Fear deschools before closure

The slow effect of such attacks is often less visible than the immediate shock. Families stop sending children to school. Teachers leave. Girls are kept at home first. Boys are pushed toward work, displacement or recruitment risks. The institution may remain officially open while its social function is already broken.

This is how insecurity destroys a society without always destroying its buildings. It empties them. It transforms ordinary gestures into calculations of risk: leaving home, crossing a road, entering a classroom.

The political point

The state is not judged only by its army operations. It is judged by its ability to make a child’s walk to school ordinary again. That is the true measure of protection. A security discourse that counts operations but cannot restore school as a safe space remains incomplete.

In Borno, children do not merely suffer from a war around them. They reveal the depth of public abandonment produced when violence becomes permanent and protection becomes exceptional.