By Kelechi Ogunleye
Abuja, Dec.12, 2025 (NAN) – A critical flaw in Nigeria’s national strategy to protect its educational institutions from attacks and kidnappings has been laid bare by the agency tasked with its coordination. The National Safe School Response Coordination Centre (NSSRCC) has identified the widespread reluctance of state governments to establish their own security command centres as a primary cause of weak surveillance and delayed emergency responses, leaving schools and students vulnerable.
In an exclusive interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the NSSRCC Commander, Emmanuel Ocheja, framed this inaction as a systemic failure that cripples the initiative’s potential. “Since the establishment of the NSSRCC, the Federal Government has consistently appealed to state governments to key into the safe school initiative by establishing control centres at the state level,” Ocheja stated. He emphasized that while a handful of states have complied, the majority have not, creating a patchwork of protection that bandits and kidnappers can exploit.
The operational logic behind these state centres is one of integrated, real-time intelligence. Ocheja explained that with functional command hubs in each state, the national headquarters in Abuja could seamlessly interface with local operatives. This creates a layered monitoring system. “It would be easier for us to interface with state operatives and monitor from the NSSRCC headquarters here in Abuja,” he said. More importantly, it enables proactive threat detection. “With such control centres in the state, it would be easy to monitor schools and detect any likely attacks by bandits or kidnappers some kilometres away for urgent response. The moment they are sighted, all signals will be sent to the appropriate security agencies for effective and prompt response.”
This gap is particularly alarming given the NSSRCC’s design as a multi-agency hub. Ocheja clarified that the centre, situated within the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) headquarters, is not a siloed operation. “We have representatives of the Police, Military, and other agencies here; they come on a daily basis to monitor activities out there,” he disclosed. The proposed state centres are intended to be local extensions of this collaborative model, operating “under the purview of the state governments” to provide granular, localized intelligence that a single national centre cannot.
The consequences of this coordination gap are not theoretical. In a separate interaction, the NSCDC Commandant-General, Ahmed Audi, provided sobering context. While acknowledging the corps’s efforts—which have reportedly thwarted over 48 attempted school attacks and kidnappings nationwide—he conceded to a worrying “resurgence of these attacks.” Audi’s admission that officials are “interrogating and investigating to find out what went wrong” points directly to the vulnerabilities created by incomplete system implementation. The physical deployment of personnel, while crucial, is insufficient without the command, control, and communication (C3) infrastructure that state centres would provide.
This report underscores a fundamental challenge in Nigerian federal security policy: the disconnect between national strategy and sub-national execution. The NSSRCC’s mandate and structure represent a recognized best practice in crisis response—central coordination with decentralized, empowered nodes for rapid action. However, without buy-in and investment from state governments, the national centre risks becoming an isolated nerve centre with limited connections to the limbs it needs to control. The safety of students and the integrity of the educational environment now hinge on bridging this federal-state governance gap, transforming a fragmented response into a unified, resilient shield.
(NAN)(www.nannews.ng)
KAYC/OJI/YMU
Edited by Maureen Ojinaka and Yakubu Uba
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