Molly Kilete
Life is hardly ever the same for any community attacked by the Boko Haram insurgents. This is a grim fact of life for the inhabitants of North-East Nigeria who have been bearing the brunt of the insurgency challenge in the country. The situation is especially critical for Madagali LGA of Adamawa, which was the epicentre of Boko Haram attacks between 2014 and 2016.
Six years after Boko Haram insurgents’ gruesome visitation on Government Secondary School in Madagali, Adamawa State, the institution is yet to recover from the havoc. This is the sum of the grim findings during a recent visit to the institution by Saturday Sun. After a three-year restoration effort, the situation is best summed up as pathetic, especially against the backdrop of its heyday before the raids.
Prior to the attack, GSS Madagali was a boarding school that attracted students from across Adamawa State and nearby Yobe and Taraba states. As a government-owned institution, it was adequately funded to meet the educational needs of the people. When Madagali was persistently targeted and captured by Boko Haram insurgents in their marauding days in 2014, they wreaked havoc on the school in a show of their repugnancy towards Western education. In the aftermath of the brutal scorched-earth attack, GSS Madagali was completely gutted––all buildings destroyed, roofs blown off, educational equipment and materials looted and burnt. The disaster brought a temporary halt to education in the community.
Although, normalcy has returned to the town in the past months, the school is now a shadow of itself and the future of the children in that remote corner of Nigeria remains uncertain as virtually all the teachers who once taught there have relocated to safer places for fear of being killed by the terrorists. Some of the students have also left town with their parents to somewhere safer where they could continue their education.
With improved security, following the deployment of a military battalion in the state to protect the community, Madagali has been enjoying a spell of peace. The community has made an effort to rebuild its life, including restarting the school.
Presently, GSS Madagali depends on just 14 volunteers to teach over one thousand registered students across all subjects, without a functional library, laboratory and other educational facilities.
The reporter inventoried the tolls of insurgent attacks on the once-flourishing educational institution, by going round the school complex and into classes, and interacting with the principal, teachers and students.
Abandoned by government
According to Mr David Bulus, the principal of the school and an indigene of the town, several appeals had been made to the government to come to the aid of the school and these have been met with promises even as he sympathized with the state government, which, in his view, is burdened with various challenges bedeviling the state.
“I have been complaining to the government. The governor visited here sometime last year in September and inspected the facilities and promised that he was going to do something; up till now, we have not seen anything on the ground. Even officials of PTDF visited the school in January and promised to do something,” he said.
Bulus who began his teaching career in 1983 as a Grade II teacher and rose to become a vice principal and then principal (now in his 11th year) bared his mind to the reporter. He was full of lamentations about his predicament at running the day-to-day activities of the school.
The boarding institution, he disclosed, has been forced to become a day secondary school as there are no suitable accommodations. Due to shortages of teachers, the principal depends on the services of volunteer teachers, a crop of young men and women who are paid N3, 000, stipend monthly. Elderly community members are also hired and paid N3, 000 to cook for the students, who also take part in the cooking so as not to overwork their cooks.
“Because of the lack of adequate staff to man the kitchen, the students take turns according to class to assist the cooks who are mostly elderly people with the cooking, washing and cleaning the kitchen on a daily basis,” Bulus explained.
The principal also depends on the generosity and goodwill of the Parents/Teachers Association (PTA) to get wages paid to his volunteer workers.
Having worked in various places in Taraba and Borno states, GSS Madagali, where Bulus took charge of in October 2016, is yet his most challenging assignment. “I have been here since; this is my home town, there is no way I can run away from here,” he said. The situation he met on ground was pitiable, devastating and the problem gargantuan. “The situation was very, very bad and nothing has changed since I took over as you can see,” he said.
More students, more problems
The school, first destroyed early in 2014, was burnt down in subsequent attacks when insurgents sacked the town. The scars are still there.
“As you can see, the whole school has been vandalized, all the structures have been burnt down, even the laboratory equipment, none is in existence, it was burnt down,” the principal pointed at the ruins.
He added: “This used to be a boarding school, but the hostels have been burnt down. For this reason, we cannot accommodate the students. Presently, they stay up till 5 or 6 pm daily before going home to sleep in their various houses. We are still feeding them up till now and that is why the students are still with us.”
On its road to recovery, the school re-started with 70 students. “But now the number has increased and we have up to 650 students in the senior section and 450 in the junior section,” Bulus disclosed.
However, such an encouraging statistics has an inherent problem: the upsurge in student population is inversely proportional to the number of teaching staff.
“I have only 14 volunteers teaching different subjects,” he said with a shrug.
He has been trying to manage the situation as best as he could. “We have been using the services of voluntary teachers,” Bulus reiterated. “We pay them between N3,000 and N4,000, depending on what we are able to source from the PTA or other dues.” He described the situation as alarming and difficult to manage even while he prayed that the government employs more teachers.
As much as he tries hard to see the bright side of the situation, Bulus cannot help but relapsed into occasional pessimism: “I cannot tell you what the future of these children would be like looking at the situation on the ground,” he said.
He divulges what gives him sleepless nights: “I need immediately an upward of 20 teachers because of the daily increase in the number of students.
This year now we have 350, SS 1 students; that is equivalent to seven classes if we are to divide and place them in a class of 50. In SS 2, we have about four classes, SS 3, two classes. So now in two years’ time, I am sure the number will still increase again. So, we need more teachers, especially in the sciences where we are lacking.”
The reporter subsequently went round the classes and observed the students studying under a less-than-ideal condition. A few of them who have been at the school before the Boko Haram attacks pleaded with the government to help rebuild the institution and return it to its glory years when it used to be a boarding school. The students expressed their worries at their situation, which has been dragging on for so long they now feared the government might have forgotten about them. “Please, we want you to take our case to the government,” one of the students appealed to the reporter.