The Nigerian Senate has launched an investigation into the Safe School Initiative (SSI), opening what lawmakers describe as a long-overdue probe into the billions of naira and millions of dollars committed to securing schools over the past decades.
The upper chamber said the inquiry had become necessary following persistent attacks, mass abductions, and the alarming failure of the initiative to fulfil its core mandate of protecting Nigerian schoolchildren.
Presiding the inaugural sitting of the 18-member ad hoc committee, its chairman and former Abia State governor, Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, vowed that the National Assembly would leave no detail unexamined.
Kalu said the investigation would expose gaps in funding, implementation, security deployment, and inter-agency coordination that had left schools vulnerable, despite huge investments.
Kalu, who described the growing assault on educational institutions as “unacceptable for a nation committed to educational development and child safety,”, cited disturbing statistics.
He said more than 1,680 schoolchildren had been kidnapped and 180 schools attacked since 2014.
Sunday Aborisade and Linus Aleke
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