Days after gunmen stormed St. Mary’s Catholic School in the remote community of Papiri, hundreds of children are still missing and their parents say they are living through a nightmare of fear, grief and uncertainty.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, in which armed men on motorbikes raided the boarding school in the early hours of 21 November and abducted more than 300 students and 12 teachers. At least 50 students have since escaped and returned home, but around 265 people – most of them children – remain in captivity.
“What affects me the most is that every day I’m depressed, no food, every day crying and fasting. Bring back our children, please,” said Tabita, a Papiri resident and mother of one of the missing pupils, speaking at the school compound where families have been gathering to comfort one another.
Local officials and church leaders say the strain has already proved fatal for some. Two parents have died since the abductions, one after suffering a heart attack, according to the Bishop of Kontagora Diocese, Rev. Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, whose diocese runs the school.
For fathers like Emmanuel Ejeh, the trauma is raw. He says his wife collapsed when she learned their son, Mathew, had been taken. “It is painful. Mathew is a very kind boy who dreams of becoming a football player. He is after football day and night,” Ejeh said.
Another parent, Elizabeth Samuel, said her son was not among those who escaped. “I was told that he was helping the younger one to escape through the fence, and it was during that process that he was kidnapped. We are very sad, especially myself — he is my last son,” she said.
Nigerian authorities say helicopters, special police units, soldiers and local hunters have been deployed in a major search-and-rescue operation across forests and remote communities straddling Niger and neighbouring states. Military personnel have been seen mingling with anxious parents in Papiri, but families complain they receive little concrete information about progress.
The Papiri kidnapping came just four days after 25 students were seized from a girls’ secondary school in Maga, Kebbi State. All of those girls have now been rescued and reunited with their families, authorities say, but the Papiri attack is one of the largest school abductions in Nigeria’s history and has renewed fears about the safety of education in the country’s north.
President Bola Tinubu has since declared a nationwide security emergency and ordered mass recruitment into the police and army, promising there will be “no more hiding place for agents of evil” and vowing to secure the release of the Papiri students.
For now, however, Papiri’s parents can do little but wait, pray and cling to hope.
“We don’t sleep,” one father said quietly at the dusty school yard. “Until our children come back, there is no peace in this community.”
