By Chief Malcolm Emokiniovovo Omirhobo.
The recent call by Ahmad Gumi urging the United States to build schools for herdsmen instead of deploying a $2 million bomb may sound humane on the surface. In reality, it is a convenient afterthought that collapses under the weight of facts, history, and Nigeria’s own policy failures.
No ethnic group in Nigeria has ever been legally excluded from education. Access has never been the real issue. Willingness, enforcement, accountability, and governance are. To suggest that herdsmen took up arms because schools were unavailable is to deliberately misstate the problem.
For decades, Nigeria has operated a Nomadic Education Programme, specifically designed to educate pastoral communities through mobile schools, flexible academic calendars, and tailored curricula. Over the years, billions of naira have been appropriated for this programme. Yet, there are no convincing outcomes, no transparent audits, and no accountability. A failed programme cannot be recycled endlessly as an excuse for insecurity.
Under the administration of Goodluck Jonathan, several Almajiri and nomadic schools were constructed across Northern Nigeria. Today, many of these schools are abandoned, vandalised, repurposed, or left unused. This exposes an uncomfortable truth: buildings do not educate people governance does. Infrastructure without policy discipline and oversight is meaningless.
Even more troubling is the silence surrounding Nigeria’s quota system and federal character principle, which already structurally favour Fulani and broader Northern interests in admissions to federal schools, recruitment into the armed forces and security agencies, and appointments into federal institutions. If educational disadvantage were truly the problem, these policies should have corrected it decades ago. Instead, they have often rewarded non-performance and entrenched entitlement without responsibility.
The framing of the debate as a choice between bombs or schools is false and intellectually dishonest.
Terrorism is not cured by classrooms, and education does not excuse violence. Criminality thrives where perpetrators enjoy impunity, sponsors are protected, law enforcement is weak, and the state refuses to investigate and prosecute offenders.
The real questions Nigeria must confront are simple but uncomfortable: Who sabotaged nomadic education? Who allowed schools to decay? Who armed, funded, and shielded violent actors? And who benefits from sustained instability?
Until these questions are answered through investigation, prosecution, and institutional reform, calls for schools after airstrikes are not acts of compassion. They are acts of deflection.
Education matters.
Security matters.
But accountability matters most.
