The Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative (WRAPA) is deeply outraged by yet another school abduction of students and staff from St. Mary’s Girls’ Secondary School, Papiri in Agwara LGA of Niger State. In the early hours of Friday, 21st November 2025, armed men have once again invaded a school and whisked away innocent children whose only rightful desire is an education. Coming barely five days after the abduction of 25 schoolgirls in Kebbi State. This latest attack exposes a frightening truth: Nigeria continues to fail its daughters in the most unforgivable ways.
This tragedy is painfully familiar. When the Chibok schoolgirls were abducted in 2014, Nigerians rose in fury and heartbreak. The world joined us. The #BringBackOurGirls movement ignited local and global solidarity, mobilised advocacy, inspired reforms, and forced a national conversation on school safety. WRAPA was there marching, canvassing, advocating, supporting families, believing that the horrors of Chibok would mark the turning point our country desperately needed.
Yet, eleven years later, we have the gory tales of abductions that are still with us. Girls are still being taken from their dormitories, spaces meant to be sanctuaries of safety. Parents are once again wondering if they will ever see their daughters alive. Communities are plunged into fear and trauma. Nigeria is once again scrambling to respond to an emergency that should have been prevented in the first place. The promise of “Never Again” has heartbreakingly become “Yet Again”
WRAPA condemns this abduction unequivocally. It is unacceptable that a decade of advocacy, policy frameworks, national pledges, budgets, declarations, and safety guidelines has not translated into real protection for the most vulnerable children in our nation. Children and most often, girls remain predictable targets because the systems meant to protect them remain weak, reactive, and chronically under-implemented. The cycle is always the same: abduction, outrage, promises, silence, then another abduction.
This tragedy is not an isolated failure; it is a systemic one. The same vulnerabilities continue to plague our security and school safety architecture, including ignored intelligence warnings, poor safety compliance, inadequate surveillance, weak coordination, delayed responses, and a dangerous lack of accountability. Rural communities, where many girls already struggle against gender, economic, and cultural barriers, are left even more exposed to violence and exploitation. The advocacy for Girls’ education is defeated, and the gains made are lost.
WRAPA calls for urgent and decisive actions. The safe rescue of the abducted girls must be immediate, transparent, and coordinated. The Safe Schools Declaration must conclusively move from paper to practice. With Real-time enforcement independent monitoring and accountability must be the response. School safety audits must become mandatory, not optional. Community-led early-warning systems must be strengthened and linked directly to security rapid response structures. Loud tangible consequences for negligence at any level, whether administrative or security-related, must be called out. Survivors and affected families must also receive long-term psychosocial support that recognises the depth of their trauma.
We must also confront the reality that this is not only a security crisis it is a gendered one. Every school abduction disproportionately harms girls: derailing their education, threatening their safety, deepening trauma, and widening gender inequalities that already hold many back. When girls are taken, the future of entire communities is taken with them.
WRAPA stands with the families of the abducted girls, with the Papiri community, and with every Nigerian exhausted by this repetition of heartbreak. The pain being felt today should never have been allowed to return. We honour the courage of every parent, survivor, activist, and community that has carried this fight for over a decade.
Nigeria has had more than enough warnings. A decade of advocacy. A decade of lessons. A decade of global attention. There is no justification for why our daughters are still unsafe.
WRAPA will not normalise these tragedies. We refuse to allow “YET AGAIN” to remain the story of Nigerian schoolgirls. The government must act now. Decisively, Urgently, and with Integrity.
Signed:
Saudatu Mahdi MFR
Secretary General
Get the PDF version of the statement here: Niger School Abduction – WRAPA Press Release (21112025))
