Two ministers admitted funding delays and fragmented oversight have weakened school security nationwide, pledging closer coordination as the Senate widens its Safe Schools Initiative probe to five more agencies, demanding accountability for billions in intervention funds. Sunday Aborisade reports.
Twelve years after 276 schoolgirls were dragged from their dormitory in Chibok, and barely three weeks after the 39 abducted school children and six teachers in Oyo State have been successfully rescued after spending 56 days in captivity, the Federal Government moved penultimate Friday to answer a question that has trailed the Safe Schools Initiative since its birth: where did the money go, and why are Nigerian children still not safe in their classrooms?
The answer, delivered under the unblinking gaze of the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on the Safe Schools Initiative, came in two parts and from two ministers who, for the first time, appeared to be reading from the same script.
At separate investigative hearings chaired by Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Taiwo Oyedele, and his Education counterpart, Dr Tunji Alausa,
pledged that the turf-guarding that has long shadowed the initiative would give way to coordination, between their ministries, security agencies, state governments, development partners and the National Assembly.
It was, in effect, an admission that fragmentation had been part of the problem.
The headline announcement was institutional. Alausa disclosed that the Safe Schools Initiative, for years financially domiciled in the Ministry of Finance even though it was Education that dealt daily with schools, states and pupils, has now been formally transferred to the Federal Ministry of Education, which has stood up a full Safe Schools Department to run it.
In an interactive session with newsmen after the session, Alausa said: “When I became Minister of Education, I wrote to the then Minister of Finance requesting that the Safe Schools financing structure be moved to the Ministry of Education. Although there was support for the idea, administrative constraints delayed the process.
“Today, the Safe Schools Initiative is officially domiciled in the Federal Ministry of Education. We have also established a dedicated Safe Schools Department to coordinate policy, implementation and monitoring,” he explained.
His argument for the switch was structural rather than political: Education supervises school policy nationwide and works directly with states and institutions, making it the natural home for a programme that, in his telling, has outgrown its original narrow conception of guns at the school gate.
Alausa said, “Safe Schools is much broader than physical security. It includes perimeter fencing, solar-powered lighting, water and sanitation facilities, recruitment of school security personnel, deployment of technology and the establishment of effective monitoring systems.”
That breadth, he argued, is precisely why it needs “a central command-and-control structure.” One in which security agencies retain their constitutional mandates while education provides policy direction and ensures every school, not just the politically visible ones, benefits.
If Alausa’s session dealt with structure, Oyedele’s dealt with money. This is to address the uncomfortable arithmetic of an initiative that has drawn in federal appropriations, state contributions, private-sector pledges and foreign grants running into tens of millions of dollars, yet has failed to stop schools from being emptied at gunpoint.
Oyedele did not dispute that gaps exist. He identified, unprompted, the most persistent one: agencies tasked with implementation, the Nigeria Police Force, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, the Department of State Services and the military, have not always received funds when they needed them.
“We have identified several issues requiring attention, including the timeliness of funding for agencies responsible for implementing the initiative,” he told the committee, adding that his ministry would work with the National Assembly “in identifying any shortcomings and implementing the necessary reforms.”
Asked why Safe Schools funding was domiciled with Finance rather than Education, Oyedele offered a technocrat’s answer that doubled as a mild rebuttal of the turf-war framing altogether.
He explained that certain funds, service-wide votes, intervention funds, are statutorily administered by the Ministry of Finance because it functions as the government’s financial manager through the Office of the Accountant-General.
The real issue, he insisted, was never who held the purse.
According to him: “What matters most is ensuring that adequate resources are made available and released on time. Timely funding helps prevent attacks rather than forcing the government into damage-control after tragedies have occurred.”
It was a carefully calibrated line, conceding the criticism’s substance while resisting its institutional diagnosis.
Whether that distinction survives the committee’s eventual report may be the real test of the hearings.
Both ministers, prompted repeatedly by Kalu and his colleagues, accepted a principle that has become the moral spine of this investigation: that changes in leadership cannot be used as a shield.
“Government is a continuum,” Kalu reminded Alausa at the outset. “Whether these funds were released before the present minister assumed office or not, the government remains responsible for accounting for every kobo entrusted to it.”
Alausa did not resist the framing, even while noting that the disbursements under the fiercest scrutiny, some running back five to seven years, predated his tenure entirely.
“Although these transactions predated my appointment, the government is a continuum,” he said. “We have a responsibility to account to Nigerians for how public resources were managed.”
Oyedele went further, turning the principle into a personal governing philosophy.
He said, “Whether those issues occurred before my appointment or not is secondary. Once we accept public office, we also accept responsibility for the institution we lead. Where we discover that something was not done properly, our duty is to acknowledge it, correct it and ensure that future processes are strengthened.”
Both hearings, for all their candour before cameras, ended the same way: adjourned into executive session.
Kalu was unambiguous about why. “Banditry, terrorism and attacks on schools are matters of national security.
He said, “We will not discuss sensitive operational issues in public because we do not want to expose information that could be useful to criminals.”
It is a justification the committee has leaned on before, and one that leaves outside observers. Journalists, civil society, the parents of the next child who might be taken from a dormitory, dependent on the eventual report for the fuller picture of what was actually said behind those doors.
Kalu was equally firm that the exercise carries no vendetta. “This investigation is not a witch-hunt,” he told Oyedele’s delegation, invoking Sections 88 and 89 of the 1999 Constitution as the Senate’s legal foundation for the probe.
“It is a constitutional responsibility entrusted to the National Assembly. Our objective is to ensure financial accountability, value for money and the protection of Nigerian schoolchildren,” Kalu explained.
Friday’s hearings landed against the backdrop of a Senate decision, taken earlier in the week, to widen the probe considerably. Lawmakers voted to fold the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, the Universal Basic Education Commission, the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, and the National Social Investment Programme Agency into the investigation, and granted Kalu’s committee an additional three weeks to finish its work.
Kalu’s reasoning was that Safe Schools Initiative cannot be understood in isolation.
“Investigating the Safe Schools Initiative without reviewing these complementary bodies will result in fragmented legislative oversight,” he told the Senate, in a motion that passed on voice vote under Senate President Godswill Akpabio.
The expanded mandate means the committee will now trace everything from TETFund-financed campus security projects to NELFUND’s loan disbursement efficiency to NSIPA’s school feeding and emergency-support programmes, a sprawling audit of nearly every naira the Federal Government has funnelled toward keeping children in, and safe within, the classroom.
The scale of what is being investigated is already on the record. Of N15 billion released for the initiative in 2023, the Nigeria Police Force received the largest single allocation at N6.225 billion, followed by the NSCDC at N3.362 billion, Defence Headquarters at N2.250 billion, and the Ministry of Education at N519 million; the amount released to the DSS was never publicly disclosed.
Layered atop federal appropriations are $10 million from the Federal Government, a matching $10 million from Nigerian business leaders, $1 million from the African Development Bank, €2 million from Germany, $4 million from Norway via UNICEF, and further contributions from USAID, the Qatar Foundation and UN agencies, a decade-long accumulation of goodwill and grant money whose full trail the Senate is only now attempting to reconstruct.
For a programme born out of national trauma in 2014 and revived by fresh trauma in Kebbi State this year, penultimate Friday’s hearings offered something Nigerians have rarely been given: two cabinet ministers, on the record, accepting that the system built to protect their children has been slow, fragmented and imperfectly accounted for and pledging, in nearly identical language, to fix it.
Whether that pledge survives contact with the committee’s final report, due in three weeks, will determine if the interface marks a genuine turning point for the Safe Schools Initiative, or simply the latest in a long line of solemn promises made in the aftermath of an empty classroom.