Public primary schools in Owukpa, a district in Ogbadibo Local Government Area of Benue State, are facing a slow and painful extinction.
These institutions, once the proud nurseries of some of Nigeria’s finest professionals, have become graveyards of learning.
Where laughter and recitations once echoed, silence now reigns. Where dreams were nurtured, only ruins remain.
Years of government abandonment, rising insecurity, and policy reversals have reduced these schools to rubble.
Classrooms are deserted. Walls have crumbled. Roofs are gone. Blackboards gather dust, and the few remaining desks rot under open skies.
Pupils have vanished, teachers have disappeared—and reptiles have taken their place.
A recent tour of the schools revealed a grim reality.
LGEA Primary School Ikwo is now a relic of the past. Founded in the early 1970s, at the moment, it is nothing but a skeletal structure.
Not a single child attends. Snakes and lizards have claimed what was once a citadel of knowledge.
Ekere Owukpa tells the same story, a perhaps worse tale. A school that educated several generations now hosts only one teacher.
Pupils are few. Parents, disillusioned, have fled to private institutions. The collapse is total.
Across the district, once-thriving schools are now shadows of their former selves.
Achi Ugbugbu. Udaburu. Ejule. Okpudu. Atamaka. Each tells a story of decay.
Each paints a portrait of neglect. Some schools have no teachers. Others, no students. Most have neither.
Those who once taught with pride now speak in despair. Retired headteachers recall classrooms overflowing with children now echo with emptiness.
Insecurity compounds the problem. In some areas, teachers have fled for their lives. Schools stand deserted, not just by policy, but by fear.
What remains is a broken system, a network of schools abandoned by the state, forgotten by leadership, and deserted by hope.
Owukpa’s children are being left behind. Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they lack will. But because they have been failed.
If nothing changes, the question is no longer when public primary schools in Owukpa will die, but whether they’re already dead.
