The National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre (NSSRCC) is grappling with a severe funding shortfall that now threatens the continuity of its school registration campaign across Nigeria.
According to the head of the centre, Assistant Commandant Rabiu Muhammad, the NSSRCC has yet to receive any financial allocation for both the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, despite an expanding mandate and rising operational demands.
Speaking during a recent conversation, Muhammad stressed that the absence of government funding has placed enormous strain on the centre’s ability to carry out school outreach and logistics-related activities critical to its mission.
“We have no budget allocation for 2024 and 2025. Finance is key. We need money to be able to access schools in terms of logistics,” he said, highlighting how the funding gap is directly affecting their operations.
The situation has forced state coordinators and local government desk officers to dip into their own pockets to sustain the momentum of the ongoing awareness and sensitisation campaigns around school registration. Muhammad expressed concern about the sustainability of this informal workaround, noting that it was unrealistic to expect staff to cover these expenses from their personal salaries.
“You can’t expect our state coordinators and desk officers at local governments to be using their salaries to move around, creating awareness or sensitisation for schools’ registration,” he stated.
Despite these constraints, skeletal activities are continuing in some parts of the country, albeit at a reduced scale and entirely dependent on locally availableresources.
“Be that as it may, we are having skeletal exercises across jurisdictions subject to available resources,” Muhammad noted.
He praised the Commandant-General of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Professor Ahmed Audi, for offering support within the limits of what is currently possible.
“Notwithstanding the financial challenges, the Commandant General of NSCDC, Prof Ahmed Audi, is doing his possible best to see that the NSSRCC does the needful in terms of school registration across jurisdictions in the country,” Muhammad said.
Beyond the financial burden, Muhammad also pointed to widespread public misunderstanding of the registration campaign as a major challenge. According to him, many school proprietors and stakeholders erroneously believe the registration drive is linked to taxation or revenue generation.
“Many think that the school registration exercise is for taxation purposes or a data source for revenue generation,” he explained.
Despite these setbacks, some progress has been made. Since taking over leadership of the centre, Muhammad revealed that the number of schools registered under the initiative has grown from 8,000 to over 11,000. However, he admitted that the actual number of schools currently undergoing registration remains uncertain due to the financial limitations that have slowed data collection efforts.
The NSSRCC was established as a response mechanism to strengthen security and coordination in schools following increasing incidents of attacks and abductions. The ongoing registration exercise is part of a broader strategy to map, assess, and secure educational institutions across the country. But with no immediate resolution in sight to the funding crisis, the future of the initiative remains uncertain.
