IN the dead of night on November 17, 2025, armed bandits stormed the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, a quiet farming community in Danko/Wasagu Local Government Area of Kebbi State.
They shot dead the vice principal, wounded another staff member, and dragged 25 Muslim schoolgirls into the surrounding forest on motorcycles.
Two of the girls later escaped and staggered home; the rest remain missing as military and vigilante teams comb the bush for a third day. For the people of Maga, this is not just another headline; it is the moment their worst fears finally arrived at their doorstep.
Danko/Wasagu has never been peaceful, its dense forests and porous borders serving as highways for bandits spilling over from Zamfara and Niger States.
Since 2010, the area has suffered at least a dozen major abduction raids, snatching hundreds of villagers—farmers from their fields, children from village paths, and even district heads from their homes—for ransoms that drain already impoverished communities.
Early incidents in the 2010s started as cattle rustling tied to herder-farmer clashes, but by 2015, they evolved into brazen kidnappings, with groups like Dogo Gide’s demanding thousands of dollars per victim.
In May 2025, bandits swept through Danmuntari and nearby villages, abducting 127 people and killing six in one of the LGA’s deadliest assaults.
The terror has only accelerated in recent months. In early October 2024, gunmen seized the District Head of Kanya and nine others, later slaughtering the leader when demands weren’t met.
That same month, Bena village endured back-to-back raids, with 20 residents taken and two killed in dawn ambushes.
By early November 2025, just days before the Maga attack, bandits hit multiple villages again, abducting at least 10 women and children amid a wave that also claimed the Kebbi State Assembly’s Deputy Speaker.
These strikes, often peaking in the dry season for easier motorcycle escapes, have displaced thousands and turned harvests into hiding seasons.
The Maga school attack feels different only because it targeted children in uniform and killed a teacher in front of his family, echoing the 2021 Birnin Yauri kidnapping in neighbouring Yauri LGA where over 100 students were taken.
In every other way, it is the same story: forests that belong to no one and everyone, security posts mysteriously empty minutes before the bandits arrive, and a government that promises action after every outrage yet leaves the same vulnerable fence, the same four policemen, the same dirt roads leading straight into the trees.
Tonight, mothers in Maga sit outside empty dormitories, waiting for footsteps that may never come.
In the villages deeper in Danko/Wasagu, others listen to the wind in the sorghum and wonder whose turn is next.
After fifteen years and countless lives, the forest still wins, and the girls of Maga have become its latest silent witnesses.