Another child, another boarding school, another set of questions
My seven-year-old nephew is the kind of child who fills a room: playful, energetic and impossible to ignore. A few days ago, I sat in the same space as him while we spoke in hushed, grief-heavy tones about a girl he knows. A girl he calls his “big sister,” even though she is not related […]
My seven-year-old nephew is the kind of child who fills a room: playful, energetic and impossible to ignore. A few days ago, I sat in the same space as him while we spoke in hushed, grief-heavy tones about a girl he knows. A girl he calls his “big sister,” even though she is not related to him by blood. A girl who was 13 years old and is now gone.
He said nothing. He was quiet. He did not ask questions. He simply sat there, still in the way that children are only still when they have absorbed something they cannot yet name. He understood, even without the words, that someone he loved would not be coming back. And if a seven-year-old could be broken into silence by that truth, the rest of us have no excuse for ours.
I never met Maimuna. I never met her parents. It is my sister-in-law who knew this family, who was close to them, and who carried the weight of their grief into my home that day. I write this not as someone personally acquainted with the deceased, but as someone who sat close enough to that grief to feel its edges, and who watched a seven-year-old boy go completely lost in the presence of something he could not yet understand but somehow already knew.
Maimuna Sani Salisu, known to those who loved her as Nihal, was a JSS 2 student at St. Louis Secondary School, Kano. On the evening of June 13, 2026, her parents received a phone call from the school informing them that she had fallen ill and was being taken to the International Clinic. Her maternal aunt rushed to the hospital only to be told that Maimuna was already dead. The family later learned, according to hospital officials, that she had already been pronounced dead before she was even brought to the facility.
What followed is what always follows. Conflicting stories. An institutional explanation, an asthma attack, the school said. And then, from other accounts, a different picture entirely: that Maimuna had been flogged by senior students, forced to kneel for an extended period under the sun without water, reportedly as punishment for arriving late to a prayer session. Her mother, Nusaiba, said she became increasingly suspicious after school officials urged her to remain calm and disregard rumours circulating about the incident, and after family members reported being repeatedly asked whether Maimuna had a history of asthma, a claim her mother firmly denied. That any of this happened to a thirteen-year-old girl, in a school where she was supposed to be safe, is not yet proven in a court of law. The Kano State Police Command has constituted a Special Investigation Panel, teachers, senior students, and witnesses have already been invited for questioning, and we are told the investigation will be thorough, transparent, and diligent. We take them at their word.
But here is what we already know, and what we do not need a court to confirm: this is not the first time a Nigerian boarding school has stood over the body of a child and offered a convenient story in place of the truth.
In November 2021, twelve-year-old Sylvester Oromoni, a JSS 2 student at Dowen College in Lagos, died after sustaining injuries his school attributed to a football game. His father told a different story. His son, before he died, told his family he had been beaten by senior students, allegedly for refusing to join a cult group. A video emerged of the boy in visible, devastating pain. The school’s initial explanation collapsed under scrutiny. There was national outrage. There were investigations. And yet, here we are in 2026, with another junior secondary school student, another boarding school, another set of conflicting accounts, another grieving family waiting for answers.
The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a culture. When something goes wrong inside a Nigerian boarding school, the first instinct of management is rarely accountability. It is containment. The school’s reputation must be protected. The incident must be managed. Parents must be kept calm. The story must be controlled. Bullies are not reported to the families of those they have hurt. Victims are not told that the person who harmed them has faced consequences. Incidents are handled “internally,” which is a polite way of saying they are quietly buried. And for the most part, this works. Most of the time, the story does not get out. The child heals, or the child learns to endure, or the child carries the wound quietly into adulthood. The school’s name remains intact.
But sometimes, it does not work. Sometimes a child does not heal. Sometimes the phone rings at 7:20 in the evening, and a mother is told her daughter is ill, and by the time her elder child reaches the hospital, the doctors are already speaking in the past tense, and the child was already gone before the call was even made.
What should happen in boarding schools when a child is harmed by another student is not complicated. There should be a documented incident report, filed immediately. Parents of both the victim and the perpetrator must be contacted, not to shame anyone, but because children are not the property of their schools. There should be consequences that are recorded and transparent, not whispered punishments that leave no trail. There should be a welfare structure with genuine independence, not a housemaster who reports to the same principal whose first concern is optics. And there should be a culture, instilled from the top, that a child’s safety is non-negotiable, and that silence in the face of harm is not peace, it is complicity.
Kano State government has already stated that corporal punishment in schools is prohibited. Therefore, the question is no longer whether the policy exists. The question is why corporal punishment is still happening? What oversight mechanisms currently govern boarding schools beyond that prohibition? Who, beyond the school management, is responsible for student welfare on a daily basis? Do the ministries of education at state level conduct welfare audits, or only academic inspections? Are there functional channels through which students can report bullying without fear of reprisal?
The St. Louis Old Girls Association (SLOGA) has already demanded the public release of a timeline of events, the identities of staff involved, and official medical reports. These are not extraordinary demands. They are the minimum that accountability requires. These are not rhetorical questions. They are administrative ones, and they deserve administrative answers.
Justice for Maimuna Sani Salisu means, first and most urgently, that those responsible for her death, if the evidence points to human culpability, face the full weight of the law. The Special Investigation Panel must do its work without interference, and the public must hold it accountable if it does not.
But justice, in its larger sense, is more than a verdict. It is the decision we make, as a society, about what we will no longer tolerate. It means ensuring that no parent in this country again receives a phone call telling them their child is ill, only to find out later, that she was already gone when the call was made.
Perhaps someday, this seven-year-old boy will understand everything that was said in that room. When he does, let him also understand that the adults around him did not stay silent. That they asked the questions. That they demanded the answers. That they refused to let Nihal’s name become just another story we tell, briefly, before we move on.
We owe Nihal that much. We owe all of them that much.