Nigeria school exam day turns into disaster

JOS (AFP) — After her early morning class ended, 16-year-old Nigerian student Chidera Denis was waiting to join classmates for end-of-term exams. Teachers had scheduled a raft of last-minute revisions.

Moments later, she was trapped under rubble as her school building suddenly collapsed, with pupils barely protected by the desks where they were sitting.

Denis was one of the lucky ones. The collapse of the Saint Academy school in Jos North district in Plateau State killed 22 students on Friday, with dozens more in hospital for treatment, including Denis’s friend.

“She said she was going to die... that if they rescued me, I should tell her mother,” Denis told Agence France-Presse (AFP) a day after the disaster.

“I said she should stop saying that, that we’ll be alive, that God is our strength.”

Her mother Amaka Denis tended to her on a hospital bed on Saturday morning. She had yet to see her son, who also attended the school.

“I am yet to see her brother,” she told AFP. “I am still searching. I am in pain.”

A spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency, Yohanna Audu, told AFP on Saturday that rescue efforts had ended after the disaster, the latest fatal building collapse in Nigeria.

Audu said there were 22 fatalities, “all of whom are students.”

The Red Cross posted on X on Saturday that a teacher and a student were still missing.

“I was beside someone who died,” 14-year-old Chidinma Emmanuel told AFP. “He fell down on my arm and it broke. The falling debris landed on his head and killed him.”

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu described the incident as a “huge loss to the nation.”