Karim Lamido Local Government Area, Taraba State, Photographs obtained by Prime Brief Media correspondence show pupils and a teacher conducting lessons inside classrooms with torn-off roofing, exposed rafters, and ceiling boards hanging in shreds above their heads.
In a classroom at South Primary School in Mutum Daya, Karim Lamido Local Government Area of Taraba State, a teacher in white stands at a blackboard streaked with faded chalk, addressing a row of children seated cross-legged on bare sand.
Above them, the ceiling is gone in patches sheets of roofing insulation hang down in tatters, and daylight filters through gaps where covering should be. There are no desks. No chairs for the pupils. Just the floor, the wall, and whatever the weather allows.
This is not one classroom on one bad day. The images obtained by Prime Brief Media, taken across multiple rooms and angles at the school, show a consistent picture: a roof structure stripped bare in sections, exposed wooden trusses, crumbling plaster walls scrawled with graffiti, and pupils some in school uniforms, some not packed onto the ground because there is nowhere else to sit.
What the Images Show
- Exposed ceiling frames in at least two separate classrooms, with insulation material torn and sagging, leaving sections of the room open to the elements.
- No functional furniture. Pupils are seen seated directly on the floor throughout every classroom photographed, with a teacher standing over them at a worn chalkboard.
- A damaged exterior roofline. A wider shot of the school building shows the roofing sheets buckled and partially torn away across an entire wing, visible from the compound below where a handful of adults and a parked motorcycle stand.
- An administrative area in comparably poor condition, a single teacher seated at a bare wooden table with a stack of papers, in a room with peeling walls and no visible teaching aids or storage.
- A packed classroom of young pupils, seated shoulder to shoulder in rows on the ground, facing forward, with the same damaged ceiling visible overhead.
Taken together, the photographs depict a school that is, at minimum, structurally hazardous, and functioning anyway, because there is no alternative on offer for the children of the community.
Why This Matters
Karim Lamido LGA sits in a state where successive administrations have publicly emphasised agricultural mechanisation and rural development as flagship priorities.
What these images raise is a basic and uncomfortable question: what is happening to the basic education infrastructure meant to serve the same rural communities those programmes target?
Nigeria's Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) exists specifically to fund states for the rehabilitation and construction of primary school infrastructure, matched by state-level counterpart funding through each State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB).
A school in the visible condition of South Primary School, Mutum Daya, is the kind of case that intervention fund is designed to address raising the question of whether Karim Lamido LGA has been reached by it, and if not, why.
What We Don't Yet Know
Prime Brief Media has not independently verified how long the school has been in this condition, how many pupils are enrolled, or whether local or state education authorities have been formally notified of the roof damage.
We have not yet obtained comment from the Taraba State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), the Ministry of Education, or the Karim Lamido Local Government Education Authority.
This report will be updated if and when those bodies respond. In the meantime, the photographic record stands on its own: children in Karim Lamido are sitting under a roof that is, in places, no longer there.
Prime Brief Media is reaching out to relevant state and local government authorities for comment.
If you have information about conditions at South Primary School, Mutum Daya, or similar schools across Taraba's Middle Belt communities, contact our editorial desk.
By Simon Augustine
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