Visually Impaired Students Of Farmcraft School Lagos Protest Over Closure -

 Students Protest 1-Year Closure of FARMCRAFT School for the Blind in Lagos

On Monday, blind Lagosians were seen protesting the prolonged shutdown of Nigeria FARMCRAFT Center for the Blind at Airport Road, Ikeja. They were demanding that the school be reopened and requesting President Bola Tinubu’s intervention.

In a video posted at 1 pm on X, several blind protesters can be seen holding banners with quotes demanding the reopening of the school. The protesters began chanting, “We no go gree!”

“We want the president of Nigeria to meet our welfare. We want them to open our school. The school has been closed since last year, come and open the school. That is the only federal school in Nigeria for the blind,” one of the protesters cried.

Another protester said, “They didn’t see any other school to lock, it’s this one.”

Some protesters also held a banner for the Inner Eye Foundation/The Blind Community and appealed to the office of the President, Senate President and Speaker of the House of Representatives to reopen FARMCRAFT Center for the Blind and look into the welfare of People With Disabilities (PWDs).

Nigeria Farmcraft Center for the Blind (NFCB) was established in 1957 by humanitarians Sir John and Lady Wilson. The school became a federal institution after Nigeria’s independence.

NFCB was shut down for a period of two years between 2017 and 2019. In a report published in 2019, Mohammed Shuaibu Afegbua, the principal of NFCB, told ICIR that NFCB had not admitted or trained any student since 2016.

Due to the fact that NFCB is a federal institution and operates on a quota basis, it is not allowed to admit up to 20 students from a single state for one academic year. Only three students are allowed per state. This constraint ignores a lot of blind people who do not have access to special education.

At the time, Afegbua mentioned that many states had candidates waiting from six years back.

Now, the blind community in Lagos is demanding that NFCB be reopened after another closure.

When FIJ contacted the Ministry of Education on Monday via phone call, the responder said they did not have a response at the time. They asked FIJ to send a letter to the ministry via email.