*Photo: Halima Imam*
I cry whenever I read about the children. I have tried not to. I have tried to approach this the way a writer is supposed to — with some professional remove, some careful distance — but the pain will not stay bottled up. It spills over every single time. Because a school should be a learning place. It should be the one location in this country where no child has to be afraid, where the worst thing that happens is a failed test or a scolding from a strict teacher. It should not be a target location. And yet, here we are.
On the morning of May 15, 2026, gunmen launched a series of coordinated attacks on multiple schools in the Ahoro-Esinele and Yawota communities of Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State. The schools they chose were not symbols of power or wealth. They were L.A. Primary School, Esinele; Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota; and Community Grammar School, Ahoro-Esinele — government schools, community schools, the kind of schools where children of ordinary Nigerians learn to read and multiply fractions. Witnesses said the assailants arrived on motorcycles and fled into nearby forests after taking the victims.
In total, 46 people were abducted, including seven teachers and 39 students. The Christian Association of Nigeria in Oyo State confirmed the figure, noting that the victims included children as young as two years old. Read that again. Two years old. Somebody’s baby, dragged into a forest.
Michael Oyedokun was born on September 26, 1968. He was a mathematics teacher at Community Grammar School, Ahoro-Esinele. He taught numbers to children. He showed up to work every day in a community that needed him. He was the kind of teacher that holds a nation together from the bottom — quietly, without ceremony, without the big salaries or the government convoys.
On Sunday, May 17, 2026, bandits released a video on Telegram showing Oyedokun tied and forced to speak before being gruesomely killed. The terrorists responsible, identified locally as members of the MetroBandits, beheaded him. The video circulated widely on social media, intensifying calls for urgent action to secure the release of the remaining victims.
On Monday, May 18, Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde confirmed the killing, saying: “What we know right now is that seven teachers in all were abducted. And, unfortunately, we got a video this morning that one of the teachers — the mathematics teacher — was killed by the terrorists.”
A mathematics teacher. Not a politician. Not a soldier. A man who taught algebra to teenagers in a dusty classroom in Oriire. They killed him, and they filmed it, and they sent it out to the world as a message. And the message was received — not just in Oyo State, but across every community in this country where a teacher still dares to walk into a public school.
His family later asked Nigerians to stop circulating the graphic video of his death, saying the repeated reposting was traumatising his children, who were currently sitting their exams, as well as elderly relatives and other family members. His children. Sitting exams. While their father’s murder played on loop across the country’s social media timelines.
The pain did not stay in Oyo. It could not. Teachers in Osun State, led by the Osun NUT chairman, Babatunde Babalola, marched from the Ataoja School of Science in Osogbo through major streets, terminating their protest at the Osun Government Secretariat in Abere.
They carried placards that said things that should never have to be said in a civilised country. “Stop killing custodians of knowledge.” “From Chibok to Oriire, our children are still crying.” “Set our teachers, pupils and students free from captivity.”
Hundreds of youths and civil society advocates also staged a peaceful protest in Osogbo, marching through major roads, chanting solidarity songs and calling on security agencies and government authorities to intensify efforts to rescue the pupils and their teachers. They carried placards and repeatedly shouted: “Release our children now.”
The fear was not abstract. Rumours of a bandit invasion triggered panic across Osun, forcing many schools to shut down temporarily. Parents rushed to schools in Osogbo, Ikirun and other communities to withdraw their children after rumours spread that armed men had invaded parts of the state. Investigations later revealed that the claims were false. But think about what that moment reveals — parents sprinting to school gates in terror because it is no longer unthinkable that their children could be taken. The rumour was false. The fear was not.
A member of the House of Representatives representing Ede North/Ede South/Ejigbo/Egbedore Federal Constituency in Osun State, Bamidele Salam, said plainly: “The abduction of school children, which started with the kidnapping of Chibok girls a few years ago, is becoming a trend. One of the keys to liberating a people is education, and if that key is in the hands of killers, then there is a problem.”
He is right. This is not an isolated attack in a remote community that caught the country by surprise. This is part of a long, bloody line that stretches from Chibok in 2014 to Kankara in 2020, from Kagara to Kebbi, and now to the heart of southwest Nigeria. The Oyo State attack is geographically significant because mass school abductions have historically been concentrated in northern Nigeria, and incidents of this scale are rare in the southwest.
The bandits have moved south. The frontier has shifted. Nowhere is outside their reach now.
Salam went further, exposing the class dimension of this crisis: “Most of the children of the leaders attend private schools, some outside the country. The children of the poor attend public schools, but we cannot close our eyes to the plight of the children of the poor.”
That is the quiet, shameful truth buried under all the condemnations and the press statements. The children in Oriire were not in an expensive school with a security guard at the gate. They were in a public school in a rural community, precisely the kind of institution that the Nigerian state has never prioritised enough to protect. And so they were taken.
The Nigerian Senate acknowledged what happened, noting that “when schools become hunting grounds for criminals, the future of the Nation itself is imperiled.” A Federal Government delegation led by the Chief of Staff to the President, alongside the National Security Adviser, the Minister of Defence, and the Inspector-General of Police, visited Oriire Local Government on May 31, 2026, to commiserate with families of the victims.
They came to commiserate. Over two weeks after the kidnapping. After a teacher had already been beheaded.
Teachers across the country were blunt. “We saw the kidnapping and beheading of a teacher in Oyo State, and the government has kept mute on the plight of these children,” said one NUT leader at the nationwide protests. “We, teachers, cannot accept that. They should rise up to their responsibilities.”
One protester in Oyo put it even more directly: “A teacher was beheaded? I am a citizen of this country. I have the right to shout. You don’t know your job? You should have gone to the bush and brought the victims back alive.”
I think about the children still in that forest as I write this. I think about the teachers still unaccounted for. I think about Mr. Michael Oyedokun, who went to work on May 15 to teach mathematics, whose family is now begging Nigerians not to circulate the video of his death, whose children are sitting exams they must somehow complete while carrying a grief no child should ever carry.
I think about the two-year-old.
We owe these people more than condemnations. We owe them more than solidarity protests and placards and press statements. We owe them a government that treats the protection of a public school in Oriire with the same urgency it brings to protecting the corridors of power. We owe them the honest acknowledgement that a country which cannot keep its children safe in their classrooms is failing at the most fundamental level of governance.
The school is not just a building. It is the promise a society makes to its children — that the future is worth investing in, that knowledge is safe, that tomorrow is possible. When we allow that promise to be shattered, when we allow armed men to march into classrooms and drag children and teachers into the forest, we are not just losing lives. We are losing the idea of ourselves as a nation.
And no amount of rice distribution, government delegations, or surveillance aircraft arriving two weeks late can give that back.
The remaining victims of the Oriire abductions are still unaccounted for as at the time of writing. Their families are still waiting.