The abduction of scores of pupils and teachers in Oyo State should trouble every Nigerian conscience. It is another painful proof that insecurity has become our greatest threat to national stability, social cohesion, and future prosperity. Beyond the immediate anguish of affected families, this incident compels us to confront a broader reality: Nigeria’s security crisis is now a truly national challenge that cannot be understood through narrow regional, ethnic, or religious lenses. Like millions of Nigerians, I feel deep sorrow for the children torn from their families, the teachers seized while performing their duty, and the parents enduring the agony of uncertainty. Every child deserves the safety of a classroom. Every parent deserves the assurance that a child sent to school will return home. The violation of that trust is one of the gravest crimes any society can endure.
Yet as we mourn, we must also resist the temptation to draw conclusions that obscure rather than illuminate the crisis. When I say we must stop counting victims by faith alone, I do not mean that all regions have suffered equally. That would be false. Data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project and the Nigeria Security Tracker show that between 2018 and 2025, the North East and North West accounted for over 75 per cent of all banditry-related fatalities. Within those zones, rural farming and herding communities-regardless of their religious affiliation-have endured violence at staggering rates. Acknowledging this disparity is not ranking suffering. It is basic diagnosis. If we refuse to see where the bleeding is worst, we cannot allocate resources or design tailored responses. Equal compassion does not require equal analysis.
The perpetrators in Oyo likely targeted vulnerable children without caring about the faith of their victims. That is true at the tactical level. But it is strategically misleading to treat all violence as identical. The North East’s insurgency is driven by long-standing extremist ideologies from Boko Haram and ISWAP. The North West’s banditry is fuelled by pastoralist-farmer conflicts, small-arms flows from the Sahel, the collapse of rural governance, and the economic lure of kidnapping for ransom. South West kidnappings, while horrific, are largely criminal enterprises seeking profit, not ideological conquest. These differences matter. A counter-terrorism strategy that works for Borno may be useless in Zamfara. A policy that addresses grazing routes and rural livelihoods may reduce conflict in the North Central but does nothing to stop a criminal gang on the Ibadan-Oyo road. We need region-specific solutions, not a one-size-fits-all lament. Recognising this does not fragment our national resolve; it sharpens it.
For years, communities across the North East and North West bore the brunt of atrocities-mass killings, kidnapping, rape, arson, forced displacement. Those events were reported, but they often failed to generate the sustained national attention they deserved. The consequence was not merely inadequate sympathy. It was a dangerous underestimation of the threat itself. Too many Nigerians viewed insecurity in distant communities as somebody else’s problem. Too many assumed that violence confined to one region would remain there. The events in Oyo should finally dispel that illusion.
But sympathy alone has never caught a bandit. Consider this: no matter how remote the forest or how deep the night, a group of dozens-or even hundreds-of abducted children and their armed captors cannot simply vanish into thin air. They must traverse roads, cross villages, pass through farmlands, and navigate checkpoints. Communities along these routes see them. They hear the engines, the footsteps, the voices. So why does no one speak? The answer is painful and stark: fear. In too many parts of Nigeria, those who report suspicious movements become the next targets. Informants are killed. Their families are threatened. Their homes are burned. The silence of communities is not complicity; it is survival. Until we guarantee the safety of citizens who volunteer information, the eyes and ears of the nation will remain shut by terror.
This brings me to a subject too often avoided in polite security discourse: the political economy of banditry and the paradox of technological silence. Former Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai (retd.), has repeatedly stated that Nigeria possesses the technological means-satellite surveillance, signal intelligence, drone reconnaissance, and advanced tracking systems-to know where both victims and captors are at any given moment. Our military and other security agencies are among the best trained on the continent. If that is true, and I have no reason to doubt a man of his rank and experience, then the failure to locate and rescue abducted citizens is not a failure of hardware. It is a failure of will, coordination, and political courage. We have the maps. We have the tools. We have the men. What we seem to lack is the decisive command to use them.
No honest analysis of Nigeria’s insecurity can ignore that banditry is a business. Powerful local and national figures have historically financed, protected, or negotiated with criminal networks for electoral gain, ransom profits, or strategic convenience. Security budgets have been looted for decades, leaving soldiers without pay, ammunition, or morale. It is not enough to call for ‘better inter-agency coordination’ and ‘judicial efficiency.’ Those are technocratic placebos if we refuse to ask harder questions. Who is arming the bandits? Who is buying their stolen cattle? Who ensures that high-profile kidnappers are never brought to trial? And why, with all our technology, do we still wait for weeks before rescue operations begin? Until we answer these questions, no amount of surveillance equipment will save a single child.
What, then, must be done differently? First, the government must publish, annually, a disaggregated security dashboard showing fatalities, kidnappings, and displacements by local government area, by known perpetrator group, and by proximate cause-whether ideology, resource conflict, or organised crime. Transparency is the enemy of denial. Second, a special anti-corruption tribunal for security procurement and elite complicity should be established, with powers to investigate and prosecute past and present officials. Without this, every new weapon bought will find its way into bandit hands. Third, community policing must be rebuilt from the ground up, with locally recruited officers who live in the areas they serve, backed by independent oversight to prevent abuse. Intelligence sharing only works when informants believe they will be protected-and when they see that technology is actually being used to rescue, not just to monitor. Fourth, the international community must stop simplifying Nigeria’s crisis into a single religious-persecution narrative, which serves foreign domestic politics more than our security. At the same time, Nigerian civil society must stop treating every attack as an opportunity for ethnic or partisan point-scoring. Criminals thrive when we fight each other.
The children abducted in Oyo are not merely Oyo’s children. They are Nigerian children. Their suffering should concern every citizen. But let us not pretend that the agony of a family in Oyo is identical to that of a family in Gwoza that has been displaced four times in six years, or a community in Zamfara that pays protection fees to bandits every month. Recognising difference is not division. It is the beginning of justice. We will overcome this crisis not by refusing to count victims, but by counting them accurately-by region, by cause, by frequency-and then acting on what the numbers tell us. And we will act effectively only when communities lose their fear, when technology is matched by political will, and when the state proves that it values Nigerian lives more than it fears exposing Nigerian elites. The tears of parents in Oyo must not become another passing headline. They must become a national demand for hard answers, not just hard feelings.