When the powerful are threatened, the state responds with full force. When ordinary Nigerians suffer, the government prevaricates. The kidnapping of children in Ogbomosho makes the double standard impossible to ignore.
On a quiet evening in April 2003, a heavily armed gang ambushed a convoy in rural Ogun State. In the chaos, five people were killed, including two young children. The intended target was narrowly spared only by a last-minute change of vehicles. Her name was Dr. Iyabo Obasanjo. Her father was the President of Nigeria.
What happened next was breathtaking in its speed and decisiveness. President Olusegun Obasanjo did not convene a committee. He did not dispatch a spokesman to express “deep concern.” He closed Nigeria’s borders with the Benin Republic overnight, strangling the smaller nation’s economy, and delivered a blunt ultimatum to its president: hand over the cartel kingpin, or the borders stay shut. Within weeks, the criminal godfather Hammani Tidjani, a man who had operated with near-total impunity for years, was arrested, extradited without ceremony, and imprisoned for life. The cross-border kidnapping and carjacking industry that had terrorized southwestern Nigeria for a generation collapsed almost immediately.
Seven years later, in 2010, a kidnapping crisis had turned the city of Aba in Abia State into a zone of terror. When gunmen abducted 15 nursery and primary schoolchildren from the Abayi International School, President Goodluck Jonathan ordered a full-scale military intervention, Army, Navy, and Air Force. Soldiers combed the forests of Asa and Ngwa for weeks. By December, the kingpin known as Osisikankwu lay dead in his fortified hideout, his network dismantled, his hostages freed.
Now consider what is happening in Ogbomosho, Oyo State, today.
On May 15, 2026, armed bandits simultaneously raided two schools, Community High School, Ahoro-Esinele, and Yawota Baptist Nursery and Primary School. A teacher was shot dead on the spot. Forty-six people, including 39 pupils, some as young as two and three years old, were marched into forests along the Oyo-Kwara border. In the weeks since, two more teachers have been executed in captivity, among them a beloved mathematics instructor, Mr. Michael Oyedokun. The Nigeria Union of Teachers has called an indefinite statewide strike. Grieving youths have blockaded federal highways. And the federal government has responded by sending a “high-level delegation” to the area and announcing the deployment of 1,000 forest guards.
Forest guards. For a crisis involving the mass abduction of toddlers.
The contrast between these three episodes is not a matter of capability. Nigeria’s security apparatus in 2026 is vastly more sophisticated than it was in 2003. The country maintains a 230,000-strong military, multiple elite police and intelligence units, and decades of hard-won experience combating Boko Haram, ISWAP, and militant oil-pipeline networks in the Niger Delta. Nigeria has the tools. What it conspicuously lacks, in the Ogbomosho crisis as in so many others, is the political will to deploy them.
This is not a new observation, but it is one that bears relentless repetition because its consequences are measured in lives. Nigeria’s security architecture is, by design and by practice, controlled by politicians. And Nigerian politicians, as the historical record demonstrates with grim consistency, act decisively only when their own interests are directly threatened. When the president’s daughter is almost killed, borders close within weeks. When a sitting minister’s convoy is attacked, soldiers are deployed before the blood dries. But when the victims are farmers in Zamfara, herders in Benue, or schoolchildren in Oyo, the machinery of state grinds slowly, if it moves at all.
The pattern of deliberate inaction runs deeper than any single crisis. When the Boko Haram insurgency was still in its infancy, the administration of President Umaru Yar’Adua commissioned an inquiry into the sect’s origins and grievances. The report was completed. It was never released. It was never implemented. More than fifteen years later, the northeast of Nigeria still bleeds from the wound that inquiry might have helped close. The commission existed to manage public perception, not to solve a problem. That is the defining feature of governance-by-optics: the gesture substitutes for the action, and those without access to power pay the price in perpetuity.
The international community should understand what it is witnessing in Ogbomosho. This is not a state overwhelmed by forces beyond its control. This is a state that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it possesses the capacity to overwhelm those forces when it chooses to. The abdication is selective. The failure is political.
For ordinary Nigerians, this understanding has long been a source of corrosive, justified fury. To watch two-year-olds disappear into a forest while the government stages photo opportunities is to be reminded that the Nigerian state regards certain lives as fully worth defending and others as regrettable but ultimately acceptable losses. The children of Ogbomosho do not have fathers who command armies or control borders. They do not have mothers whose deaths would embarrass the government before international partners. They are simply children, and in Nigeria, that is sometimes not enough.
There are things President Bola Tinubu could do this week, if he chose to. He could invoke the precedent his predecessor set in Aba in 2010 and order a full-scale, tri-service military operation in the Oyo-Kwara forest corridor, not a delegation, not a committee, not a press release. He could instruct the National Intelligence Agency and the Department of State Services to treat the rescue of those hostages with the same urgency they would treat a threat to his own convoy. He could make clear to every governor along the bandit corridor that the political cost of inaction now exceeds the cost of confrontation.
He will not do these things, most likely, until the political calculus changes. And the political calculus will not change until Nigerians, in civil society, in the media, in diaspora networks with access to international audiences, and above all in the streets, make it unambiguously clear that the era of performative governance has a cost. That protests will not end when a delegation arrives. That strikes will not be called off for a press conference. That children in forests deserve the same ferocity of state response as presidents’ daughters.
Nigeria is not a failed state. It is a state that has learned, over decades, that it can fail its most vulnerable citizens without consequence. The children of Ogbomosho are still in the forest. Until that truth produces the kind of political crisis that an attack on a president’s family once did, they may stay there.
That is the real emergency. Not the bandits in the forest, but the political indifference that keeps them there.
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