Friday’s announcement of the release of the Oriire captives sent Nigerians into a state of collective rejoicing. It beautifully confirmed the universality-of-griefs thesis: that whether in Nchatancha in Enugu, Kaura Namoda in Zamfara, or Ilu-Abo in Ondo State, our shared humanity possesses a single colour. Yet, in the midst of this euphoria, let’s reflect on a pertinent ancient fable from the kingdom of animals —a huge forest — where animals once wrestled with deception.
Long ago, Ìjàpá, the Tortoise, the famed trickster lord of the animal world, grew deeply jealous of the popularity of Ẹkùn, Leopard, as the forest circumciser. He devised a con plan to de-escalate Ẹkùn’s admirable place in the hearts of the forest inhabitants. To ruin his rival’s popularity, Ìjàpá secretly hid a stolen calabash (igbá) containing undiluted palm wine inside the den of the fearsome but likeable leopard.
Having perfected this gambit, Ìjàpá called a town meeting of all animals. Feigning a broken heart and weeping profusely, he announced that a theft had occurred which, if not drilled deeply down into, stood the risk of destroying the very ligaments of the community’s relations. He then led the entire animal population straight to the evidence of Ẹkùn’s guilt that he himself had planted.
On seeing the palm wine kept secretly in the leopard’s lair, the animals gasped in utter disbelief. They unanimously chorused that Ẹkùn had betrayed the kingdom and stood guilty of being a greedy thief. But as the community prepared to send the leopard into exile and disgrace him, long-necked Ògòǹgò — the world’s largest and heaviest living bird, considered the king of the feathered — furtively climbed down from the Irokò tree where she had been hiding.
Cloning Bob Marley’s classical Small Axe track, she reminded the animal crowd that he who diggeth a pit for another will surely fall into it: “Ẹni tí ó gbe koto, òun ló maa já si.” Ògòǹgò then revealed how she had secretly watched Ìjàpá plant the evidence to implicate the leopard. As affirmation, she asked the gathered animals to look closely at the edge of Ìjàpá’s shell, revealing it was stained with the very same palm wine, while the trickster’s greedy fingers still reeked of the damp smell of the wine.
In deep annoyance, the animals felt let down by the staged “discovery.” They promptly banished the wily tortoise from their kingdom and exonerated Ẹkùn. The moral of the fable is reflected in the saying: when you dig a pit for your enemy, don’t dig it too deep, for you may someday fall into it yourself. More fundamentally, those who attempt to destroy others often expose their own malicious nature.
For the last 56 grueling days in Oyo State and across Nigeria, it was as if the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was right there with us. Nigeria was wrapped in a shawl of collective sorrow. In the abduction of the 39 pupils and six teachers in Oriire Local Government, Nigerians momentarily forgot the bitter issues that divided them.
In his 1961 work, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Levinas — the French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry — observed that suffering and sorrow uniquely unite a people. They allow a collective to see how vulnerable they are through the plight of others. As he wrote, collective mourning allows people to recognize their shared, fundamental fragility, shifting society’s focus from individual interests to interpersonal connection.
For 56 harrowing days, the streams of Nigerian tears gathered inside one single bowl. They agonised collectively and lamented with a single cadence of sorrow, confirming the views of Matthew Ratcliffe, a professor at the University of York, UK. Writing with an authoritative lens on grief, Ratcliffe noted that losses, even in remote parts of humanity, radically alter our shared world, giving us entirely new ways of connecting with one another.
Whether we like it or not, since 2014, weaponising the abduction of school children as a political tool has become an inescapable factor in Nigerian politics. Only God knows whose child will be the next sacrificial lamb. Either as fact, fiction, or faction, abduction of school children has come to stay as a permanent conspiracy theory. It has become exactly like what my people say of the uncountable teeth of Adipele, a woman of abundance of molars: how many of those teeth can one truly count? Is it the horde of molars and incisors buried deep down into ridges of flesh, or the canines and premolars sitting on top of a mountainous mouth debris?
On April 14 of that year, Boko Haram terrorists abducted 276 schoolgirls from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. While over 190 escaped or were rescued, approximately 80 to 90 remain missing in captivity till tomorrow. Aware that abduction was a novel weapon designed to typecast his government as effete, President Goodluck Jonathan was reported to have initially doubted its authenticity.
The suspicion that the Chibok abduction was a political tool was fueled by a strange calculus: it took place in an area that possessed an extensive security umbrella. The lingering question was how men riding motorcycles could abduct such a massive number of students in a high-security zone without being intercepted by the Army, Air Force, Police, or DSS.
When these abductions were taking place, the then-opposition — in whose vanguard today’s Nigerian president stood — took Jonathan to the cleaners. Possessing an effectively lethal media machinery, they succeeded in reducing the president to the value of used tissue paper. The opposition, led heavily by Tinubu, demanded Jonathan to “bring back our girls,” effectively internationalising the campaign and even recruiting Barack Obama and his wife to their drive.
The Tinubu-led opposition challenged Jonathan precisely because he was the Commander-in-Chief, while completely leaving Governor Kashim Shettima alone because he wasn’t the C-in-C. I agreed with that logic then; it was perfect. But in the 2026 Oriire case, yesterday’s opposition now in government, are changing the roles and rules, shifting the blame from the Commander-in-Chief to a governor who is sitting in Shettima’s exact shoes. What greater duplicitous politics could there be?
Throughout the entire Chibok period, no reference was made to Governor Shettima’s responsibility to rescue girls picked like hens from his government’s backyard. He received no strictures.
Yesterday’s opposition characters have completely inverted their thesis today. Now, state governors (who are not in their party) — who cannot give a single binding directive to the Police, DSS, or Military without federal approval — are the ones blamed for local abductions. Their security votes, which were never an issue during the Shettima era, are suddenly the core of the debate. The hypocrisy and Janus-faced hypothesis sicken.
The logic of this new thinking is scary, and even examples within the ruling party’s own states belie it. On April 28, 2026, 15 church members were abducted in Eda Oniyo, within the Ilejemeje Local Government Area of Ekiti State. They spent two grueling months in captivity until their release on July 4, with one victim tragically losing his life during the ordeal. From an initial ₦1 billion demand, the abductors reportedly collected unnamed fees from the poverty of the villagers before releasing their victims. Yet, Governor Biodun Oyebanji of Ekiti State was neither harassed nor did his second-term ambition allowed him to lead the push for the rescue. When the abducted were finally freed, the governor was at their hospital beds for a photo-op that graced the front pages of Nigerian newspapers.
Unbiased logic must convict anyone who harangued Jonathan in 2014 over Chibok but now claims Tinubu is entirely guiltless while children spent 56 days in a dense forest of a million demons.
Going further with the comparison, Jonathan swallowed the welter of orchestrated criticisms and, in May 2014, invited Governor Shettima to the Presidential Villa to discuss rescue efforts.
Tinubu, by contrast, seemed too locked up in the prison of his own grouses. He is too imprisoned to invite the Oyo governor.
It took Peter Obi to let the world know that the president was all this while drinking pap with his Iya Alakara’s akara in Aso Rock and never even called the Oyo State governor to discuss the way out of the tragedy. Sources claim that when the governor reached out to discuss operational details with the C-in-C, he met impenetrable walls. Instead, while Tinubu was in Lagos for the merriment of Sallah, he merely sent his isomogbe — political surrogates whom Nigerians never voted for — to insolently fly choppers over the mourning people of Oyo State.
However, as the wisdom in the metaphysical operations of the Yoruba goes, the Babalawo, high priest and diviner of the Ifá oracle, divines every five days on purpose. His consistent interrogation of celestial operations is not done because of today’s realities, but because the realities of tomorrow may refuse to align with today’s. It is expressed as: “Bí oní ti rí, ọ̀la ò rí bẹ, l’ón mú babaláwo dí’fá oroorún.” It speaks to the absolute need for constant daily recalibration.
If we want to end this ugly weaponization of abductions as a political tool — whether real or imagined — we cannot simply celebrate the freedom of the Oriire abductees and declare it “QED” like mathematicians do. We must conduct a rigorous post-mortem into it and ask critical questions, just as the Babaláwo divines for the sake of tomorrow.
By the way, if you look carefully at the pictures and videos of the rescued children that began circulating Friday evening, they looked remarkably well-fed. Except for Mrs. Alamu, who looked genuinely harangued and lean, only the bushy hair of the children suggested they had been in captivity for so long. Their clothes looked not too roughened for people trapped inside a forest for 56 days.
The questions begging for answers are heavy: Did the rescuers change their clothes after their abduction? How were they fed during the ‘detention’, and how were those provisions procured? Where is the body of the neutralized abductors? Can the eight other arrested suspects be paraded publicly before the world? How true is the military’s claim that they were released without a ransom payment?
More than an aside, I congratulate gallant Nigerian security officials for this rescue, as well as President Tinubu and Governor Seyi Makinde. I also pray for the souls of the slain teachers and of the gallant officers who were martyred for this rescue. A reminder, though: Hundreds of others are still held in the forests of Nigeria. But, to effectively stem this Sòbìà, we need the Olúgànbe leaf. What leaf is that? Ask the native doctor nearest to your bunker!
