July 13, 2026
The Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) were in the media yesterday (Sunday) urging President Bola Tinubu to replicate in the North the feat that rescued the Oriire pupils and teachers in Oyo State. I am with them. Their request is not a northern demand; it is a national obligation. No Nigerian child anywhere should be in captivity. I particularly agree with their demand since Tinubu’s monkey has displayed such astonishing dexterity in scaling the Oriire trees. Let it prove the cynics wrong by showing that its skill was not because some juju pulled the trees close together.
But I also have a message for ACF and NEF: life returns to you what you put into it. If you do not sweat like the labourers at Oyingbo, you cannot gleam like Adegboro at Oja-Oba. The Oyo children and their teachers would probably have vanished like bad fart into odious oblivion, had their governor, their state government, their media and the whole of Yoruba people not fought openly and relentlessly for them. Abuja alone neither can nor will save anyone.
Nigeria is a cold, lonely and often wicked place. Alátiṣe must help Alátiṣe. When your people are kidnapped, and you choose to play the politics of silence, you gag the press, punish critics, criminalise the cries of victims and dismiss public outrage, you weaken the very pressure that compels governments to act. The North does all those. Had the Yoruba of the South-West behaved that way, the Oriire children and teachers would long have been swept away by the flood of life. Silence in the face of evil is not dignity; it is complicit surrender.
The Oriire mass abduction of kids was a snake that was treated as a snake. The Yoruba love life and love kids – all kids. They also value education and knowledge. You feel it in their songs, and see it in their dance. They live before death; if they must die, it would not be a surrender at the backyard of the foolish. I am very lucky to be of that race of giants.
“More than 40 other children — some as young as two — were taken from their schools in northeast Borno State on the same day as the Oyo kidnapping. They are still in captivity. Such attacks are more common in the North than in the South-West of the country.”
Germany’s international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW), made that observation in its last Friday report on the release of the 44 pupils and teachers abducted by terrorists from schools in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State on May 15, 2026. Why are the Borno kids not back home like those from Oriire? Borno was where Chibok happened 12 years ago. Borno is also where scores of students writing NECO were abducted by gunmen last month. The bush of Borno is tired of receiving kidnap victims. The state is the springhead of a flood that has defied all logic.
I read a statement on Saturday by the Kwara State chapter of the PDP lamenting that 176 persons—children, women, the young and the old—from Woro community in Kaiama Local Government Area of the state had been in terrorists’ captivity since February 3, 2026. That was 160 days ago, and counting. Yet, there is hardly a public outcry anywhere, including, and especially, in Ilorin. Their president and his presidency are quiet. Their governor and state are quiet. Their neighbours are quiet. Their relatives are quiet. I understand it is a crime in the North, including Kwara, for their critics and their media to publicly condemn terror. Silence has become part of the tragedy.
This Kaiama horror has been going on in Kwara for over five months, yet there has been an unsettling quiet. This silence does no credit to the media in Kwara or to the public voices of the state. A friend from the North told me: “We don’t yell in the North; whatever happens is an act of God.” But God does not condone evil. Terrorism cannot be His act. Mass abduction and mass murder are the work of men, and men must resist them. “So, please, speak out.” I told my friend and reminded him o
