The Classroom Should Be Sacred. In Nigeria, It Has Become a Target.
On a Friday morning in May 2026, gunmen rode into a community in Oyo State and took children from their classrooms. Some of those children were two years old. This is not a new story. That is the problem.
The Morning of May 15
On the morning of Friday, May 15, 2026, around eight o’clock, twelve gunmen on six motorcycles dressed in military camouflage rode into the Ahoro-Esinele community in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State. They were armed, they moved fast, and they knew exactly where they were going. They stormed three schools simultaneously: Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yawota, Community Grammar School, and L.A. Primary School in Esiele.
They shot indiscriminately. When they left, they took with them seven teachers, dozens of students, and children as young as two years old.
Two years old.
By Sunday, a video had circulated showing one of the teachers, Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher, being beheaded by his captors. Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State confirmed that thirty-nine pupils and seven teachers had been abducted in total. The governor declared a state of alert, announced the deployment of military and police reinforcements to Oriire LGA, and said arrests had been made. At the federal level, President Bola Tinubu condemned the attack and directed security agencies to secure the immediate release of all hostages.
Oyo State sits in Nigeria’s southwest, a region that had, until now, been considered relatively insulated from the school kidnapping epidemic that has plagued the north for more than a decade. That illusion is now shattered.
Nigerians have long watched the worsening insecurity in the north with a detachment that I find both telling and dangerous. It is the psychology of the huge house: one wing is on fire, but because the flames have not yet reached your corridor, you ignore them. You go about your business. You tell yourself it is someone else’s crisis, someone else’s geography.
But fire does not negotiate with distance. What we are witnessing now is the moment the rest of the house begins to burn.
This Is Not a New Story
Twelve years ago, in April 2014, 276 schoolgirls were taken from their dormitories in Chibok, Borno State, on the eve of their final exams. The world responded as it does: hashtags trended, world leaders issued statements, campaigns were launched, and Nigeria, as it always does in these moments, promised to do better.
The lessons from Chibok have not been learned.
I have reported on this crisis for more than a decade. I obtained the proof-of-life video in 2016, which helped kick-start negotiations for the release of some of the Chibok girls. I reported on the Dapchi school kidnappings in 2018, when more than 110 girls were taken from the Government Girls Science and Technical College in Yobe State. Most were released quickly, but Leah Sharibu, a Christian girl who refused to convert to Islam, remains in captivity.
I watched the wave of abductions roll through the northwest: Kankara in December 2020, where 344 boys were taken from a government secondary school in Katsina State and released days later, a ransom was denied but security sources confirmed one was paid. Kagara in February 2021, where students and staff were taken from a school in Niger State; Bethel Baptist High School in Kaduna in July 2021, where 121 students were abducted, and Kuriga in March 2024, where close to 287 children were seized in Kaduna State in one of the largest single school kidnappings since Chibok.
I have said this before, in interviews and in newsrooms and to anyone who would listen: what has been allowed to grow in Nigeria is not simply a security failure. It started with jihadism, a terrorism rooted in ideology—in Boko Haram’s case, the belief that Western education is haram, or forbidden.
It has now morphed into something quite different: a highly lucrative criminal enterprise. Gunmen found a formula: storm a school in a vulnerable area. Take the children, an emotional outcry is guaranteed, leading to government pressure to pay up. The ransom follows, reload, and do it again. Rinse and repeat.
According to data reported by the National Bureau of Statistics, this cycle is part of a staggering reality: Nigeria is contending with an estimated 2.2 million kidnapping incidents recorded in a single year, with ransom payments draining a massive ₦2.2 trillion from the population. As security scholar Prof. Oyesoji Aremu recently highlighted, these figures reflect the emergence of a highly structured and well-organized “ransom economy” driven by banditry, kidnapping syndicates, and insurgent networks across the country.
What the Government Has Done, and What It Has Not
There was progress after 2014, and it is worth acknowledging. Nigeria endorsed the Oslo Declaration on the Safe Schools Initiative in 2015, committing to protect schools and students from attack and military use during armed conflict. The initiative, developed in collaboration with Norway and now adopted by more than 100 countries, established protocols for securing schools in conflict zones and created frameworks for documenting attacks on education.
Domestically, the federal government established Operation Safe Schools, a military-backed programme intended to provide security coverage to vulnerable schools in the northeast. The National Emergency Management Agency and the Ministry of Education developed guidelines for school safety drills and community-level security coordination. State governments in Borno, Zamfara, and Katsina established dedicated task forces following the northwest kidnapping surge of 2020 and 2021.
But there is a difference between creating an initiative and implementing it with the consistency and reach that the scale of this problem demands. There is an even bigger difference between policy on paper and protection on the ground, in the rural communities that remain most exposed.
That gap is where children are still being taken. The Oriire Local Government Area in Oyo State, where last Friday’s attack occurred, sits near the Old Oyo National Park, an area security sources have long identified as a bandit hideout corridor. This was not a secret. The geography of risk was known.
And yet 12 men on six motorcycles were able to ride into three school compounds, open fire, abduct dozens of people, including a two-year-old child, and disappear into that same forest.
Governor Makinde has stated that a school protection programme was under review for Oyo State. President Tinubu’s administration has pointed to ongoing military operations in the northwest as evidence of commitment to the broader insecurity problem. Both responses may be sincere. Neither is sufficient when a mathematics teacher has been beheaded, and thirty-nine children are still missing.
Why Oyo Matters Beyond Its Own Horror
The Oyo attack matters for a reason beyond its immediate horror. It represents something that security analysts and journalists who cover this beat have long feared: the geography of school kidnapping is expanding. What was once described, with a troubling kind of geographic fatalism, as a problem of the north, the northeast, the northwest, the vulnerable rural areas far from the centres of power, has now arrived in the southwest, starting in Kwara State, where a church was attacked, and worshippers kidnapped mid-service.
The problem is clearly not contained. It never was. It was just easier to look away when it was happening somewhere else.
The Christian Association of Nigeria in Oyo State said it plainly: silence becomes complicity when children are hunted in classrooms. That is not a statement of religion. It is a statement of moral fact.
The Formula for Impunity
What makes the Oyo attack, and every attack before it, possible is not simply that armed men exist with guns and motorcycles. It is that the conditions for their success have been consistently allowed to remain in place. Rural areas with minimal security presence. Schools with no physical protection. Predictable patterns, known to security analysts, journalists and local community leaders, that have never been disrupted at source.
Ransom payments, whether officially sanctioned or not, fund the next operation and a news cycle that mourns, demands action, and moves on until the next attack. This structured enterprise carries escalating human and economic costs, turning an ongoing national tragedy into a lucrative business model.
Nigeria’s security establishment has made repeated commitments to break this cycle. Successive administrations have announced emergency funding for security in affected states, deployed troops, launched operations, and convened summits.
What has been missing is not a plan. What has been missing is the sustained, measurable implementation of that plan in the places most at risk, monitored not just in the weeks after a crisis but in the long, quiet months between them, when the cameras have gone, and the urgency has faded.
Has the Government Done Enough?
I was asked this question recently in an interview, and I want to answer it here the same way I answered it there.
Enough is relative. Are there still children being kidnapped from school? Are there still parents weeping, afraid to send their children through those gates every morning? Are there still parents, just in the last few days, who have had their children abducted and their teachers killed?
Until all of these incidents are brought to a stop, it is very hard to say that the government has done enough. There have been initiatives and campaigns, but you cannot say enough when these incidents are still happening.
What I know from more than a decade of covering this story is that schools in wealthier, more affluent regions of Nigeria are well protected, while in rural areas of the northeast, the northwest, and now the southwest, many parents remain afraid to send their children to school every morning. That fear has not gone away. In Oyo State last Friday, it was completely justified.
The Classroom Must Be a Sacred Space
There is a principle, recognised in international humanitarian law and encoded in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, that schools are protected spaces. That education is not a battlefield. That children reaching for knowledge should never have to reach for safety at the same moment.
Nigeria has signed those conventions and made those commitments. On the morning of May 15, 2026, twelve men on motorcycles made a mockery of all of them.
The solution is not simple, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is not a single policy or a single deployment. It is a genuine, consistent, measurable commitment to making rural schools in Nigeria as safe as the schools in the affluent areas of Lagos and Abuja, because the children inside them are equally Nigerian, equally valuable, and equally deserving of an education that does not require courage just to attend.
It is holding governments accountable not just in the week after an attack, but in the weeks and months and years between attacks. It is refusing to allow school kidnapping to become, as it has slowly and terrifyingly become, normal.
I Am Not Done With This Story
Last Saturday, I stood on a stage in Yola and watched twelve Chibok girls collect their degrees from the American University of Nigeria. It was one of the most profound moments of my career. I meant every word I said to them during my commencement address to the Class of 2026.
But as I told them, the work continues. More than 80 Chibok girls are still missing. Yana Galang’s daughter, Rifkatu, is still among them. And now, in Oyo State, a new set of families is beginning the particular agony of waiting: for a phone call, for a video, for news, for their children.
I have spent over a decade on this story because I believe that journalism, done right, holds a light in the dark. I believe that the right story, told to the right people at the right moment, can change what happens next.
But I also know now, more than I did when I first walked into that Aso Rock room in 2016 and saw those girls in their bright ankara outfits, smiling broadly, that telling the story is only part of it. The greater responsibility is in refusing to let the story become acceptable. Refusing to let the deaths and the disappearances and the terrified parents become background noise in a country with too much else to carry.
The classroom should be sacred. Until it is, I will keep writing.
Stephanie Busari is an Emmy, Peabody, and Gracie award-winning journalist, founder and CEO of SBB Media, and founder of Her Story Global. She spent 16 years at CNN International and was recognised by the United Nations as one of the 100 Most Influential People of African Descent.
Follow her work at sbbmedia.com | @official_sbbmedia
If this piece mattered to you, please share it.