12 days since the children were kidnapped

Today is Children’s Day.

Across Nigeria, children will wake to the sweet privilege of being celebrated.

Some will plead for trips to cinemas, malls, amusement parks, and restaurants. Parents will buy gifts they can scarcely afford because love, sometimes, expresses itself through sacrifice disguised as celebration.

Living rooms will echo with cartoons and laughter.

Family photographs will flood social media.

Official statements will speak glowingly about protecting the future.

But in parts of Oyo State, Children’s Day has arrived carrying a different language — the language of grief.

Because while many parents are planning outings, others have spent nearly two weeks living inside uncertainty.

They are not asking what gift to buy.

They are asking questions no parent should ever have to ask.

Have they eaten?

Are they cold?

Do they still believe someone is coming for them?Are they alive?

Their children are gone.

Kidnapped.

And on a day dedicated to celebrating childhood, some homes have become chambers of unbearable waiting.

Yet the tragedy did not stop with abduction.

The horror deepened.

One of the teachers entrusted with protecting those children — a guide, a guardian, a familiar adult face meant to represent safety — was killed, his death circulated in a live video that shattered families, traumatised communities, and stripped away any remaining illusion that this was merely another security incident.

Suddenly, the crisis acquired a human face impossible to ignore.

Not a statistic.

Not a policy briefing.

A teacher.

A life extinguished in the shadow of children already stolen from their parents.

How does a community recover from such cruelty?

How does a child return from captivity carrying the memory that someone who stood beside them did not make it home?

How does a parent explain to a frightened son or daughter that adulthood, authority, and protection — the things children are taught to trust — could collapse so violently?

Once upon a time, mass abductions felt like distant northern tragedies — horrifying but geographically remote from the imagined safety of the South-West.

Not anymore.

Terror has crossed invisible borders.

It has memorised roads leading to Oyo.

It has found the forests.

It has discovered the vulnerabilities hidden beneath years of political assurances.

And now, the South-West faces an uncomfortable truth it can no longer postpone.

Warnings existed.

Forest Guards were proposed.

Amotekun was embraced precisely because communities understood that security cannot be outsourced to hope alone. Governors spoke about reclaiming forests from kidnappers and dismantling criminal corridors. Security trust funds, digital surveillance systems, rapid-response mechanisms — the language of preparedness was abundant.

Yet the forests kept their secrets.

The kidnappers kept moving.

And parents kept crying.

So we must ask, not as political opponents but as citizens wounded by recurring tragedy:

Where are the footprints of the promised protection?

Because somewhere in Oyo tonight, Children’s Day is not about celebration.

It is about absence.

It is about parents staring at silent phones.

It is about communities carrying the trauma of a murdered teacher.

It is about children whose holiday has been swallowed by fear.

And no society should become so accustomed to terror that the kidnapping of children and the killing of their teacher begin to sound like ordinary news.