The killing of teacher Michael Oyedokun, who was beheaded by his abductors, is a sad sign, ominous as darkness falling at peak noonday. On Friday, he had been abducted along with six colleagues and 25 school children from Community High School, Ahoro-Esinele, and Baptist Nursery and Primary School in the Ogbomoso Yawota area of Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. It was bad enough that in our society, schoolteachers and educators are already an endangered species due to the embarrassingly poor remuneration that legitimises their exploitation by both public and private employers. Now, it is even a far worse development that the same set of impoverished labourers become collateral damage in a kidnapping industry that needs a spectacular action like public beheading to trigger public outrage and push the government to urgently address their ransom demands.
We should be afraid because the signs this development portends are foreboding. Something dark looms on the horizon, and mass kidnapping of school children in the southwest—the previously fabled safer region—is the harbinger. Mass abduction of school children now seems persistent, unfortunately. From that first kidnapping of the Chibok girls in 2014, raiding schools for poor school children has somehow become dangerously routine. Hardly a month passes now without reports of mass abduction, and schools are one of the targets because the abductors know that victimising innocent children compels public sentiment. The more children they can abduct, the heftier the payday. Now, it has become almost impossible to keep track of the spate of abduction attacks facing the country from every corner without a respite. How long ago was it that the victims to be rescued were from the Catholic school in Niger State, where 300 students and 12 members of staff were abducted? Or the one involving 24 schoolgirls in Kebbi State? Or the many instances of youth corps members and individuals whose kidnapping stories are too commonplace to even be newsworthy? How many instances have been recorded in Kwara or Borno now? The other day, they were negotiating the ransom for the victims in Kwara. Some of the 176 victims are still in the custody of their abductors now, waiting for a government already distracted by the 2027 elections to remember them and eventually rescue them.
Yes, elections are coming, and the abductors have been Nigerians long enough to know that this is a season when governance is abjured for politicking. For now, the major focus of our leaders is on the next elections and what the coming power reshuffle across all the sectors will portend for them. How does a kidnapper redirect public attention in a landscape where upcoming elections are the focal point and where school abduction has become too routine for anyone to lose sleep over it? You move further down to the southwest, abduct school children, behead a teacher on video, and make sure the video circulates as widely as possible. Now you not only have the attention of the public and government officials, but they will be desperate to negotiate. To stimulate even more urgency and maintain the moment, you start torturing the poor children on video.
Killing one person is an unspeakable tragedy, but the oncoming disaster is that this will not be an isolated instance at this rate. Abductors, especially those for whom kidnapping is now a career, take cues from one another’s operations and build on the tactics. Now that they know what it takes to shake the government out of its electoral ambition stupor, which is to commit a gruesome act of killing an innocent person on video, their next line of action is almost predictable. They will start copying what has succeeded for one group until the method becomes stale. That means there might be a flurry of activities by copycat kidnappers who want to take advantage of the electoral season. Politicians who do not want their failures on insecurity to be weaponised against them will pony up, which, of course, will motivate other potential abductors. So, while the Nigerian president is busy traversing the international speaking circuits to hawk his own version of “African poverty porn” to potential loan lenders, the Nigerian child needs one egg per day to not be afraid of education, the real threat to the future of the Nigerian child is riding on motorcycles with AK-47s and headed to a school near you. They are the destruction that wastes lives and human potential at noonday; the reason children are out of school, and many will stay out of school for many years to come. The fallout of their assault on education in the southwest will be so bad that we will need decades to recover.
We can, of course, argue that kidnapping did not start with the Bola Tinubu administration, yes, but it seemed to be ramping up under his watch. There is a lot of disquiet in Nigeria, a direct consequence of the economic hardship his harsh, unmediated policies caused. Not to excuse anyone, but the sporadic rise in banditry cannot be divorced from the hardship, the abjection, and the bleak futures under the series of failed leaders that have plagued Nigeria. For those people, the only means of any breakthrough in the country now is to join the kidnapping industry. This also means there is a ready supply of a kidnapping army that will terrorise the country for many years to come. We can deploy aircraft and army officials to rescue children, but without cutting off the pipeline through which these people join the kidnapping industry, Nigeria’s best efforts will at best be merely futile.
Now, there will be no shortage of advice on enhancing national security from all corners. This is the time that people, rightfully concerned about the unfortunate development, will come up with private solutions to the problem of insecurity. As much as possible, I urge the government to sieve through and take advantage of the well-meaning ones. However, the solutions we need to explore are not only political or technical; they are also moral. We need to be a country that decisively punishes offences. We must be seen as a people who have no qualms about enforcing ethical standards.
Under Tinubu, Nigeria has further descended into a state that routinely pardons criminals, invests heavily in the supposed rehabilitation of terrorists, and lets all sorts of corruption slide. The reprehensible evil that Muhammadu Buhari allowed to fester because of his ethnic/religious affinity with bandits has been seriously bolstered by the ethical looseness of the Tinubu administration. Part of the problem is Tinubu’s lack of self-assurance. He knows he is someone with a gossamer-thin moral image, and as such, he is always reluctant to stand up to corruption. Instead, he rewards bad behaviour. If he is not preemptively pardoning drug and murder convicts before they pay their debts to society, he is placing the dregs of our society in elevated ambassadorial positions. Some, like the disgraced Farouk Lawan, were pardoned, even angled to return to the legislature. That is the kind of morally permissive society Tinubu has bred.
When leaders who lack moral authority, or those with low expectations of integrity, are foisted upon your society, what you get is chaos. Those who have turned kidnapping into a job are also members of the Nigerian society who must have observed the ethical degradation besetting our country. They look around and think, if the rogues—the thieves, the certificate forgers, the blatant looters of the public treasury, the ones with the shady family background and shadier career trajectory, the disbarred lawyers, the drug peddlers and their bagmen—can attain some of the highest cadre of power in our society, what stops them too from exploiting the same society to make their own way?
