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 of Fela’s song, “Jẹ́ n wí tèmí”—Don’t Gag Me. And we have a Yoruba proverb: “Isu atẹnumọràn kì í jóná.” The yam of the outspoken never gets burnt.
I have heard some ask why the Oyo victims were far luckier than their counterparts in Borno, Kwara and other places. But was it really luck? Or was it geography? Or politics? Or the people?
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If you ask why all 44 abductees in Oyo are now free while many in Borno remain in captivity, you must ask more than that one question.
Ask: Why do we know the exact number of those abducted in Oriire while the number of those held in Borno is still spoken of in estimates? Why did the Oriire abduction provoke outrage across southern Nigeria, while similar tragedies in Borno so often fail to generate the same intensity of public emotion across the North? Why, even after the Oriire children regained their freedom, are people still conducting a post-mortem of the tragedy—studying the children’s faces, asking difficult questions, demanding explanations and refusing to let the matter fade?
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As noted by Deutsche Welle, “such attacks are more common in the North than in the Southwest of the country.” Why? Why did the Oyo State governor and his administration remain visibly engaged throughout the 56-day ordeal, while there has been no comparable public pressure on the Borno, Kwara and other northern state governors and governments? And why, despite their political differences, did President Bola Tinubu publicly commend the Oyo State governor after the rescue, while the governor, in turn, thanked the President? Those questions deserve answers.
Part of the answer lies in the response of the communities themselves. In Oriire, the people refused to let the story die. Families, teachers, traditional rulers, civil society, labour unions and the media sustained public attention for fifty-six days. Every child had a name, every family had a face, and every passing day deepened the urgency. The abduction became a collective wound that the community insisted the nation must acknowledge.
Now, cast your glance at parts of the North, particularly communities like Chibok and Dapchi, where normal life is forever hostage to insecurity. In those places, repeated violence has produced a very different public environment. Why? There are several reasons. Elite indifference is one written in capital letters. Too many influential voices speak only when there are political dividends to harvest. Even then, their outrage is often selective, muted, mellowed or wrapped in the language of fatalism. Terrorism is crookedly presented as an act of destiny to be endured by the rural poor, while those making that argument remain safely ensconced in state capitals, far from the gunfire and the grief.
So, to the ACF and the NEF, I say this: Borno, Katsina, Zamfara, Kwara and other afflicted northern states will have their Oriire moment only when leaders and the led alike come to see banditry and terrorism as a common enemy that must be confronted with unity of purpose; only when bandits are seen as terrorists who must be fought and defeated, not rehabilitated and not reintegrated.
On Friday, Borno South Senator Ali Ndume gave voice to the quiet humming as he urged the military to turn its attention to his state. Speaking on Channels Television, he said: “I want to use this opportunity to appeal to the military to shift their attention now to my senatorial district and help us get these people back. Our people, our children in my senatorial district are under captivity. Forty-two of them. We have over 30 people from Lassa that were captured recently. We still have a leftover of over 50 people in another place. They released some out of the 400 and we still have some people in captivity that were kidnapped.”
Ndume’s figures are scary: 42; 30; 50; 400. All human beings. I wish I could ask the senator why his appeal waited to be fed by the success in Oyo. Did he notice that every Yoruba man, home and abroad, was heavily invested in the push to get the Oyo kids and the teachers back? Terrorism does not flourish on barren ground; it thrives where communities become too frightened, too divided, or too compromised to resist it. The soil must be made hostile to the plant of evil. Every act of collaboration with evil, every silence that shields it, every sympathy that excuses and rehabilitates it, is fertiliser that helps it grow.
I worship at the feet of the wise; and I have many around me. As I write this with my eyes, my ears are with one of them. He reminded me that the Yoruba philosophy of life is “fundamentally a profound celebration of existence. It revolves around Ìwà (good character and living well) and Ìfẹ́ (love as a powerful, unifying life force).” In greatly protected details, the Yoruba people esteem joy, longevity, community, resistance to evil, material prosperity as essential elements of a truly meaningful life. I read these and more in J. Omosade Awolalu’s ‘The Yoruba Philosophy of Life’. If and when a non-Yoruba also reads it, they will understand why it is difficult for extremist philosophy to violate the innocence of “life more abundant” among the Yoruba of South West Nigeria.
In the west of Nigeria, life is not merely the absence of death; it is àlàáfíà, ìfọ̀kànbalẹ̀—peace of mind, good health, harmonious relationships, prosperity, fulfilment and happiness. It is the totality of all that makes life worth living. A fulfilled life, according to Awolalu, is one in which a person builds a home, raises children, laughs, sings, dances and enjoys the blessings of the earth. Even the Yoruba religion is organised around preserving that harmony, because life is sacred, death is an interruption, and violence is an assault on the divine order. The Yoruba worldview is one that celebrates living rather than dying, making rather than destroying.
‘Oriire’ means, literally, good head (good luck). It is very far away in meaning and geography from Chibok (Cibak in Kibaku). On Tuesday, 16 June 2026, when he addressed protesters led by social media activist, Martins Vincent Otse (VeryDarkMan) at his private residence in Ikolaba, Ibadan, Governor Makinde declared: “Let me make it very clear, Oyo State is not Chibok and we will not be Chibok… We have lost men, even soldiers and officers… but we will do everything possible to ensure that these children and teachers return safely.” Where did that confidence come from? It came from knowing that despite political differences, Oyo (Yoruba) people were united behind the rescue of their children. In Oriire, there was no constituency for evil.
The freedom of the abducted pupils and teachers after 56 days was therefore a vindication of a civilisation whose deepest instinct is to protect life. A people whose songs proclaim àlàáfíà will always find it harder to surrender their children to a forest of thorns which sacrifices life to extremism.
We have a proverb: “Ilé olóore kì í jó tán; tìkà kì í jó kù (The house of a good person never burns down completely; the house of a wicked person never burns only in part). Wickedness here is not merely cruelty to one’s neighbor; at its deepest level, it is wickedness to oneself. A people who despise themselves, who excuse the forces that destroy them, should not expect the world to value what they themselves do not value. The world will watch them burn.
General Mamman Vatsa, in his final words in February 1986, said: “Lean liberty is better than fat slavery… The day you start mocking yourself, others will join you.” There is wisdom in that warning. The people of Oriire, Oyo State and the wider Yoruba country made it unmistakably clear that terrorism was an unacceptable affliction.
They know the freedom of the children is only a battle won in a war that still rages. But, like the crab in their stream, they have never stopped shouting at home and on the farm that their eyes must keep vigil over their heads. Throughout the ordeal, they owned the struggle against terror. They understood the wisdom of the proverb: A kì í fi ojú olójú ṣ’òwò ká j’èrè (you do not trade with another person’s eyes and expect to profit). They stood together, demanded action and refused to normalise evil. Having resolved to recover what was stolen from them, they stirred the conscience of the nation, and the world rose to meet them at their point of need.
The ACF, the NEF, Borno and, indeed, the wider North—including Kwara—should reflect on that lesson. Evil thrives where it is tolerated.
Now, for all those who paid the ultimate price during those 56 days of horror—the two teachers, the commercial motorcyclist and the security personnel—we mourn. May God comfort their families and grant peaceful rest to their souls. We also rejoice at the return of the 44 pupils and teachers.
The Yoruba have a saying: Inú ẹni kì í dùn, ká pa á mọ́ra (one does not hide joy or suppress its celebration). So, as we celebrate and congratulate President Bola Tinubu, Governor Seyi Makinde, the military and all the security agencies involved in the Oriire operation, I also join my voice to that of a brilliant professor of history from the Middle Belt who remarked yesterday in the woods of the internet: “Since they have now found a military rescue model that works and avoids the payment of ransoms to terrorists, they should extend it to Kwara, where many kidnapped people are still with terrorists in the forest, and to Borno, where the students abducted from their SSCE examination hall are still with terrorists. No more excuses. No more non-kinetic nonsense. The same team that did the Oriire miracle should get orders to storm Kwara and Borno.”
The Commander-in-Chief must accept that challenge.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
