The news from Oyo State arrived with the familiar brutality that has become common in our country. Terrorists descended on schools in Oriire Local Government Area and abducted pupils, students, and teachers as if they were spoils of war. By the time the figures emerged, our country had been handed another register of sorrow: students missing, teachers abducted, families shattered, and one teacher beheaded.

Behind every number sits a household caught between prayer and dread.

Somewhere in Oyo State, a mother has stopped sleeping because the child she bathed for school did not return home. Somewhere else, a father walks from the police station to a church and back again, searching for words of hope. A wife has buried a husband whose only offence was showing up to teach children in a rural community. Children who escaped the attack will carry the memory of armed men invading classrooms long after the headlines disappear from public attention.

The dead teacher, Adesiyan Joel Adegboye, belonged to that neglected class of Nigerians who still believe that service matters. Rural teachers earn little, travel difficult roads, and work in communities abandoned by the government. Many remain because they believe education offers children a chance to escape hardship. His burial last Friday should have shaken the conscience of the country. Instead, our country moved through the tragedy with the familiarity of people who have seen too much grief too often.

School attacks once carried the association of distant northern territories where insurgency had become rooted through years of state failure, poverty, and political opportunism. The Oyo abductions show how insecurity now travels freely across geography. Communities in the southwest once regarded mass school kidnappings as horrors belonging elsewhere. 

That illusion has evaporated. 

A country reaches a dangerous point when parents begin to fear the journey to school more than ignorance itself. The attack in Oriire raises questions that demand serious answers from this government. Rural schools across our country remain dangerously exposed. Many operate without perimeter fencing, trained security personnel, emergency communication facilities, or rapid response arrangements with law enforcement agencies. Teachers, students and pupils gather each morning in spaces that would struggle to withstand even a brief organised assault. Armed groups understand this reality. Soft targets offer easier access, weaker resistance, and larger emotional impact.

Public officials often respond after such tragedies with familiar declarations about investigations, tactical deployments, and rescue efforts. Citizens have heard these assurances through the years of sustained kidnappings, massacres, and attacks on public institutions. Confidence weakens each time victims remain in captivity for weeks while families negotiate survival through private channels.

Security failure carries consequences beyond immediate casualties. Education itself begins to suffer long after gunmen leave the scene. Parents withdraw their children from schools located in isolated communities. Teachers reject postings to rural communities. Attendance falls. Young people already burdened by poverty become more vulnerable to exploitation, criminal recruitment, and permanent exclusion from formal learning. The children who were abducted from those schools belong to a generation already trapped inside economic uncertainty. They were born into homes where families struggle daily with inflation, unemployment, and rising food prices. Their parents still send them to school because education remains one of the few surviving promises available to our people. 

Armed terrorists continuously break their hope.

Our country ineluctably normalises violence. Public reaction to mass abductions increasingly follows a sad cycle. News breaks. Outrage erupts online. Officials issue statements. Days pass. Attention shifts elsewhere. Families get locked inside private agony while national focus drifts toward the next disaster. Such emotional weariness weakens collective moral pressure on leadership. Political leaders speak frequently about national unity and development. Those ideas become hollow in communities where citizens cannot safely attend school, farm their land, or travel roads. Security forms the basic obligation of governance. Citizens surrender authority to the state partly because they expect protection in return. Every successful attack exposes the widening distance between that expectation and the present reality.

The Oyo tragedy also reveals the uneven visibility of suffering in Nigeria. Certain attacks command sustained national outrage because they occur in major cities or involve influential victims. Rural communities often mourn in relative obscurity. Children abducted from villages rarely receive prolonged media attention once initial reports fade. Their families continue to hope for the safe returns of their wards, while our country resumes political conversations around politicians who have lost their seats in the legislature and to inanities.

The killing of Michael Oyedokun introduces another disturbing dimension to the crisis. Beheading represents violence intended not only to kill but also to terrorise communities psychologically. Such acts spread fear beyond immediate victims. Teachers across rural Nigeria will read the story and wonder whether their classrooms have become death traps. Parents will hesitate before sending young children to distant schools. Communities will begin measuring residents’ lives against the possibility of catastrophe. Our country cannot continue approaching security disasters as isolated incidents disconnected from broader national decline. Armed groups flourish where state authority weakens, where intelligence gathering collapses, where corruption drains public resources, and where rural communities feel abandoned. Security operations alone cannot repair those deeper conditions. Political seriousness, institutional reforms, economic inclusion, and accountable governance remain essential to any lasting response.

The children still missing from Oyo deserve sympathy. Their families deserve urgency grounded in competence, not public relations. Teachers deserve protection equal to the importance society claims to attach to education. Rural communities deserve the same sense of safety enjoyed by political elites protected behind convoys, escorts, and fortified residences. The news from Oyo should disturb the country’s conscience because it speaks to something larger than a single criminal attack. It paints the picture of a country where helplessness increasingly defines ordinary life. Schoolchildren now enter classrooms carrying risks that previous generations could scarcely imagine. Parents wake each morning calculating the dangers attached to their responsibilities. Teachers stand before blackboards while wondering whether armed men may arrive before closing hours.

Country people survive hardship when they still believe tomorrow can improve upon today. That belief weakens each time children disappear from classrooms into forests controlled by terrorists.

Oyo is grieving today. Many communities recognise the feeling too well. But our politicians remain consumed by empty spectacles and petty power struggles, behaving as though the country can endure endless neglect without consequences. The lesson from Babylon should trouble us. While King Belshazzar and his court feasted in comfort, the forces of Cyrus entered the city and brought the empire to ruin. Our country drifts toward a similar danger as the leaders grow detached from the sufferings of our people and treat national decline with dangerous indifference. A country does not collapse in a single moment. It weakens gradually while those entrusted with its future look away.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette