Catholics gather for a mass at the Church of the Assumption in Lagos on April 21, 2025. An unknown number of pupils have been abducted from a Catholic school in central Nigeria, an official said on November 21, 2025, in the second such incident in less than a week.
In May 2026, bandits stormed three schools in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State, beheading a teacher named Michael Oyedokun in front of his students before abducting children into the forest. The bandits then invaded Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Community Grammar School, and L.A. Primary School in a coordinated attack. This was not an isolated horror. It was the latest entry in a ledger that has been filling since 2014. Nigeria does not have a kidnapping problem. It has a governance collapse that expresses itself, most visibly and most shamefully, through the bodies of little children.
Nigeria has recorded over 20 major school kidnapping incidents since the 2014 Chibok abduction, with more than 1,700 students and staff abducted, showing how insecurity has become seriously embedded in the country's social system, particularly in northern and central regions. These are not episodic failures. They are a pattern so consistent it constitutes policy through inaction.
