AN EPIDEMIC OF STOLEN SCHOOL CHILDREN
The authorities must do more to secure and protect our children
On the morning of 15 May, as children in three schools in the Oriire area of Oyo State were settling into the ordinary rituals of a school day, more than a dozen gunmen on motorcycles rode into Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota; Community Grammar School, Esiele; and L.A. Primary School. By the time they rode back into the forest, an assistant headmaster and a motorcyclist lay dead while dozens of pupils and their teachers were herded into the bush at gunpoint. A few days later, the abductors beheaded one of those teachers. Later still, a member of the security forces who had joined the rescue effort died after running into explosives the kidnappers had planted on the trail.
Meanwhile, on the very same day in distant Borno State, gunmen seized more than 40 children from a school in the Askira/Uba area, as though to remind Nigerians that this is not a local tragedy but a national condition. Those abducted Borno children are still unaccounted for while the pupils and the surviving teachers of the Oyo State tragedy remain somewhere in the forest. The principal of one of the schools, herself a captive, has filmed a video from the bush, begging the country to remember that they are alive and waiting.
