June 10, 2026
The entire drama that featured the abduction of Mrs. Olaide Busayo Adegoke John-Paul and her 12-year-old twin boys lasted for just three days, between Wednesday and Saturday. Those were tension-soaked days that served mostly to highlight or add to the pressure on a federal government that many had come to see as the very symbol of incompetence.
Abuja, for many, had failed to uphold the fundamental objective justifying the social contract between a state and the people: the assurance of the safety and welfare of the citizens. A day or two earlier, Nigerians had been angered to distraction and made desperate by the terrorists in the Oriire community in Ogbomoso LGA. They had released (for the second time) a painful but cowardly footage in which two of the women captives, with the barrel of a gun pointing in their faces, were made to beg the authorities not to make any attempt to storm the forest to free the 46 hostages being held there.
Stirred by that footage and reports of more abductions in other parts of the country, the Nigeria Union of Teachers and other civil society groups were already issuing threats of civil disobedience. They were bent on protesting against the abduction of pupils, students and their teachers in Ogbomoso. It was the third week and it didn’t look as if the government was doing enough to rescue them. They are now in the fourth week of their abduction and, just when one had concluded that there had not been any new developments since last week, another footage emerged from the forest with the now-familiar face of Mrs. Folawe Alamu.
