Abuja marked Children's Day on May 27 with speeches and celebrations while dozens of Nigerian schoolchildren remain in terrorist captivity, some for weeks, after being kidnapped from their classrooms in a series of brazen attacks that have exposed the Bola Tinubu administration's inability to protect its youngest citizens.
The grim irony was not lost on Nigerians. As government officials issued statements pledging commitment to children's welfare, kidnapped students ranging in age from 2 to 14 years old remained in the hands of armed groups, sleeping on cold ground in forest camps, unable to bathe themselves, traumatized by violence they witnessed during their abduction.
In one particularly horrific incident reported by Punch, a teacher was beheaded in front of the children during a kidnapping raid on a school in Oyo State. The surviving students, some as young as toddlers, witnessed the execution—a trauma that will haunt them for life, if they survive captivity at all.
"Today is Children's Day, but Nigerian children are still in captivity," wrote one frustrated citizen on the Nigeria subreddit. "Children who were taken from their school, which was supposed to be a place of learning by terrorists. The government is not saying anything about it. The government is not even faking sympathy for these children."
The criticism is pointed and accurate. President Tinubu's response to the escalating kidnapping crisis has been to urge Nigerians to pray that bandits and terrorists have a change of heart—a response that demonstrates either profound disconnection from reality or complete abdication of governmental responsibility.
In Nigeria, as across Africa's giants, challenges are real but entrepreneurial energy and cultural creativity drive progress. Yet no amount of Nigerian dynamism can compensate for a government that responds to armed terrorism with prayer rather than military strategy.
The kidnapping epidemic has become so normalized that Nigerians now track abductions the way other countries track weather patterns. A video compilation circulating on social media shows , and those are only the cases that made headlines.
