My heart is not just broken, It is torn to shreds. I write as a deeply traumatised, furious, and bleeding Nigerian, whose heart fractures every passing second for the innocent souls currently being tortured in the darkest and most desolate forests of our Nation. Our country has officially descended into an open-air slaughterhouse, a country where human life has become unbearably cheap.
How do we close our eyes at night knowing that thirty-nine of our innocent children, including a defenceless two year old toddler seized on her very first day of school, are out there in the freezing rain being terrorised by monsters? How do we breathe normally when the image of the mathematics teacher Michael Oyedokun, who went to work only to be brutally beheaded in captivity, circulates online like a trophy while our leaders look on with a dead, paralyzing, and unbothered silence? These are human beings, our own flesh and blood, yet they are reduced to mere statistics for evening news briefings while the state operates with a sickening level of nonchalance. The absolute cruelty of these bandits, who deliberately torture children to crush the mental sanity of their families, is enough to make any leader tear their garments in grief. Instead, we are left with the agonizing psychological warfare of kidnappers cutting off phone lines intermittently, leaving families dangling over a cliff of endless torment, screaming into a dark void because the Nigerian state has completely abandoned them.
It is profoundly saddening that while the Nation, and the entire South-West region bleed through this unprecedented security emergency, our collective conscience has gone completely numb. Instead of a wave of public anger sweeping through the land, instead of citizens flooding the streets in unyielding protest to demand the heads of the terrorists and the resignation of incompetent officials, the entire country recently paused to obsessively celebrate and trend the Ojude Oba festival. How have we become this chillingly desensitised? We have degenerated into a society that chooses the glamour of colourful cultural carnivals, expensive fabrics, and internet breaking fashion statements over the raw, agonising screams of forty-six citizens being tortured in the forests of Oriire. The truth is bitter. We are simply not angry enough. We have mastered the art of compartmentalising our horrors, dancing at lavish parties and posting social media aesthetics while the blood of our compatriots dries on school uniforms, proving that our collective empathy has been replaced by a superficial, cold, and deadened public spirit.
While our villages are being wiped off the map and burned to the ground, the big bosses in the presidency are busy playing politics on social media. It is deeply painful to see that presidential aides can spend all their energy battling online with critics like VeryDarkMan over fake voice notes, purely to protect their polished corporate image. How can this government quickly deploy heavy machinery to fight a war on X and Instagram, yet fail to find the tactical intelligence or the will to flush out the bloodthirsty terrorists living openly in our national parks? When a government cares more about online criticism than the actual lives of weeping mothers whose children have been stolen, that government has completely lost its soul. It reveals that they are far more afraid of looking bad on social media than they are of losing poor, innocent children to wicked bandits in the deep bush.
I am equally disgusted by the shameless and stomach-turning exhibition of moral bankruptcy from our politicians, Senators, House of Representatives members, and the absolute circus of political aspirants across all party lines. We are trapped in a country where our supposed leaders are numb, cold, and stripped of basic human feeling, showing more concern for election primaries, strategic victories, and personal political fortunes than for the bleeding heart of their own nation. While parents weep and scream in the bushes of Oriire, our lawmakers are inside air-conditioned party secretariats haggling over delegate lists, buying nomination forms, and throwing lavish parties to celebrate their tickets. It is a grotesque crime against humanity when the political class pops expensive champagne over winning a primary while the blood of a dedicated schoolteacher is still fresh on the soil of Oyo State, proving beyond any doubt that to these elites, political power is everything and human life is absolutely nothing.
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This total failure has reduced a giant country like Nigeria to a weak, helpless beggar that bows, negotiates, and pleads with common criminals just to purchase a few days of peace. How did we sink into this dark hole? How did a nation with a fully funded military machine degenerate to the point where lawless killers now give us orders, lock down our schools, and force poor, weeping parents to beg for donations on WhatsApp just to pay off kidnappers? We arrived at this terrible place through years of deep-seated greed, corruption in which security funds are stolen by senior politicians, and a deliberate refusal by those at the top to arrest the wealthy sponsors of these terrorists. By choosing to pay off criminals and strike backroom deals instead of dismantling them permanently, the government has transformed kidnapping into a highly lucrative, zero-risk business, leaving the average Nigerian to pay the heavy price with their own blood.
This horrific tragedy in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State is the ultimate and irrefutable proof that the grand promises of the Renewed Hope agenda have deflated into an insulting and empty political slogan. Where is the renewed hope when armed terrorists dressed in stolen military camouflage can ride effortlessly into three schools simultaneously, unleash a hail of bullets, and cart away forty-six citizens without a single immediate state interception? The federal government swore to secure this country so that every Nigerian could farm, learn, and travel without fear, yet today we are trapped in a terrifying regional contagion in which northern-style mass school abductions have successfully reached the South West.
President Bola Tinubu’s administration must understand that remote press releases from Abuja do not stop an improvised explosive device from halting rescue troops, nor do they dry the tears of a mother whose child is a captive inside the sovereign criminal kingdoms thriving in the Old Oyo National Park. The ruling APC cannot govern a country through performative television broadcasts while the ground drinks the blood of its citizens. At the same time, the opposition PDP, ADC, NDC, and their endless factional boards are equally guilty, using these human tragedies as cheap rhetorical talking points while their own governors sit back, completely toothless and frozen in the face of active terror.
The structural rot is laid completely bare by the operational paralysis of our centralized security framework, screaming for the immediate and non-negotiable implementation of state policing and synchronized regional security collaboration. It is a massive and suicidal constitutional absurdity that a governor, whether it is Seyi Makinde of Oyo State or any of his counterparts in neighbouring states, must practically beg for orders from an Inspector General of Police in Abuja before tactical teams can move with full autonomous firepower to defend a bleeding border. The current system is a broken colonial relic that treats a nation of over two hundred million people like a small local district, and trying to secure the South West through long-distance administrative decrees from Abuja is an absolute failure.
We need an immediate and aggressive constitutional amendment to Section 214 to completely unbundle the Nigeria Police Force and give states the sovereign right to run heavily armed state police structures. We need local officers who actually know the treacherous terrain of the Oquara forest corridor, who speak the local language, and who are directly accountable to the mothers and fathers of the community rather than a detached federal apparatus that views rural Oyo as a dispensable wasteland. The fact that rural communities in that zone explicitly warned security agencies about suspicious armed movements days before the Oriire attack, only for those intelligence briefs to be entirely ignored due to federal bureaucratic delays, is a damning indictment that centralization is killing us.
Regional frameworks like the Amotekun corps must be immediately upgraded by law, armed with military grade weapons, and fully synchronized with state intelligence networks to shut down the porous criminal transit routes between Oyo, Kwara, and Osun states. We must transform our security posture from a reactive, camera-friendly theatre into an unyielding iron shield.
There is also a deeply troubling pattern that demands urgent investigation, the speed with which graphic images and videos of atrocities committed by terrorist groups, including Boko Haram, ISWAP, and other violent extremist organisations responsible for severe harm and human rights violations appear on blogs and social media long before government agencies or credible news outlets release verified information. How do bloggers obtain these materials so quickly? Who supplies them? Through what channels do such sensitive images travel from perpetrators to online publishers with such precision and speed? This digital pipeline must be traced. Investigating these networks could expose collaborators, disrupt propaganda channels, and help identify the terrorists who commit these atrocities. Nigeria cannot continue to allow criminals to control the narrative of violence.
I call upon every single Nigerian, every civil society group, every student union, and every community leader to wake from this slumber, discard our collective numbness, and demand absolute and uncompromising accountability from both the federal government and state executives. We must refuse entirely to normalize this horror. We must channel our hidden rage away from internet festivals and into an unrelenting roar to bring back our children, and we must legally force the restructuring of our security architecture before this raging fire consumes what remains of our nation.
To the beautiful, resilient, and profoundly devastated people of Oyo State, and most especially to the grieving and tortured families of Oriire, I weep with you, I bleed with you, and my heart burns alongside yours. But I beg you not to let your spirits be permanently broken by this demonic assault on your peace. Do not surrender to the cold, dead indifference of the political class or let their numbness extinguish your courage. Your resilience is the ultimate living rebuke to these monsters. Stand unyielding, hold each other close in this dark hour, keep screaming for justice for Michael Oyedokun and the forty-six captives, and know that the burning moral conscience of this entire country stands with you in the trenches until every single child and teacher is rescued and brought back home to safety.
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