By Rekpene Bassey
Aristotle observed that the purpose of the state is not merely to enable life but to enable the good life. By that measure, few failures of the modern Nigerian state have been as devastating, or rather as enduring, as its inability to protect children in their classrooms.
School abductions are often reported as security incidents. They are far more than that. They are assaults on education, attacks on social mobility, and challenges to the very idea of state authority. Every child taken from a dormitory, classroom or hostel represents not simply a victim of crime but a breach in the social contract.
For more than a decade, Nigeria has lived through a recurring nightmare. Armed men arrive under cover of darkness. They overwhelm poorly defended schools and communities. They seize children and teachers. Then they disappear into forests, mountains and vast ungoverned spaces where the reach of government fades.
The pattern has become so familiar that each new kidnapping risks being absorbed into the background noise of national insecurity.
Taken together, these attacks constitute one of the most sustained campaigns against education anywhere in the contemporary world.
What began as an ideological war against Western education has evolved into something more complex. And, in some respects, more dangerous: a hybrid economy of terrorism, banditry, extortion and ransom.
Schools have become so unsafe and soft targets. Children have become strategic assets. Kidnapping has become a business model.
The modern history of this crisis is punctuated by dates that have become part of Nigeria’s collective memory. In February 2014, militants attacked the Federal Government College in Buni Yadi, Yobe State, killing more than 50 students as they slept in their dormitories.
Two months later, the event came that transformed a Nigerian tragedy into a global cause. On April 14, 2014, Boko Haram fighters abducted 276 girls from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State.
The kidnapping triggered the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign, drew the attention of world leaders and celebrities, and exposed profound weaknesses in Nigeria’s security architecture.
More than a decade later, Chibok remains both a symbol and a warning. Some of the girls escaped. Others were released through negotiations. Some remain unaccounted for, a reminder that national traumas do not always end when headlines fade.
If Chibok shocked the world, it also taught armed groups a dangerous lesson. Mass abduction worked. It generated publicity. It generated leverage. Most importantly, it generated profit.
In 2018, Boko Haram abducted 110 girls from Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi. Most were eventually released, but Leah Sharibu reportedly remained in captivity after refusing to renounce her Christian faith.
By 2020, the epicentre of school kidnappings had shifted from the insurgency-ravaged Northeast to the forests of the Northwest. The abduction of 344 students from Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, Katsina State, demonstrated how the tactic had migrated beyond Boko Haram. Criminal groups increasingly recognised that children could be converted into bargaining chips.
The year 2021 marked the industrialisation of mass kidnapping. In rapid succession came Kagara, Jangebe, Afaka, Greenfield University, Birnin Yauri, Bethel Baptist High School and Tegina. Hundreds of students were abducted across multiple states within months.
The attacks followed a grimly efficient formula: identify a poorly defended school, exploit intelligence gaps, move hostages into forest sanctuaries, open negotiations, demand payment and repeat. The model proved frighteningly resilient.
Although the frequency of mass school kidnappings declined after 2021 due to intensified military operations and the Safe Schools Initiative, the threat never disappeared.
The abduction of students from Federal University Gusau in 2023, the kidnapping of 287 pupils in Kuriga, Kaduna State, in March 2024, and attacks on tertiary institutions in Kogi and elsewhere demonstrated that armed groups retained both intent and capability.
More than 280 pupils and teachers were seized in Kuriga alone before security operations secured their release. The episode underscored how quickly large-scale school kidnappings could return despite official claims of progress.
Then came the disturbing developments of 2025. In November, gunmen attacked Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killing the vice principal and abducting 25 schoolgirls. Days later, armed men raided St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, Niger State, abducting more than 300 students and teachers in one of the largest school kidnappings since Chibok.
Although many were eventually released, the attack demonstrated that criminal networks retained the capacity to mobilise large numbers of fighters and execute complex operations on a massive scale. However, the most troubling development may not be the persistence of school abductions but their geographic expansion.
For years, many Nigerians viewed the crisis as a predominantly northern phenomenon, concentrated in regions afflicted by insurgency and banditry. That assumption was shattered on May 15, 2026.
Armed men launched coordinated attacks on schools in Ahoro-Esinele and Yawota communities in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. Pupils, students and school personnel were abducted. A teacher was killed. Schools across neighbouring communities were shut down, while security agencies launched an extensive rescue operation.
Subsequent reports indicated that dozens of victims had been taken into forest hideouts linked to the Old Oyo axis.
The significance of Oriire lies not merely in the number of victims but in what it revealed. The kidnapping economy is no longer confined to the Northeast or Northwest.
It is migrating. What began in Chibok travelled through Dapchi, Kankara, Jangebe and Kuriga before reaching communities in the Southwest that once considered themselves insulated from the phenomenon.
Like a contagion, successful criminal tactics spread when left unchecked. The consequences extend far beyond the immediate victims.
Nigeria already has the world’s largest population of out-of-school children, estimated at more than 18 million. Every attack deepens parental fears, accelerates school closures and undermines confidence in education itself.
For families in vulnerable communities, the decision to send a child to school increasingly involves a calculation between opportunity and danger. The result is a vicious cycle. Insecurity drives children out of school.
Educational deprivation fuels unemployment. Unemployment expands the pool of recruits available to criminal and extremist organisations. The cycle then reproduces itself.
Economically, the kidnapping industry has become a formidable shadow sector. Recent estimates suggest Nigerians paid trillions of naira in ransom between 2023 and 2024. The figures underscore a disturbing reality: kidnapping is no longer merely a security problem. It is an economic enterprise.
Like any profitable enterprise, it survives because incentives remain intact. Every successful ransom payment strengthens the market logic of abduction. Hostages become commodities. Schools become investment opportunities for criminal networks. Children become financial instruments in a violent economy.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that without effective authority, life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Large portions of rural Nigeria increasingly resemble that condition.
The challenge is not simply the existence of armed groups. It is the emergence of spaces where state authority is contested, intermittent or absent.
Vast forest corridors stretching across Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, Sokoto, Kebbi, and increasingly parts of North-Central, Southwest, and South-South Nigeria, particularly in Cross River State, provide sanctuary for kidnappers and other criminal elements, including those engaged in illegal mining and logging.
Porous borders facilitate the movement of weapons and fighters. Weak rural policing limits prevention. Intelligence remains fragmented. Emergency response often arrives after the damage is done.
Under such conditions, kidnappers operate with a degree of strategic confidence. The deeper question, therefore, is not why kidnappings occur. It is why deterrence repeatedly fails.
Deterrence succeeds when the perceived costs of an action outweigh the benefits. But for many kidnapping networks, the equation remains favourable. Ransoms generate revenue. Arrest rates remain relatively low. Convictions are inconsistent. Financial sponsors frequently remain anonymous.
The rewards often exceed the risks. Nigeria has become increasingly effective at rescuing hostages and responding to crises after they occur. It has been less successful at preventing those crises from emerging in the first place.
That distinction is crucial. A nation cannot arrest its way out of a kidnapping economy. Nor can it bomb its way out of one.
The long-term solution requires intelligence-led policing, financial disruption of ransom networks, hardened school infrastructure, rapid-response capabilities, forest-denial operations, border reforms, community-based early warning systems and sustained economic investment in vulnerable regions.
Most importantly, it requires governance. The ultimate objective is not merely to rescue kidnapped children. It is to create conditions in which kidnapping ceases to be a viable enterprise.
Every school that shuts down because parents are afraid represents a victory for those who profit from fear. Every child denied an education represents a strategic loss for the nation.
The names: Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara, Kagara, Jangebe, Afaka, Birnin Yauri, Tegina, Kuriga, Gusau, Papiri and Oriire have become markers on a timeline of national vulnerability. They chart the evolution of a crisis that has outlived governments, military campaigns, intelligence operations and moments of public outrage.
Nigeria can rebuild classrooms. It can reconstruct dormitories. It can replace fences, vehicles and damaged infrastructure.
What is far more difficult to rebuild is trust. And after more than a decade of unsafe schools, stolen classrooms, stolen childhoods and stolen futures, trust may be the most endangered institution in the country.
Plato once warned that the direction in which education starts a child will determine his future life. The question confronting Nigeria today is stark: what future awaits a nation where millions of children increasingly associate education not with opportunity but with danger?
Until children can go to school without fear of being stolen like items, Nigeria’s war against insecurity will remain unfinished; a war against our collective future. Indeed, a state that cannot reliably protect its classrooms is ultimately fighting to protect its future.
