There is something profoundly insulting about a government that stages a victory parade every time citizens are rescued from criminals who should never have captured them in the first place. It is rather like a fire brigade demanding applause for extinguishing the blaze after spending months neglecting the fire. The rescue of the abducted pupils and teachers from Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State is unquestionably welcome. Their families deserve relief. The security personnel who risked, and by official admission, in some cases lost, their lives deserve the nation’s gratitude. But what Nigeria witnessed in the aftermath was not sober governance. In mature republics, when the state fails to secure its citizens, the subsequent recovery of those citizens is treated with a quiet, somber sense of relief. It is viewed as the belated correction of a catastrophic administrative breakdown. In Abuja and Ibadan, however, the extraction of state hostages is treated as an occasion for theatrical self-congratulation, political point-scoring, and state-sponsored jubilation.
The facts are brazen: on May 15, 2026, bandits breached three separate educational institutions in Oyo State, murdering a teacher, Mr. Michael Oyedokun, and dragging children into the Old Oyo National Park. After 57 harrowing days in captivity, an intelligence-driven operation involving a massive, multi-agency task force comprising the Army, Navy, Air Force, DSS, Police, and local hunters finally applied enough structural pressure to compel the terrorists to abandon their captives. The children and their teachers were freed. Eight suspected terrorists were arrested; others were reportedly killed. If indeed no ransom was paid and no prisoner exchange occurred, the operation deserves professional commendation. Yet professionalism is precisely why triumphalism is so misplaced. Competent states do not congratulate themselves for restoring citizens to the liberty they failed to protect.
The response from the political class has been a competitive display of public excitement. The celebratory chorus that followed from President Bola Tinubu, would have been more convincing had Nigeria not remained one of the world’s kidnapping capitals. Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State immediately announced that he would personally receive the rescued victims in Ibadan. The state’s information apparatus quickly declared the non-payment of ransom a “victory for resilience and principled leadership.” This is an astonishingly tone-deaf framing. To boast of a “principled” refusal to pay ransom while your own public schools are insecure enough to allow mass abductions is a bizarre subversion of logic. The irreducible minimum of the social contract is protection, not the competitive pricing of a post-facto rescue.
Worse still was the immediate descent into partisanship. Speaking in Bauchi, Governor Makinde saw fit to link the trauma of these school children to his own political timeline, noting with suspicious precision that the abduction occurred mere hours after he declared his intention to contest the 2027 presidential election. To reframe a collective security failure as a localized conspiracy aimed at a politician’s personal ambitions is a remarkable vanity. It reduces a structural national tragedy to a footnote in a party-factional primary. Not to be outdone, the broader political apparatus swung into action. A chorus of governors; from Imo to Ogun issued sycophantic communiqués hailing President Tinubu’s “unwavering commitment” and asserting that criminals will find “neither refuge nor reward.” This rhetorical triumphalism ignores a bleak mathematical reality: while the Oriire victims have returned, hundreds of other Nigerians remain unaccounted for in various forest hideouts across the country, their names absent from the presidential statements because their cases lack identical political utility.
The question is not whether the rescue was successful. It plainly was. The question is why the Nigerian state has become so accustomed to failure that merely correcting one catastrophe is presented as an epochal achievement. Across Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto, Borno and parts of the Middle Belt, families continue to wait beside silent telephones, hoping for news of sons, daughters, husbands and wives swallowed by Nigeria’s expanding kidnapping industry. Some have languished in forests for months. Others have disappeared forever. Thousands remain internally displaced by insurgency, banditry and communal violence. Entire communities still pay protection levies to armed gangs exercising de facto sovereignty over Nigerian territory. One successful rescue cannot conceal this grim arithmetic. Indeed, it exposes it. The government’s response has been oddly self-congratulatory. President Tinubu praised the professionalism of the security agencies. Governor Makinde described himself as “overjoyed.” His administration celebrated its refusal to pay ransom as evidence of principled leadership. The Progressive Governors’ Forum hailed the operation as proof that criminals would find “no safe haven.” Political parties rushed to issue statements that read suspiciously like campaign advertisements. One could forgive citizens for wondering whether the greatest beneficiary of the operation was public relations.
There is another uncomfortable truth lurking beneath the celebrations. The abduction itself represented a catastrophic intelligence failure. Terrorists were able to attack multiple schools, seize children and teachers, retreat into forest hideouts and hold them captive for nearly two months before being compelled to release them. If government deserves praise for eventually rescuing the victims, it must also accept responsibility for allowing the kidnapping to occur. Security is not measured by rescue operations. It is measured by prevention. Governments exist not merely to retrieve citizens from danger but to prevent danger from acquiring an address. This distinction matters because Nigeria has drifted into an alarming normalization of insecurity. Every successful rescue is announced as though it were a military victory comparable to liberating occupied territory. Yet the territory in question was never supposed to be occupied by terrorists in the first place.
One particularly revealing aspect of the official narrative deserves closer scrutiny. The government insists that the terrorists demanded the release of one of their kingpins and that no concession was granted. That is commendable if accurate. Yet it simultaneously underscores the sophistication of the criminal networks confronting the Nigerian state. These are no longer opportunistic kidnappers. They possess logistics, intelligence, command structures and negotiation strategies resembling insurgent organizations. Destroying one camp while leaving the wider ecosystem intact merely postpones the next kidnapping. Nor should the nation overlook the extraordinary duration of the ordeal. Fifty-seven days is not an operational footnote. It is almost two months during which schoolchildren remained under terrorist control inside Nigerian territory.
In any country with functioning security institutions, such an episode would provoke searching parliamentary inquiries, intelligence reviews and public accountability. In Nigeria it produces congratulatory speeches. Perhaps the most disturbing consequence is psychological. Every elaborate celebration subtly lowers public expectations. Citizens begin to regard rescue, rather than safety, as the benchmark of competent government. Parents become grateful that abducted children return alive rather than outraged that schools remain vulnerable to attack. The abnormal becomes ordinary.
This is how democracies quietly surrender standards. None of this diminishes the bravery of the soldiers, intelligence officers, police personnel, Amotekun operatives, hunters and local vigilantes who participated in the rescue. On the contrary, their courage deserves recognition precisely because they were required to rectify a national failure under extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Their sacrifice should never become political decoration. Nor should the heartfelt gratitude expressed by the rescued teachers be exploited as a substitute for accountability. Survivors understandably thank those who save them. That is human nature. Governments, however, are judged by different standards. They are judged not by expressions of gratitude but by measurable reductions in insecurity. That remains elusive.
The authorities have promised justice for the murdered teacher, Michael Oyedokun. They have promised continued operations against the remaining terrorists. They have promised more forest guards and stronger intelligence. These are welcome commitments. Nigerians have heard many such promises before. The true measure of success will not be this week’s photographs of smiling politicians receiving rescued children. It will be whether there is another Oriire. Until schools cease resembling soft targets, until highways cease functioning as hunting grounds for kidnappers, until forests cease operating as terrorist sanctuaries, and until ordinary Nigerians can travel without calculating ransom values, official jubilation remains premature.
The proper response to this rescue is gratitude mixed with humility. Gratitude for lives saved. Humility because the Republic still has far too many citizens waiting to come home. A serious government does not mistake one rescue for the end of a war. It understands that every captive still hidden in Nigeria’s forests is a standing indictment of the state’s first constitutional obligation: the protection of life and property. Until that obligation is consistently fulfilled, the applause should be reserved not for press conferences, but for the day when there are no kidnapped schoolchildren left to rescue.
