Who Will Answer Nigeria's Bleeding

What Happened in Oriire on 15 May

Picture a Friday morning in Yawota, in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. Exercise books are open. A teacher is mid sentence. Then motorcycles, gunfire, and men walking into classrooms as if they had the timetable.

That was 15 May 2026. Gunmen struck schools in Yawota and the neighbouring community of Ahoro Esinele, including Baptist Nursery and Primary School, a community secondary school, and L.A. Primary School. The numbers vary by source, which is its own kind of sorrow. Oyo’s own officials gave early counts that shifted for days. The figure most often repeated is forty six: thirty nine pupils and seven teachers, according to a report carried by Vanguard in July, with the Christian Association of Nigeria in Oyo describing the captives as mostly children between two and sixteen.

Two teachers died. Accounts differ on when and how, so I’ll say only what a court has been told. The charge sheet in Abuja names a teacher called Oyedokun and another called Olaleye as the two victims killed, and the prosecution alleges that one of them was beheaded. Those are allegations until a judge says otherwise. They are also somebody’s colleague and somebody’s husband.

It is now five months since that morning and three months since the children came home. The news has stopped breaking. This is the part where a country usually looks away, so let’s not.

Fifty Six Days in the Forest

For fifty six days nobody outside the forest knew for certain who was alive. Government told the public little, and what it did say was sometimes contradicted by families. A federal delegation brought rice and cash to Yawota in the last days of May. As reported at the time, the women there turned it down. They had not asked for relief packages. They had asked for their children.

The Nigeria Union of Teachers in Oyo shut public schools from 1 June. Teachers rallied in Lagos. On 4 June the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria publicly called for the captives’ release. The union suspended its strike on 1 July, with the state promising a joint security task force for vulnerable schools, counselling for victims and payment of entitlements to the families of the dead teachers. So the strike ended while the children were still missing. I’d forgotten that until I went back to read the dates, and it’s worth remembering, because teachers went back to classrooms for nine more days with their colleagues still in captivity.

On 10 July the presidency announced that all the pupils and teachers had been rescued. Spokesman Bayo Onanuga said eight members of the gang were in custody of the Department of State Services and that some attackers had been “neutralised”. He also said, “There was no quid pro quo in the rescue,” meaning the government denied giving up a kingpin whose release the kidnappers had demanded. The agencies promised a fuller account later. As far as I could find, that account has not been published in any detail, so how the children came out is still told mainly in the government’s words.

I’m not saying the government is lying. I’m saying that three months on, the public knows who has been charged but still doesn’t have an independent account of the last days. A mother is entitled to that.

What the Courts Have Done Since

By 20 July the federal government had named three suspects, all from Suleja in Niger State, and filed a ten count charge at the Federal High Court in Abuja under the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022. The charge sheet says they professed membership of Darul Salam, described as an affiliate of the proscribed group Ansaru. It alleges that the three conspired between January and May with three other men, said to be at large, to carry out the abduction. One of them is also accused of financing terrorism through illegal gold mining.

In September the Department of State Services brought a new amended charge against five men, again alleged to be Ansaru members. On 17 September, before Justice Salim Ibrahim, all five pleaded not guilty. An earlier hearing had been put off because the men wanted their own lawyer. The prosecution asked for trial to begin at once and the court allowed its witnesses to wear masks. I found no reported trial date after that.

Two of the five carry names resembling those that security sources gave the press in June for commanders the kidnappers wanted freed. I note it as a resemblance only. The court has to decide what those men did, and the rest of us have to leave them the presumption of innocence that we would demand for our own sons.

What the Kidnap Figures Now Show

Oyo felt like an exception because it happened in the south west, within reach of Ibadan and Lagos. The numbers say otherwise.

In August, SBM Intelligence published its latest count of kidnapping in Nigeria, covering July 2025 to June 2026. It recorded 7,825 people kidnapped in 1,411 incidents, up from 4,722 the year before, a rise of about 66 percent. At least 1,142 people were killed, against 762 the previous year. Kidnappers demanded 22.86 billion naira, well below the 48 billion of the year before, but families and others paid at least 7.78 billion, compared with about 2.56 billion. In plain terms, the gangs asked for less and collected three times as much. Borno alone accounted for 5.05 billion of the payments.

I’d read that as a market that works. People pay because the alternative is a funeral, whatever the law says, and each payment funds the next raid. No argument about principle survives a night when your child is in a forest, and the law that forbids paying never had to sit through one.

Anyone who wants to read this crisis as something done to the south by the north, or to Christians by Muslims, should look at where the victims were. SBM counted 7,334 victims in the north, which is 93.7 percent, and 491 in the south. The biggest totals were in Zamfara, with 1,921, then Sokoto with 1,157 and Kaduna with 814. The report doesn’t record victims’ religion, so I won’t pretend it does. But Zamfara and Sokoto are states where most people are Muslim, and they bleed more than anywhere.

The Sharia Demand and What It Does Not Prove

Here’s the objection in its strongest form, and I want to state it fairly. A Christian parent in Oyo reads that kidnappers wanted Sharia imposed on a southern state, and concludes that this is a religious war, that the pattern across the country confirms it, and that anyone who tells him otherwise is being polite at his children’s expense. That is not a stupid reading. Nigeria has real history of religious violence, and a demand like that, if it was made, would be a deliberate provocation.

Start with what is documented. Leadership and other outlets reported in early June that the kidnappers wanted a ransom of one billion naira, two vehicles, the release of detained associates and the implementation of Sharia in Oyo. Sahara Reporters wrote on 10 June that the Sharia claim was one “the victims have debunked”, and quoted the activist Francis Nwapa saying that “Whether true or not, no serious government publicly discloses sensitive details of negotiations.” I could not find the victims’ account first hand, and the prosecution documents I read do not mention a Sharia demand at all. So it is reported, it is disputed, and it has not been tested in court.

Now suppose it was made. The Muslim community in Oyo State answered within days. A joint statement from its leaders said, “Islam forbids kidnapping, terrorism and the extortion of innocent citizens,” and “Terrorists do not represent Islamic values and cannot speak for Muslims.” Those who have been charged are accused of belonging to a group the Nigerian state has proscribed as terrorist, and the court papers describe them as men from Niger State. Whatever a gang says to extract money, the accusation in Abuja is terrorism, not a Muslim programme for Oyo.

None of that makes the demand harmless. Armed men who use the language of a faith to frighten a Christian town have done something wicked, and a Christian is allowed to say so. But the churches that took Oyo’s grief seriously should take the grief of Zamfara just as seriously, since the same industry is emptying villages there at a far larger scale, and the mothers there have no cameras waiting for them. Our grief cannot be selective and still be Christian.

What Waiting Does to a Nation

The Oriire children are home, and the question now is what home looks like. Parents quoted in July said they were afraid to send them back. One relative, Fausat Akindele, put it this way: “What happened has changed everything for us.” The state’s information commissioner, Dotun Oyelade, said that it was “understandable if parents do not want to send their children back to those schools,” that work had begun on the buildings, and that security was mainly a federal matter. I could not find reporting since then on whether those schools have reopened or how many pupils have returned. That silence tells its own story.

The prophet Habakkuk would have understood the waiting. He opens his book with a charge against God that no Nigerian who has followed the news needs explained.

“Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.”

— Habakkuk 1:3 (ESV)

He doesn’t get the answer he wants. He gets a longer one, that God is at work and that the wicked will not be left to enjoy what they’ve taken, and he is told to wait for it. That is a hard sermon to preach in Yawota. I wouldn’t preach it fast, and I wouldn’t preach it to anyone still waiting for news. But it is honest. The Bible doesn’t hand the sufferer a quick answer, and it doesn’t tell him he is wrong to ask.

What the Church Can Do Besides Pray

The church hasn’t been absent. Congregations pray, raise money for the displaced, and pay quietly to get their own people back. Priests have been among the kidnapped. None of that is small.

But prayer meetings can’t be the whole response, and I doubt most pastors think they are. Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall while enemies were planning to stop him, and the account of how he did it is more practical than people remember.

“Those who carried burdens were loaded in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other.”

— Nehemiah 4:17 (ESV)

He didn’t stop building to fight, and he didn’t stop praying to organise. His prayer in the first chapter and his building in the third are the same project. For us it might mean something quite ordinary. Church leaders could press local governments to publish what happens after a school attack, as the Oriire families are still waiting to learn. Dioceses and denominations could share what they know about threats, as they already do about missions. Pastors in the south could visit pastors and imams in the north, and listen to what a Zamfara mother says about the last two years before they say a word about their own. Congregations could fund the counselling the Oyo government has promised for rescued children. And every citizen could keep asking, at the ballot box and in the church car park, why a gang with motorcycles ran a school abduction for fifty six days.

None of it is dramatic. Most answers to a bleeding country aren’t.

Answering the Question Isaiah Heard

Isaiah’s vision in the temple ends with a question put to nobody in particular.

“And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me.’”

— Isaiah 6:8 (ESV)

Isaiah didn’t know the cost when he raised his hand. The teachers of Yawota hadn’t known it either, on the morning they set out to teach the alphabet to children of two. Two of them paid, and fourteen weeks after the rescue a court in Abuja is still hearing about it.

So here’s what I’d ask of you, whoever you are reading this. Find out which school in your area has had a security scare, and who is meant to protect it. Ask your own pastor what your church will do for the next family that goes through this, so the answer isn’t invented in the middle of the night. Give to a fund that pays for a teacher’s family or a child’s counselling, and check that it reaches them. And when the next headline comes, say a prayer, and then say something to someone with the power to act.

References

Biblical References

Matthew 2:18 (ESV). Epigraph. Rachel’s weeping for children who are gone names the grief of Oriire’s families and of every Nigerian parent in the same position.
Habakkuk 1:3 (ESV). The prophet’s complaint to God gives voice to Nigeria’s waiting, and God’s longer answer frames the sermon the section dares to preach.
Nehemiah 4:17 (ESV). Builders working with a weapon in hand set out the church’s double duty to build and to guard, and Nehemiah’s chapters one and three show that prayer and practical work belong together.
Isaiah 6:8 (ESV). The call and the answer that closes the article.

Other Sources

Channels Television. (2026, July 10). Abducted Oyo pupils, teachers regain freedom: Presidency. https://www.channelstv.com/2026/07/10/breaking-abducted-oyo-pupils-teachers-regain-freedom-presidency/
Channels Television. (2026, September 16). Oyo school abduction: DSS to re arraign five suspected Ansaru terrorists over alleged involvement. https://www.channelstv.com/2026/09/16/oyo-school-abduction-dss-to-re-arraign-five-suspected-ansaru-terrorists-over-alleged-involvement/
Nairametrics. (2026, August 27). Nigerians pay N7.78 billion ransom as kidnappings surge 66%. Reporting SBM Intelligence, The capture of Nigeria’s kidnap economy. https://nairametrics.com/2026/08/27/nigerians-pay-n7-78-billion-ransom-as-kidnappings-surge-66/
News Central TV. (2026, June 6). Oyo Muslims reject terrorists’ demands in Oriire. https://newscentraltv.com/?p=415384
Pulse Nigeria. (2026, July 20). Oyo school kidnap: FG reveals identities of three suspects behind abduction of pupils, teachers. https://www.pulse.ng/story/oyo-school-kidnap-fg-reveals-identities-of-three-suspects-behind-abduction-of-pupils-teachers-2026072008570965167
Sahara Reporters. (2026, June 10). Oyo government faces backlash over fabricating terrorists’ demands amid continued captivity. https://saharareporters.com/2026/06/10/oyo-government-faces-backlash-fabricating-terrorists-demands-amid-continued-captivity
Sahara Reporters. (2026, September 17). DSS re arraigns five suspected terrorists over Oyo school kidnap, defendants plead not guilty. https://saharareporters.com/2026/09/17/dss-re-arraigns-five-suspected-terrorists-over-oyo-school-kidnap-defendants-plead-not
The Guardian Nigeria. (2026, July 2). NUT suspends strike, directs Oyo teachers to resume work today. https://guardian.ng/news/nut-suspends-strike-directs-oyo-teachers-to-resume-work-today/
Vanguard (via AllAfrica). (2026, July 13). Nigeria: After 56 days in captivity our children may not return to schools, Oriire parents. https://allafrica.com/stories/202607140537.html
Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Oyo school abduction. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyo_school_kidnappings

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.