President Bola Ahmed Tinubu stood on a stump in opposition and hurled a simple demand at then president Goodluck Jonathan: act to protect Nigerians or step aside. He invoked competence, honor and the primal duty of the state to keep its children from harm. That admonition, delivered with righteous impatience, was the music of accountability. Nigeria’s children are disappearing again; vanishing into the ungoverned night, swallowed by the geography of state failure. Their abductions are no longer national shocks; they have metastasized into a grim civic routine. Let us be blunt about the stakes. A nation that normalizes school kidnappings normalizes the theft of its future. The children abducted today are the teachers, nurses, engineers and judges of tomorrow. Today, with more than 300 schoolchildren, mostly girls, snatched from classrooms across the country, that music has become an unbearable, hollow echo. The question is no longer rhetorical: if Tinubu once asked Jonathan to resign for failing to secure the nation, why does he not resign now for failing to secure the students?
This is not hyperbole. The mass abductions that have scarred towns in Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara, Katsina, and elsewhere are not isolated acts of criminality; they are an indictment of policy, capacity and will. Kidnapping schoolchildren is not merely a security failure. It is a civilizational failure. When a state cannot guarantee that classrooms are safe sanctuaries; when lessons are interrupted by fear and corridors become conduits to ransom, the compact between citizen and government is being steadily, gruesomely dismantled. Tinubu ran on a promise of competence. He promised that his stewardship would restore order and rekindle economic life. He promised decisive action against insecurity. He promised that he would not be the president who looked away. Yet the country watches as abductions multiply, as parents barricade their children at home, and as communities barter safety for survival. The president who once wielded moral thunder from the sidelines must now answer the fundamental question of governance: What plans, what resources, what urgency has he brought to bear to stop this hemorrhage of childhood?
Nigeria is now an obituary-in-progress; an unfinished eulogy to a nation that has forgotten its children.
President Tinubu, once the most flamboyant critic of presidential inertia, now presides over its masterpiece. From the comfort of Lagos drawing rooms and campaign podia, Tinubu once thundered that a president unwilling or unable to protect Nigerians should resign. Jonathan, he said, had failed the most basic test of leadership: securing the lives of citizens. Tinubu did not hedge, soften, contextualize or philosophize. He demanded resignation. So, let us resurrect his own logic since memory, like governance, appears to have decayed in this administration: If abducted schoolchildren were grounds for resignation in 2014, what then, sir, shall we call this era; this theatre of serial kidnappings, military withdrawals under suspicious timing, school closures spanning entire states, and a national psychology permanently rewired by fear? If Jonathan’s failure was intolerable, is Tinubu’s merely inconvenient?
The president now reads riot acts to terrorists, delivered not even by his own voice, but by a legislative surrogate in Kaduna. Through the Speaker of the House of Representatives, he offered mournful poetics about a North “bleeding,” a nation “paralyzed,” a moral compass “distorted.” Tinubu spoke of inherited complexities, institutional decay, and historical dysfunction, as though insecurity were geological rather than governmental. And then, with stunning abstraction, he promised highways, endowment funds, and emerging oil prospects. One wonders what abducted children will do with a superhighway. Tinubu praises the Arewa Consultative Forum as “a reservoir of patriots, thinkers, moral leaders.” Yet it is schoolgirls – hungry, frightened, barefoot – who now embody patriotism, courage and sacrifice. They have been abandoned to negotiate survival in forests while the state negotiates semantics in conference halls. He warns leaders not to “sleep comfortably while millions sleep hungry or travel in fear.” But this president sleeps. Soundly.
Yes, the crisis is complex. But complexity is not exculpation. A Kebbi governor is demanding answers after soldiers reportedly withdrew from a school less than an hour before bandits arrived. The Christian Association of Nigeria and the Catholic Diocese of Kontagora accuse state officials of peddling propaganda to evade responsibility. School administrators insist no warnings or shutdown directives were ever issued. Their students are gone. Their buildings have been abandoned. Their windows sealed. Their playgrounds silent. Yet we are told the administration is “determined,” “committed,” and “urgent.” Determined speeches, committed platitudes, urgent nothingness.
Meanwhile, at least 180 schools across northern Nigeria have closed, not for renovations, not for reforms, but because the state cannot ensure the physical survival of students. We have entered the age of educational exile. Learning has become a gamble; knowledge a hazard; childhood a crime scene.
Nigeria, the so-called Giant of Africa, now trembles before men on motorcycles. The president insists “no region will be left to bleed.” But Northern Nigeria is already hemorrhaging; human capital, trust, confidence, investment, stability, dignity. The North has been consigned to perpetual mourning: Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara, Jangebe, and now Paipiri and Maga. A decade of mass abductions, and still no structural prevention, no coordinated rescue framework, no transparent security doctrine, no accountability for military lapses. Children kidnapped in 2014 are still missing. Today’s abductees may join them in the archive of unresolved national shame.
Tinubu has inherited this insecurity crisis, yes; just as Jonathan inherited Boko Haram before him. But leadership is not inheritance; it is responsibility. A president cannot forever govern from the safe penthouse of excuses. Nigeria’s security failures are not immutable; they are the predictable consequence of under-policing, fragmented intelligence, bureaucratic turf warfare, militarized corruption, and a unitary command structure designed for ceremonial pageantry, not counterterrorism.
Banditry has become an industry because ransom has become a revenue stream. Kidnapping has become a profession because governance has become a theoretical suggestion. Criminality thrives in the vast space where the state has retreated, not only territorially, but morally. And while citizens bury their hope alongside their children, the president promises oil exploration in Kolmani. Oil, Nigeria’s eternal lullaby for unsolved problems.
What, precisely, does President Tinubu intend to do about this escalating war on children? Not philosophically. Not metaphorically. Not someday. Specifically. Will he reform Nigeria’s broken security architecture? Will he decentralize policing? Will he punish military negligence, such as unexplained troop withdrawals hours before abductions? Will he establish permanent school-protection units? Will he deploy technology – drones, surveillance mapping, communication intercepts – not as rhetorical decoration, but as actual instruments of rescue and deterrence? Or is the presidential strategy to wait, condemn, promise, repeat?
The tragedy is not merely that Nigeria has failed to protect its children. It is that the government appears intellectually bored by their suffering. Tinubu warns that “unity remains the North’s greatest asset.” But unity is not a security policy. Hope is not a defense mechanism. Speeches do not escort children safely to school. Nigeria is approaching a psychological breaking point. Families are relocating. Farmers are abandoning land. Entire communities are negotiating parallel governance structures with bandits. A generation is internalizing fear as citizenship. Nothing corrodes a nation faster. The president says he attends national events “bound by duty and conscience.” Conscience, however, demands action, not sonorous prose. And duty does not allow a leader to demand resignation when outside power, then recoil from accountability once enthroned.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu once believed Nigeria deserved better. Millions of Nigerians still do. But belief is collapsing, and a state that cannot protect its children does not deserve the ornamental dignity of sovereignty. Mr. President, you promised renewal. What we have instead is repetition. You once demanded better of others. The nation now demands better of you. And if you cannot deliver the safety you once treated as a presidential prerequisite, then, by your own doctrine, you know what honor requires – resign!