….On Governor Makinde’s Call for a UN Probe of the Oyo Kidnapping
Governor Seyi Makinde has asked the United Nations and international human rights bodies to independently investigate the circumstances of the abduction of pupils and teachers from three schools in Oriire Local Government Area; how it happened, whether there was institutional failure or collusion, and how it was eventually resolved.
L-R Barrister Priscilla Adebayo, the survivors of Oriire abduction and Governor Seyi Makinde.
The call has divided opinion. The Senate and the Presidency have pushed back, arguing the matter should remain a domestic one; the Oyo State House of Assembly has backed the governor, arguing that a pattern of mass school abductions, stretching back to Chibok in 2014, has not been broken by domestic efforts alone and deserves outside scrutiny.
I will state my position plainly: the probe is healthy. An independent examination of how forty-nine children, a toddler, and their teachers came to be taken from three schools in a single morning, and of what happened; or failed to happen in the fifty-six days that followed, is not an insult to Nigeria’s institutions.
It is how institutions earn public confidence after a catastrophic failure of protection. If it identifies lapses, it gives the state something rescue operations and press statements cannot: a concrete basis for preventing the next one. I do not write to argue against the probe. I write because I am concerned about something the probe cannot touch or change.
What the probe cannot change
Whatever the investigation ultimately finds, whether it uncovers negligence, confirms collusion, or simply documents an under-resourced security response overwhelmed by a determined and well-armed group, none of it will alter what actually happened to the forty plus children and teachers who lived through it. An inquiry can assign responsibility but it cannot revise the experience. The abduction will remain, on every version of events, fifty-six days in which children as young as toddlers, and the teachers responsible for them, were taken against their will, marched through the forest of the old Oyo National Park by night to evade security patrols, and held in the open, exposed to sun and rain, for nearly two months.
It will remain true that a mathematics teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was beheaded on the second day of that captivity, inside the kidnappers’ camp, while the rest of the group, his own pupils and colleagues among them, remained held nearby.
The killing captured on video and deliberately released to the public as a message to the government. It will remain true that a second teacher, Esiyan Adegboye, was shot dead during the initial invasion of the school. It will remain true that, by the rescued principal’s own account, younger pupils were beaten whenever they cried or made noise, month after month, simply for behaving like frightened children.
No finding by any inquiry, however rigorous, diminishes any of that. The facts of the ordeal are settled. Only the question of who is accountable for allowing it, and for how it was handled, remains open.
The danger of a hardened public
This is the part I want to name directly, because I have seen it happen in other post-conflict settings, and I am already seeing the early signs of it here. When an event becomes a political controversy, when a governor’s motives are debated, when a Senate and a state House trade accusation, when the story becomes about who said what to whom; the public’s attention shifts from the survivors to the argument. People start talking about the probe instead of the children. And somewhere in that shift, without anyone intending it, the human beings at the center of the story can start to recede.
There is a further risk, one I would ask Oyo’s public to guard against deliberately: that survivors themselves become collateral in this argument. That a rescued teacher is asked, implicitly or explicitly, to account for what happened, as though their survival needs justifying. That a child who spent two months in a forest is met with suspicion, gossip, or unkind speculation about what they endured or whether they somehow could have resisted it. That families are left to feel they must defend their children’s ordeal rather than simply be supported in helping them heal from it. None of this is hypothetical cruelty; it is a pattern that repeats after almost every high-profile kidnapping in Nigeria, once the initial wave of sympathy gives way to political noise.
Two duties, not one instead of the other
The people of Oyo State, and Nigerians more broadly, do not have to choose between wanting the truth and caring for the survivors. Both are owed, simultaneously, and neither should crowd out the other. Support the probe if you believe, as I do, that establishing what went wrong is the only real path to preventing a recurrence. But do not let that debate hollow out the far simpler, far more urgent duty owed to the forty-plus people who came home: to receive them without judgment, to protect them from having to relive their ordeal for the curious or the cynical, and to give them the quiet, sustained, professionally supported recovery that fifty-six days of captivity, violence, and loss demands.
This means, concretely, that community members should not ask survivors to recount what they saw for entertainment or gossip. It means neighbours should not speculate aloud about what a child or teacher “must have gone through” in ways that reduce their suffering to spectacle. It means no one should suggest, even in jest, that a family should have done something differently, or that a teacher bears any blame for the actions of armed men who invaded a school. And it means that as the political argument over the UN probe continues; as it likely will for weeks, the survivors should not be made to feel that their healing is a lesser priority than the argument about accountability.
A community can hold a government to account and hold its children close at the same time. Oyo State does not have to choose. It only has to remember that the truth it is asking the world to help uncover, and the tenderness its survivors are owed at home, are two separate obligations; and that fulfilling one does not excuse it from the other.
Barrister Priscilla Adebayo is an indigene of Oyo State, born and raised in Ogbomoso town.
She works with survivors of conflict in post-conflict and resettlement contexts, supporting them to rebuild meaningful and fulfilling lives beyond their traumatic pasts through evidence-based psychosocial interventions and tailor-made programs.
She is the founder of Self-Actualization for Refugee Women Incorporated, a non-profit organization based in Georgia, USA, dedicated to helping refugee women discover renewed purpose and pursue their full potential despite the adversity they might have experienced. She is also a doctoral candidate in the International Conflict Management program at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA.
Contact: adebayopriscillatemitayo@gmail.com
Website: www.sa4refugeewomen.com
