On 15 May 2026 armed men attacked three schools in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State. Forty-six pupils and teachers were taken. On the same day — the same day — forty-two children were abducted from Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School in Askira-Uba, Borno State. A mathematics teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was killed. His students watched. Three weeks have passed. Most of those children are still missing.
Nigeria does not have a kidnapping problem. Nigeria has a protection accountability problem. The kidnapping is the outcome. The accountability failure is the system.
The Record on Paper
Nigeria endorsed the Safe Schools Declaration in 2015. It launched a National Policy on Safety, Security and Violence-Free Schools in 2021. In December 2022 the government committed ₦144.8 billion to a Safe Schools financing plan running through 2026. A National Safe Schools Response Coordination Centre was established. Security personnel were trained across all 36 states.
On paper, this is an impressive policy architecture. In practice, it has not protected a single child from the pattern of mass abduction that has defined the last decade.
The Record on the Ground
Over 600 pupils and teachers were abducted during the same four-year window that ₦144.8 billion was being committed to safe schools programming. Only 37 per cent of schools across ten sampled states have functional early warning systems. In November 2025 over 300 children and teachers were taken from a single school in Niger State, one of the largest mass abductions since Chibok. Then Kebbi. Then Oyo and Borno, simultaneously. The Senate has now summoned ministers to account for over $30 million mobilised since 2014.
The money moved. The children did not get safer.
A Rights Failure, Not Just a Security Failure
There is something else that must be named directly. The federal government mobilised quickly for Oyo — high-level visits, national statements, visible political response. The 42 children in Borno, taken the same day from the same kind of classroom by the same kind of armed men, were met largely with silence. The Coalition of Northern Groups said it plainly: the victims in Borno have been abandoned.
When a government’s protection response is geographically selective, that is not a security failure. That is a rights failure. Every child in a Nigerian classroom holds the same claim on the full weight of the state’s protection obligation. That is not an aspirational standard. It is the minimum floor set by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Nigeria has ratified. There is no legal basis for a hierarchical protection response. There is only political geography.
The Harder Question
Why do the same calls keep being made after every abduction — by UNICEF, Save the Children, the UN Resident Coordinator — with no structural change? The gap is not knowledge. It is consequence.
Every naira and dollar committed to safe schools programming in Nigeria has been tracked primarily through government and donor self-reporting. There has been no independent verification of what reached schools, what was repurposed, and what never moved beyond the ministry level. The Public Expenditure Tracking methodology, which has driven education reform in Uganda and across sub-Saharan Africa, has not been applied in Nigeria at scale or with genuine civil society oversight.
Statements from international bodies are consistent, credible, and largely ignored by the implementing architecture. The Safe Schools Declaration needs a binding performance-review mechanism with civil society verification. Nigeria’s ₦144.8 billion Safe Schools financing plan needs an independent audit, not Senate inquiries convened after another mass abduction, but structured civil society-led expenditure tracking tied to the Declaration’s performance review cycle.
What This Moment Demands
What is needed before the end of 2026 is a multi-stakeholder Independent Safe Schools Expenditure Review led by a credible Nigerian civil society coalition alongside an international partner, covering the full ₦144.8 billion plan and the prior $30 million, with school-level verification against the Minimum Standards for Safe Schools, disaggregated findings by state and activity, and results tied directly to the Safe Schools Declaration performance review cycle.
This is uncomfortable. It exposes failures at every level — federal, state, donor, implementing partner. That is precisely the point. Commitments without consequence architecture are not commitments. They are performance.
The Expanding Risk
I have spent nearly a decade working within this system across Nigeria’s most fragile zones in documentation, legal casework, research, advocacy, and rights-based policy analysis. The pattern is not new. What is new is the geography. Oyo was supposed to be outside the risk corridor. It is not anymore. The protection deficit has expanded. The consequence architecture has not.
The 88 children in Oyo and Borno are not a crisis to be responded to. They are evidence of a system that was never built to protect them. That distinction matters for how we design what comes next. And it matters for how long the international community is willing to accept solidarity statements as a substitute for structural demands.
By Matthew Folorunsho Braimoh, Barrister-at-Law and Director of Advocacy, Research and Training at Christian Solidarity Worldwide Nigeria (CSWN), based in Kaduna.