There is a particular cruelty in killing a man for teaching mathematics. Not for stealing, not for sedition, but for the quiet, stubborn act of explaining fractions to children in a village called Ahoro-Esinele. Yet that is precisely what happened to Mr. Michael Oyedokun on the 15th of May, 2026, when bandits descended on three schools in the Oriire axis of Ogbomoso and dragged teachers and pupils into the bush like livestock. A few days later, a video surfaced. He was bound, forced to speak under duress, and then beheaded. The message was clear: in this country, even the classroom is not neutral ground.
We have grown accustomed to calling such things “baric.” The President said it. The Governor said it. Royal fathers and unions said it. And they are right. But words have a way of becoming anesthesia. We condemn, we mourn for 48 hours, and then we wait for the next video. The real barbarism is not only in the blade, but in our collective decision to treat the unthinkable as routine. When schools become war zones, and when a teacher’s last act is to plead for his life on Telegram, we are no longer a republic. We are a stage, and the play is titled _Every Man for Himself_.
I thought of this as I recalled my own first day as Chairman of the Governing Council of Waziri Umaru Federal Polytechnic in Birnin Kebbi. I never made it to the campus. I remained in my hotel, under military guard that I financed myself, while flights in and out of the state were cancelled for weeks. The irony is not lost on me. I graduated from that same polytechnic. In my time, we travelled by road at night, sang on buses, and never once considered that the journey itself could be a death sentence. Today, even those charged with governing the institution cannot access it without armed escort and personal expense. If the guardian cannot enter the gate, what chance does the student have?
Service, I have come to learn, often takes one through routes one never imagined. In Yobe, my assignment meant landing in Bauchi or Kano and then enduring a four-hour road journey to Damaturu, where the school is situated. Those four hours were a nightmare each time—open roads, no escorts, every bend a question mark, every oncoming vehicle a possible threat. The memories of those trips remain etched in my mind. My wife had to be on fasting and prayers before each journey. Kebbi followed, another difficult terrain. It was about the same time that the Deputy Speaker of the Kebbi State House of Assembly was kidnapped despite his security. I say this not to complain, but to bear witness. Through it all, I remain grateful to serve, and I still believe in the idea of Nigeria. One Nigeria, one nation.
Would I also forget the gruesome murder of my brother, Alhaji Rauf Adeniji, may Allah bless his memory? Kongo, as we fondly called him, was kidnapped in his home in Abuja and later found dead. That’s how bad the situation is at this moment. What has been happening in our country is beyond explanation. The Hausa, the Igbos, and we Yoruba have been living together for long. I am of the opinion that this is foreign to us, and so we must all see it as a war confronting us as an entity and stop to view the killer as Hausa.
This is what happens when the state retreats and the vacuum is filled by men who understand only ransom and terror. Rural communities like Ahoro-Esinele are left exposed, their security structure thin as paper. Rescue teams walk into IEDs. Teachers are abducted during morning devotion. And the response is a cycle we know too well: outrage, a few arrests of “accomplices,” promises of kinetic and non-kinetic approaches, and then silence until the next abduction. Meanwhile, a ransom economy grows fat in the shadows, turning fear into currency and children into invoices.
Philosophers used to argue that the first duty of the state is to secure the life of its citizens. That idea feels almost quaint now. We have inverted it. The citizen must now secure the state, or at least his small corner of it. Parents hire guards for schools. Chairmen pay for their own convoys. Teachers go to work with a will written in their heads. And still, we pretend that education can flourish in such soil. It cannot. You cannot teach geometry to a child who hears motorcycles at night and wonders if they are coming for him. You cannot build a nation on the backs of people who live perpetually in the anteroom of violence.
This is not the occasion for governors to start building bridges and roundabouts to prove they are working, nor for flashy urban roads and houses that make for good photographs. If it can happen in Ogbomoso, then Ile-Ife, Modakeke, Ila, Ikire, Okuku must begin to watch their border villages with the same urgency. The governor and local government chairmen, as chief executives and chief security officers, must rapidly invest in policing their territories, in rural roads, and in the electrification we so desperately need. Schools in the bushy areas should be closed for now, and each of us as citizens must see this as a collective responsibility. Security cannot be outsourced to Abuja while we decorate the cities and pretend the hinterland does not exist.
So what is left when the speeches are done? Not another committee, and certainly not another ribbon-cutting ceremony in the city center while the villages bleed. If we are serious, we must stop pretending that schools can be safe without deliberate protection. It means treating informants and collaborators as the traitors they are, and letting the public see them face justice. It means recognizing teachers as a critical national asset, and protecting them as such, with hazard allowances, insurance, and legal weight behind their lives. And it means breaking the ransom economy by making it unprofitable, not by negotiating with it in the dark.
But beyond policy, there is a deeper question. At what point do we decide that enough is enough? That a country where a mathematics teacher is beheaded on camera, and a brother is dragged from his Abuja home to die in captivity, and even a Deputy Speaker is taken despite his security, is not a country at all, but a cautionary tale? Mr. Oyedokun did not die for politics. My brother did not die for politics. They died for showing up. For believing, against all evidence, that Nigeria still mattered here.
May that belief not die with them. And may we, for once, act as if it matters too.
