The Oyo schoolchildren and teachers have finally been rescued after nearly two months in captivity. And one of the very first images Nigerians saw of their freedom wasn’t footage of family reunions or of exhausted victims receiving medical attention. It wasn’t parents embracing children they feared they might never see again. It was a video of one of the rescued teachers thanking President Bola Tinubu, flanked by schoolchildren chanting, “Thank you, sir.” Needless to say, it was a deeply uncomfortable sight.
Not because gratitude is inappropriate—if the government played a role in securing their release, appreciation is understandable—but the speed with which a humanitarian tragedy was folded into political messaging reflects a consistent pattern. Under the Tinubu administration, successful security operations have increasingly become opportunities for political communication. The problem is that good optics cannot substitute for a coherent response to a national insecurity crisis that continues to engulf large parts of the country.
The Oyo students and teachers spent almost two months in captivity after gunmen attacked three schools in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State on 15 May. Two teachers died. One was killed during the attack itself. Another was publicly and brutally beheaded while in captivity. Dozens of families spent 57 days living through unimaginable uncertainty. For much of that period, there was little visible urgency from the Federal Government.
Instead, it was teachers’ unions, civil society groups, celebrities, and ordinary Nigerians who kept the story alive. The Nigeria Union of Teachers staged nationwide protests, warning that continued attacks on schools could force teachers across the country to withdraw their services. Public figures, including Davido, Tiwa Savage, Toke Makinwa, Ruth Kadiri, Iyabo Ojo, Toyin Abraham, and Paul Okoye, amplified the #BringBackOurStudents campaign. Davido even wore a custom “BRING THEM HOME” jacket bearing the names of the victims during his performance at the FIFA World Cup Countdown Concert in Los Angeles.
Only after the victims were freed did the administration suddenly become eager to tell their story.
The rescue itself is laudable. The arrest of eight suspected kidnappers is welcome news and, if presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga’s account is accurate, security agencies secured the victims’ release without paying ransom or yielding to the abductors’ demand that a notorious gang leader be released from custody. But this rescue is, largely, an isolated victory.
A single successful operation does not erase the broader problem. Governments are not judged by isolated victories but by the systems they build. If kidnappings continue to occur with alarming regularity, if communities still live under the constant threat of armed groups and if dozens of Nigerians remain in captivity elsewhere, then one successful rescue—commendable as it is—cannot reasonably be presented as evidence that the country’s insecurity crisis is under control.
The Oyo victims have returned home. But most of the students and teachers abducted from Government Day Secondary School in Lassa, Borno State around the same period have not. Although a handful have reportedly been rescued, many remain unaccounted for. Similar abductions continue to emerge from Zamfara, Katsina, Niger, and other northern states, where mass kidnappings have become so frequent that they rarely dominate the national conversation for more than a few days.
That raises uncomfortable questions. Does the Federal Government respond differently depending on where an abduction happens? Are some victims simply more politically valuable than others? Have we become so accustomed to mass kidnappings in Northern Nigeria that they no longer generate the same urgency as similar attacks elsewhere? A functioning security strategy should not produce isolated success stories surrounded by a landscape of recurring tragedy.
Election seasons in Nigeria have historically coincided with spikes in violence. Politicians arm local actors, security resources become concentrated in the hands of political elites, and armed groups exploit the resulting gaps. At the same time, insecurity itself becomes political capital. Every successful rescue becomes evidence of competent leadership. Every failure becomes ammunition for the opposition.
The Chibok abduction demonstrated this vividly.
The Jonathan administration was widely criticised for its slow response. According to former Information Minister Lai Mohammed, the government waited about 15 days before responding meaningfully to reports of the abduction and did not contact then-Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima for 19 days. International assistance reportedly offered by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and China was also initially rebuffed. Whether every criticism levelled at the administration was fair is still debated, but politically, the damage was irreversible. Chibok became one of the defining issues of the 2015 election, with Muhammadu Buhari repeatedly presenting the tragedy as evidence that the Jonathan administration had lost control of the country’s security situation.
The lesson from Chibok was not simply that governments should respond faster, it was that insecurity is judged as much by public confidence as by military operations. Once citizens begin to believe that the state is reacting to crises instead of preventing them, political consequences inevitably follow.
A decade later, the political incentives look remarkably similar. During the weeks the Oyo victims were held, opposition figures, including Peter Obi, accused President Tinubu of displaying a lack of compassion and failing in his constitutional responsibility to protect Nigerians. When the victims were rescued, Nigerians were almost immediately presented with footage of rescued schoolchildren thanking the President.
Whether deliberately staged or simply poorly judged, the optics are unmistakable. By making that video one of the defining public images of the rescue, the administration shifted the focus from the insecurity itself to the political value of resolving it. The operation ceased to be solely about returning children and teachers safely to their families. It also became part of a broader narrative of competent leadership.
That should concern Nigerians regardless of political affiliation. Successful rescues deserve recognition, as they are what governments are supposed to achieve, but they should never become substitutes for confronting the deeper crisis that made the rescue necessary in the first place.
The true measure of this administration’s security record will not be one successful operation in Oyo or one widely circulated thank-you video. It will be whether kidnappings become rarer, whether schools become safer, and whether every kidnapped Nigerian—from Borno to Zamfara to Kaduna—is afforded the same urgency, the same attention, and the same determination from the state.
