Part Two – The Historical Roots of State Absence
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KOi
This is Part Two of a seven-part essay. If you are arriving here for the first time, the Introduction – “Before the Echoes Fade” – and Part One – “How Many Chiboks Define a Nation’s Capitulation?” – are available on this page and provide the full context for what follows.
The historical roots of Nigeria’s security failures are not confined to any single region, though they have manifested most catastrophically in the northeast. To understand how the country arrived at a moment when schools in both Borno and Oyo could be attacked on the same Friday morning, one must trace the long, tangled lineage of state neglect that stretches from the colonial era to the present, and that has shaped the relationship between the Nigerian state and its most vulnerable citizens in ways that are remarkably consistent across geography and time.
The colonial state in Nigeria was never designed to protect. It was designed to extract. The British administration that governed the territories that would become Nigeria was, at its core, a resource-acquisition machine, and its relationship with the vast majority of the population was mediated through a system of indirect rule that left…
The postcolonial Nigerian state inherited this thin, extractive architecture and, despite the rhetoric of independence and development, did little to transform it. The state that emerged from the independence negotiations of 1960 was a federation of regions, each dominated by ethnic and regional power blocs, and the competition among these blocs for control of the central government and its oil revenues quickly became the primary driver of political behaviour. The state’s relationship with its citizens remained fundamentally extractive: oil revenues were collected at the centre and distributed, in highly politicised and opaque ways, to the regions and states.
Service delivery – education, healthcare, infrastructure, security – was a secondary concern, a residual category in budgets that were overwhelmingly consumed by the costs of political patronage and administrative overhead. The military regimes that seized power in 1966 and ruled for most of the next three decades exacerbated this dynamic. They centralised control over oil revenues, suppressed political competition, and invested in the coercive apparatus of the state – the military, the police, the intelligence services – while neglecting the developmental apparatus. The result was a state that was simultaneously overdeveloped in its capacity for repression and underdeveloped in its capacity for protection and service delivery. This is the fundamental contradiction of the Nigerian state, and it is the contradiction that has produced the security crisis that now engulfs the nation.
In the northeast, this contradiction manifested with particular brutality. The region, which had been economically marginalised even during the colonial period, found itself further peripheralised in the post-independence era as oil revenues from the Niger Delta became the central obsession of the political class. The north, as a political entity, retained significant influence at the centre through its demographic weight and its control of key military and political positions, but this influence did not translate into developmental investment in the northeastern periphery. The region remained poor, undereducated, and underserved, its population largely excluded from the benefits of the oil boom that transformed the skylines of Lagos and Abuja.
The emergence of Boko Haram in the early 2000s, and its transformation into a full-blown insurgency after the extrajudicial execution of its founder Mohammed Yusuf in 2009, was not a bolt from the blue. It was the predictable outcome of decades of state neglect, of a population that had been taught, through the consistent absence of the state as a provider, that the social contract was a fiction. The insurgents did not need to destroy the state’s legitimacy in the northeast. They simply occupied a vacuum that the state had already created.
But if the northeast was the most extreme case of state absence, it was not the only one. Across the country, in rural communities far from the centres of political and economic power, the Nigerian state exists as a distant, intermittently present entity – a tax collector that occasionally appears, a police force that is more often a predator than a protector, a local government that exists on paper but delivers no services. The southwest, with its higher levels of education, its more diversified economy, and its stronger traditional institutions, had managed to maintain a somewhat more functional social contract, particularly in urban areas.
But the rural communities of Oyo State, like rural communities across the country, have long experienced the same thinness of state presence that characterises the peripheries of the Nigerian project. The attacks in Oriire on 15 May 2026 were not an invasion of a region that was fully protected and suddenly breached. They were an exposure of vulnerabilities that had been present for decades, vulnerabilities that were masked by the relative calm of the southwest but that were, in structural terms, not fundamentally different from the vulnerabilities that had made the northeast a theatre of war.
Revisiting the specific details of the Oriire attack through this historical lens reveals how perfectly it conforms to the pattern of state failure that runs from the colonial era to the present. The attackers struck between eight o’clock and nine-thirty in the morning, in broad daylight, moving through multiple schools – Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yawota, Community Grammar School and Community High School in Ahoro-Esin-Ele, and L.A. Primary School – with a confidence that spoke of precise local knowledge. They knew the geography, they knew the absence of security forces, and they knew that they could complete their operation and escape before any meaningful response could be mounted.
The Assistant Headmaster, Mr. Adesiyan, was shot dead while trying to protect the children. Another teacher sustained gunshot injuries. A student was killed. The principal, Mrs. Rachael Alamu, was abducted along with several teachers and an unspecified number of pupils. The ANCOPSS Elders Forum, in its letter to Governor Seyi Makinde, captured the horror and the grief with precision, describing the attack as “a direct assault on the future of our children” and a desecration of the teaching profession itself. The images that emerged – teachers pleading from captivity, children crying, mothers wailing at the school gates – were indistinguishable, in their emotional register, from the images that had emerged from Chibok, from Dapchi, from Kankara, from Kuriga.
The question that must be asked, and that the state has consistently failed to answer in the aftermath of every such attack, is how armed groups can operate with such impunity across such diverse geographies. The answer lies in the systemic weaknesses that are common to all the regions affected: the absence of effective community-level intelligence networks, the predictability of security patrols, the corruption that diverts resources meant for protection into private pockets, the political incentives that reward crisis management over crisis prevention, and the fundamental disconnect between a centralised, Abuja-based security architecture and the local realities of communities
that are, in practice, left to fend for themselves. In Oriire, as in Mussa, as in Chibok and Dapchi and Kankara, the attackers knew the terrain better than the security forces did. They knew the schedules of the security forces, or they knew that there were no security forces to speak of. They knew which communities were exposed and which schools were soft. And they knew, crucially, that the response from the state would be slow, confused, and ultimately inconsequential. This knowledge is not a secret. It is the accumulated wisdom of a decade and a half of successful operations against a state that has proven incapable of learning from its own failures.
The CAN statement of 18 May 2026 articulated this failure with a clarity that is often missing from official pronouncements. “The invasion of schools by armed criminals in broad daylight, the murder of innocent citizens, and the forceful abduction of defenceless children represent a horrifying collapse of security and a direct assault on the conscience of our nation,” the statement declared. “It is intolerable, disgraceful and utterly unacceptable that Nigerian children can no longer sit safely in classrooms without the fear of being kidnapped by armed gangs.” The language is notable for its refusal to accept the euphemisms and qualifications that so often soften official condemnations.
It does not speak of “unfortunate incidents” or “isolated security breaches.” It speaks of a “horrifying collapse” and a “direct assault on the conscience of our nation.” This is the language of moral emergency, and it reflects a growing recognition, across religious, ethnic, and regional lines, that the Nigerian state is failing in its most fundamental obligation.
The CAN statement also mourned the specific victims of the Oyo attack – the assistant headmaster who died trying to protect the children, the teachers killed and injured, the pupils and students abducted – and insisted that “their sacrifice must never be forgotten, and those responsible must be identified, apprehended and prosecuted without hesitation.” This insistence on accountability is, in the Nigerian context, a radical demand. The history of security failures in Nigeria is a history of investigations that go nowhere, of reports that are never published, of commanders who are quietly rotated rather than publicly disciplined, of families who are left to grieve without ever learning the truth about what happened to their loved ones. The CAN statement’s call for prosecution is not just a demand for justice in a specific case. It is a demand for a fundamental change in the culture of impunity that has enabled the security crisis to persist and expand.
The psychological toll of this culture of impunity is immeasurable, but it can be glimpsed in the testimonies of survivors and the observations of those who work closely with affected communities. Parents in vulnerable areas across Nigeria now raise their children with a quiet, unspoken fear that has become a generational inheritance. The decision to send a child to school, once the most ordinary of parental responsibilities, has become a calculated risk, a bet against the odds that the school will not be
attacked, that the child will return home in the afternoon. Teachers, who were once figures of authority and respect, now live with the knowledge that their profession has become one of the most dangerous in the country, that they may be called upon to sacrifice their lives for their pupils as Mr. Adesiyan did, and that their sacrifice will likely be met with nothing more than a condolence statement and a news cycle that moves on within days. Children who survive attacks or who witness abductions carry the psychological scars into adulthood, their development shaped by experiences of terror that no child should ever have to endure, and that no mental health infrastructure in Nigeria is equipped to address. The exhaustion that CAN named in its statement is not just political. It is the deep, bone-level exhaustion of a population that has been asked to endure the unendurable for so long that the capacity for outrage has begun to atrophy.
The Yoruba response to the Oyo attack, as articulated by Sooko Agoriesin Oladotun Hassan and other leaders, represents an attempt to break through this exhaustion and to mobilise a collective response that draws on the region’s distinctive cultural and institutional resources. The call for a Second Yoruba Obas Conference, to be convened under the authority of the Ooni of Ife, is significant not because a conference alone can solve the security crisis, but because it represents a recognition that the state, in its current configuration, cannot be relied upon to protect the people, and that the people must therefore organise to protect themselves. The conference, as Hassan envisioned it, would address security but also agriculture, infrastructure, education, and healthcare —the full spectrum of conditions that make communities resilient or vulnerable. This is a holistic vision that understands, correctly, that security is not just a matter of guns and patrols but of the social and economic fabric that binds communities together and gives them a stake in the stability of the nation.
The specific security recommendations that emerged from the Yoruba response – the strengthening of the Eso Abo Oodua Joint Task Force, the formal integration of hunters, OPC, Agbekoya, and Ode guilds into a coordinated surveillance and rapid-response network – are rooted in a philosophy of communal defence that predates the modern Nigerian state. These indigenous security structures have existed for centuries, and they have been repeatedly mobilised in moments of crisis when the formal security apparatus has proven inadequate. The call for their integration into a formal security architecture is not a rejection of the state. It is a demand that the state recognise and support the protective capacities that communities have developed in the absence of effective state protection. It is also, implicitly, a critique of the centralised, one-sizefits-all approach to security that has characterised the Nigerian state since independence, and that has consistently failed to adapt to the specific conditions and resources of different regions.
The contrast between the responses in the northeast and the southwest illuminates the uneven geography of Nigeria’s political and cultural capital. In Borno, after Mussa, the response was exhausted and ritualised. Senator Ali Ndume, who chairs the Senate Committee on the Army and who has watched his constituency bleed for over a decade, described the attack as “barbaric and disheartening” and called for troops to “intensify” rescue efforts. The words were sincere, but they were also hollow, drained of meaning by years of repetition. The Deputy Speaker of the Borno State House of Assembly could not even bring himself to confirm that children were among the abducted. The military high command ignored press inquiries. The silence was the silence of a region that has been battered into submission, whose political representatives have learned that protest changes nothing and that the best they can do is manage the optics of grief.
In Oyo, the response was louder, more organised, more culturally confident. Traditional institutions were mobilised. Federal lawmakers made specific demands, including the establishment of a military base in Oriire. The ANCOPSS Elders Forum wrote formal letters to the governor. The Yoruba Council Worldwide called for a pan-Yoruba conference of traditional rulers. This disparity is not a reflection of moral difference. The parents of Mussa love their children as fiercely as the parents of Oriire. The difference lies in the political and organisational resources that the two regions can bring to bear after an atrocity, and that difference is itself a product of the uneven development and uneven devastation that have characterised Nigeria’s recent history.
The northeast has been ravaged by seventeen years of insurgency. Its social fabric has been shredded. Millions of its people have been displaced. Its local economies have been destroyed. Its traditional authorities, where they still function, have been weakened by the loss of territory, population, and legitimacy. Its political representatives, however well-intentioned, operate in a context of such overwhelming need and such limited resources that their capacity to deliver meaningful change has been systematically eroded. The southwest, by contrast, has been spared the worst of the violence until recently. Its economy is more diversified, its educational institutions more robust, its traditional authorities more intact, its civil society more organised. When violence strikes, the region can mobilise a response that draws on these reserves of institutional and cultural capital. The Oyo attack is a warning that these reserves are not infinite, that the violence is spreading, and that the conditions that made the northeast vulnerable – state neglect, underdevelopment, the thinness of the protective apparatus – are present, to varying degrees, across the entire country.
The CAN statement, by addressing the crisis as a national phenomenon rather than a series of regional incidents, performs an essential function. It insists that the children abducted in Oyo and the children abducted in Borno are equally victims of the same systemic failure, and that the response must be national in scope and undifferentiated in urgency. “Nigeria must never surrender its schools, its children or its future to armed criminals,” the statement declared. “Safe school initiatives must no longer exist only on paper while students and teachers remain exposed to terror. Rural communities, forest corridors and known criminal hideouts must be aggressively secured, monitored and reclaimed without delay.” This is the language of a comprehensive national response, one that does not distinguish between regions or between the different armed groups that prey on schools. The demand is for the state to perform its most basic function – the protection of its citizens – in every part of the country, for every community, for every child.
The moral question at the heart of this crisis is one that Nigeria has refused to confront honestly for decades. What is the value of a Nigerian child? The question is not answered by the speeches of politicians, the slogans of campaigns, or the policy documents that gather dust on the shelves of ministries. It is answered by the reality on the ground, by the choices that the state makes about where to deploy its resources, by the urgency with which it responds to threats, by the consequences it imposes on those who fail in their duties. The reality on the ground, as revealed by the events of 15 May 2026, is that the Nigerian state does not value the lives of its children enough to protect them.
The children of Mussa, toddlers who could barely speak, were abandoned to their fate by a military that pulled out thirty minutes before the attackers arrived. The children of Oriire, whose teachers died trying to protect them, were left exposed by a security architecture that was nowhere to be found when the gunmen struck. The state’s response in both cases was silence, deflection, and the ritualised performance of concern without substance. This is not a failure of capacity. It is a failure of will, a failure of values, a failure of the moral imagination required to see the children of the rural poor as fully human, fully citizens, fully deserving of the protection that the state claims to provide.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that ethics begins with the encounter with the face of the other, with the recognition that the other person makes a claim on us that we cannot ignore. The children of Mussa and Oriire have faces. Their parents carry those faces in their memory, and they make a claim on the Nigerian state and on every Nigerian citizen that is absolute and non-negotiable. The assistant headmaster, Mr. Adesiyan, who died trying to protect his pupils, made that claim with his life. The teachers who were abducted, the students who were killed, the parents who watched helplessly from the mountains in Borno or who received the devastating news in Oyo – all of them make that claim.
The question is whether the Nigerian state, and the Nigerian people, will answer it. The CAN statement concluded with a warning that resonates with the deepest traditions of moral thought – the insistence that silence, in the face of children being hunted in their classrooms, is indistinguishable from complicity, and that the delay in responding has long since become dangerous. The silence has lasted long enough. The delay has cost enough lives. The question that now confronts Nigeria is whether it will continue on the path of complicity, or whether it will finally, belatedly, choose to protect its children and, in doing so, reclaim its own humanity.
The events of 15 May 2026, across two distant states and two different conflict zones, have rewritten the map of Nigeria’s security crisis. They have demonstrated, with a clarity that cannot be denied, that the crisis is national, that no region is immune, and that the state’s failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens is a failure that transcends geography, ethnicity, and religion. The abduction of toddlers in Mussa and the killing of teachers in Oriire are not separate tragedies.
They are the same tragedy, occurring in different places, produced by the same systemic rot, met with the same hollow response. The register of the missing, now spanning both the northern and southern extremities of the country, is the most damning document in contemporary Nigerian history. It is a list of names, but it is also a list of broken promises, abandoned duties, and unfulfilled obligations. Mommy, aged one year and seven months, abducted in Borno. Mrs. Rachael Alamu, principal, abducted in Oyo. Mr. Adesiyan, assistant headmaster, killed while trying to protect the children. The names are different, but the indictment is the same.
