Fifty-six days after gunmen stormed a school in Orire Local Government Area of Oyo State and marched 44 pupils and teachers into the forest, every one of them is free. That sentence alone is worth pausing on, because in a country where kidnap-for-ransom has become an industry and where families of the abducted have learned to expect months or years of silence before any resolution, a clean rescue of this scale is rare enough to count as genuinely good news.
We say so without qualification, and we say it while holding in mind that one man connected to this same ordeal, Mr Oyedokun, did not come home. His murder by the terrorists who held these children is the reminder that even a rescue this successful was still a tragedy before it was a victory.
The operation itself deserves the credit the Presidency and the military are claiming for it. According to the Nigerian Army, troops of the 2 Division under Major General C.R. Nnebeife worked for more than a month with the Office of the National Security Adviser’s Counter Terrorism Centre, the Defence Headquarters, special forces drawn from the Army, Navy and Air Force, the police, the Department of State Services(DSS)the National Intelligence Agency, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, and local hunters and vigilantes to trace the kidnappers to hideouts inside the Old Oyo National Park Forest.
President Bola Tinubu says the pressure applied through arrests across Oyo and other states left the kidnappers’ network dismantled to the point that they released the children and teachers unconditionally, without a ransom paid and without the prisoner swap the kidnappers had originally demanded. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga confirmed that eight of the abductors are now in DSS custody and that others were neutralised in the course of the operation. That the government resisted the demand to free a jailed kidnap kingpin in exchange for the children is a decision this newspaper supports without reservation. Trading convicted terrorists for hostages does not end kidnapping. It funds the next one.
This is worth saying plainly because Nigeria has not always got that calculation right, and every capitulation to a ransom or a prisoner swap in the past has taught armed groups that abduction pays. The coordination described in the Army’s statement, intelligence-led, patient, and willing to run for weeks rather than rush a raid that might have got children killed, is the template the country’s security agencies should have been following in every mass abduction since Chibok.
That it has not been the template until now says something uncomfortable about how much of the last decade’s response to school kidnappings has been improvised rather than institutional.
Which is the point that matters more than the celebration. We have said on this page before that Nigeria’s recurring failures rarely come from a lack of capacity. This operation proves the country’s security agencies can plan and execute a complex, multi-agency rescue without paying a ransom, without a swap and largely without harming the hostages. The question the government has not yet answered is why that same capability was not deployed to protect the school before 44 children had to be marched into a forest in the first place. Orire is not the country’s first mass abduction of pupils, and unless something changes in how schools in exposed rural areas are guarded, it will not be the last.
President Tinubu has directed the Oyo State Government to ensure adequate security around its schools going forward, and Governor Seyi Makinde deserves recognition for cooperating fully with the Federal Government through the ordeal. But a directive is not a policy, and Nigerians have watched similar promises fade once the immediate crisis passes and the cameras move on.
The Army’s statement promises that “further operations are to be conducted” and that “the security agencies will give full account soon” of the mission that has now concluded. We take that promise seriously and expect it to be honoured, not quietly dropped the way past assurances of transparency around military operations have been.
Nigerians deserve to know how the kidnappers built their network inside a national park that ought to be under some form of state surveillance, who supplied their weapons and logistics, and what happens next to the arrested kingpin whose release the kidnappers had demanded and the government refused to grant.
A full account also owes something to the men in uniform who did not walk away from this operation unhurt. The Army has confirmed casualties among the security forces without yet naming them or explaining the circumstances, and that omission should be corrected once the immediate operational security concerns have passed.
For now, the country can allow itself a moment of genuine relief. Forty-four children and their teachers are alive, reunited with families who spent nearly two months not knowing whether they would see them again, and the government held its ground against a demand that would have set a dangerous precedent for every armed group watching how Abuja responds under pressure. That restraint, and the operational patience behind it, is worth commending without irony.
But relief is not the same as closure, and a rescue is not a substitute for prevention. The government’s obligation now is to convert one successful operation into a standing capability, to protect schools in Orire and everywhere like it before the next kidnapping is planned rather than after it happens, and to give the country the full account it has promised. That means permanent security arrangements around rural schools in exposed states, not a one-off deployment that quietly winds down once public attention drifts elsewhere, and it means treating the National Park’s apparent use as a staging ground for armed groups as a standing security failure rather than an isolated incident. Anything less turns a genuine achievement into just another news cycle that Nigeria will have forgotten by the time the next school is attacked.
