25 November 2025
Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian education minister and prominent anti-corruption campaigner, has issued a blistering condemnation of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, declaring that the continued failure to protect schoolchildren from mass abductions amounts to “governing without legitimacy”.
In a widely shared thread posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, Mrs Ezekwesili argued that Nigeria’s deepening security crisis – particularly the abduction of pupils by armed criminal gangs and jihadist groups – is the direct result of “cancerous level systemic corruption” that has “metastasised” into every corner of the country’s political culture.
Citing data from UNICEF and Save the Children, the former minister revealed that more than 1,680 students were kidnapped in 70 separate attacks between 2014 and 2022, with a further 816 children taken in 22 incidents between 2023 and November 2025. The figures underscore a grim escalation in school-targeted violence, most prevalent in the country’s troubled north-west and north-central regions.
“After more than a decade of holding government accountable for the preventable atrocities committed against Nigeria’s schoolchildren, one has reached a point where outrage no longer feels adequate and repetition feels like an insult to the memory of the lost,” Mrs Ezekwesili wrote.
She described the abducted children not merely as victims of terrorists but as “hostages of the unforgivable failure of governments and political class that refuse to be moved, and to a people whose empathy has been steadily eroded”.
The statement comes eleven years after the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno State by Boko Haram insurgents – an event that galvanised global attention but failed to halt the subsequent wave of similar attacks. Mrs Ezekwesili, who spearheaded the #BringBackOurGirls campaign during her time outside government, insisted that the Nigerian state can no longer claim ignorance or inexperience.
“After ten years since ChibokGirls, the Government of Nigeria has forfeited any claim to ignorance, surprise, or learning curve,” she said. “What we have is deliberate negligence, and deliberate negligence is a crime.”
In her most damning passage, the founder of the School of Politics, Policy and Governance declared: “To continue to govern without rescuing all our abducted children and protecting the rest in their schools is the highest acceptance of the President of Nigeria that he governs without legitimacy.”
Mrs Ezekwesili’s remarks have reignited debate over the federal government’s handling of insecurity, with many civil-society figures and opposition voices echoing her characterisation of the crisis as evidence of state failure in its most fundamental duty – the protection of citizens, particularly children.
The presidency has yet to respond officially to the former minister’s accusations.
