The recent successful rescue of former Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu’s sister, Olaide Busayo Adegoke John-Paul, and her 12-year-old twin sons is undeniably a relief.
Abducted on June 3, 2026, while driving her children to school in Ibadan, the family was freed just three days later during a swift, intelligence-led operation by the Force Intelligence Department’s Intelligence Response Team (FID-IRT).
Operatives tracked the kidnappers’ movements, neutralized two suspects in a gun duel, and safely reunited the victims with their family. It was a textbook demonstration of what Nigeria’s security apparatus can accomplish when fully mobilized.
Yet, as the Adelabu family celebrates, this rapid breakthrough casts a long, uncomfortable shadow over a different, far more tragic reality playing out across the nation. The striking efficiency deployed to rescue the relatives of a prominent politician stands in sharp contrast to the slow, agonizing gridlock surrounding the mass abductions of ordinary Nigerian students and teachers in states like Borno and Oyo.
Consider the tragedy in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State, just days before the Adelabu incident. On May 15, 2026, heavily armed men simultaneously raided three schools, abducting 49 pupils, teachers, and even a toddler.
The scale of cruelty was laid bare when the kidnappers released a video showing the beheading of Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher taken in the raid. Weeks later, these children and their educators remain trapped in captivity, leaving entire communities devastated and forcing the Nigerian Union of Teachers to launch indefinite strikes over the complete failure of school safety.
Similarly, in Borno and other northern states, hundreds of students and teachers continue to linger in the custody of terrorists, their plights frequently fading into mere statistics.
Even the victims’ families cannot ignore this disparity. Mrs. Olufunmilayo Adelabu, the mother of the former minister, tearfully recalled that she had been weeping over the viral footage of the kidnapped Oriire schoolchildren just a day before her own daughter was taken. Her emotional plea upon her daughter’s return, praying that the same God who freed her children would extend that mercy to the remaining hostages underscores a painful truth, ordinary citizens are left relying on divine intervention, while the political elite enjoy the immediate, kinetic protection of the state.
This stark divide reveals a deeply flawed premium placed on human life within Nigeria’s security architecture. When a high-profile political family is targeted, sustained intelligence tracking, elite federal tactical units, and top-tier state resources are deployed instantly but when dozens of impoverished rural schoolgirls in Borno or toddlers in Oriire are marched into the bush, the state’s response routinely devolves into familiar scripts: official condemnations, committee reports, and hollow promises.
Between March 2024 and May 2026 alone, at least 603 students and teachers have been abducted in major school raids across Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Kogi, Borno, and Oyo states. Despite a massive ₦145 billion allocation to the Safe Schools Initiative, Nigeria’s learning institutions remain soft targets for bandits and militants.
The Nigeria Police Force and the military have proven they have the tactical capability to track, confront, and neutralize kidnapping syndicates within a 72-hour window. The issue is not a lack of competence, but a selective distribution of political will.
A nation cannot claim to be secure when the speed of justice depends entirely on the victim’s surname. The federal and state governments must recognize that a toddler taken from a village school in Oriire or a teacher abducted in Borno deserves the exact same urgency, tracking assets, and tactical ferocity as the relative of a former minister. Until the state treats the security of the common citizen as a non-negotiable priority, selective rescues will remain a painful reminder of a broken system that protects the few while leaving the majority defenseless.