ILORIN, Nigeria — 12 June 2026 — While the nation gathers today to mark 27 years of democratic rule, the Nigerians seized in a wave of attacks across several states will spend Democracy Day where they have spent every day for weeks and months: held by their captors. The schoolchildren and teachers of Oriire are entering a fourth week. The women and children of Woro, in Kwara North, have been held since February. Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative (BBYDI) marks this day with their families, and with a plain question for the country: what is the democracy worth celebrating if it cannot bring them home?
“A democracy is tested less on the day it holds an election than on every day after, in whether the state can keep an ordinary citizen safe,” said Nurah Jimoh-Sanni, Executive Director of BBYDI. “Today the country will hear about reforms and progress. The families in Oriire and Woro will hear none of it, because they are still waiting to be told their children are alive. We are asking the Federal Government, the Oyo and Kwara State Governments to make that news possible, and to make it soon.”
These cases are part of a security failure now reaching communities once thought safe. Borno, long the epicentre, had a school raided the same May morning as Oriire. Kwara North has been hit hardest and longest: months after the massacre at Woro and Nuku and the abduction of its women and children, gunmen returned on 25 May to burn part of the Emir’s palace at Yashikira and seize ten more people, members of the royal household among them, according to the Kwara State Police. That case, too, is still open.
The ideals Nigeria honours on June 12 — freedom, accountable government, a society where no one is oppressed — mean little to a child who cannot sit in a classroom without fear. The country is not short of plans. It ratified the Safe Schools Declaration in 2019 and is funding a national safe-schools programme that runs through this very year. What Oriire and Borno expose is the distance between a signed commitment and a guarded school gate. BBYDI calls on federal and state authorities to spend what they have pledged, secure the schools, and keep families informed through official channels rather than leaving them to learn a relative’s fate from a captor’s video.
“This has outgrown any one region, and it has outgrown the language of condemnation,” Jimoh-Sanni said. “The people now being taken are the teachers, students and traditional leaders we work alongside in states like Kwara. It has to be treated as a national emergency, because that is what it is.”
While these cases stay open, we also urge the public to handle them with care. In the weeks after Oriire, false claims of a rescue spread quickly and pulled scarce resources away from the search. Waiting for verified information from official channels and credible newsrooms is, right now, a way of protecting the very people the country is trying to bring home.
June 12 endures because Nigerians once refused to let their voices be erased. That same insistence, informed and organised, is how citizens hold a government to its first duty, and BBYDI will keep preparing young people to carry it. The government’s task today is narrower. Bring every captive home, and let next year’s Democracy Day be one that no family marks from the roadside, still waiting.
Sanni Alausa-Issa
Communications Director, BBYDI