39 Students. 7 Teachers. Still Not Home.

On May 15, 2026, armed men popularly known as “bandits” did the unthinkable.

They stormed three schools in the Ahoro Esinele community in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State, a secondary school and two primary schools, and they left with 39 students and seven teachers. The children taken were between the ages of two and sixteen years old.

Two years old.

I want you to sit with that. Not as a number in a news headline. As a child. A child who was probably still learning to speak in full sentences. A child whose entire understanding of the world is built on feeling safe.

Little Lives Foundation exist because we believe every Nigerian child deserves safety, health, a chance and environment to grow. What happened in Oyo is not only a security failure. It is a failure of the most basic promise this country makes to it's children.

For a long time, school abductions were seen as a crisis confined to Nigeria’s northern region. The attack on schools in Oyo has confirmed that the threat has now spread to the South West which was previously considered safer. The crisis has no geography anymore. Every region, every school, and every person must now reckon with that reality.

The tragedy deepened when we learned that one of the abducted teachers, Mr. Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher at Community Grammar School, was killed by his captors. A man who went to school to teach children was killed for it. His family will never be the same and neither should our national conscience.

Three weeks later, the kidnappers reportedly demanded a ₦1 billion ransom, the release of detained associates, and the provision of operational vehicles as conditions for freeing the captives. As of today, those children are still not home.

As of this writing, the Oyo Police Command has debunked viral social media reports claiming the children have been released, urging the public to rely only on official channels. The children remain in captivity and their families in agony.

This is not normal and we can't move away from this topic until the needful is done.

This bleeding nation has now lost count of how many children have been taken from classrooms. A tally by the Associated Press shows at least 1,799 students have been seized in a dozen of the largest school abductions since the Chibok attack in 2014. Each time, we grieve. Each time, the news cycle moves on. Each time, another set of parents is left waiting.

At Little Lives Foundation, we are calling for three things:

1. Bring these children home now. Every day in captivity is a day of physical and psychological harm to a developing child. This is a child health emergency, not just a security matter.

2. Protect schools as sacred ground. Schools need physical security infrastructure, community surveillance networks, and rapid-response protocols. Rural schools especially cannot be left defenseless.

3. Remember the children after the cameras leave. Rescue is not recovery. These children will need trauma support, mental health care, and family stabilisation long after they return. Nigeria must be ready for that.

We do not write this post for any form of debate or criticism. We write it because these are little lives, the same lives we committed ourselves to protecting when we founded this organisation.

The children of Oyo, and Nigeria deserve more than thoughts and prayers. They deserve to come home. They deserve to go back to school without fear. They deserve a country that fights for them.