When Children Become Statistics, the Republic Shrinks
Hon. Midala Balami did not bring poetry to the floor of the House of Representatives. He brought a ledger of days. Forty-four schoolchildren taken from Mussa on 15 May 2026 have now spent more than 138 days in captivity.
Thirty-six students and two teachers seized from Lassa Ward have passed 70 days. Others snatched along the Buratai–Maiduguri Road have endured more than 160 days. Add them up and the House heard a demand for the immediate rescue of 116 schoolchildren and other victims still held in Borno.
That is not an abstract security briefing. It is a catalogue of stolen childhoods. Many of those taken from Mussa were nursery and lower-primary pupils—some as young as two or three.
The Lassa students were sitting examinations. Families in Askira-Uba and along that dangerous stretch of road have lived for months with the same unanswered question: where are they, and when are they coming home?
Balami’s motion of urgent public importance was the latest parliamentary attempt to force coordination where coordination has been too slow. The House called for intensified, better-coordinated search-and-rescue operations, stronger intelligence sharing, and increased patrols and checkpoints around Mussa, Lassa, the Buratai–Maiduguri Road and other vulnerable communities. Those resolutions are necessary. They are also late.
Nigeria has seen this movie. Chibok taught the country that mass school abductions do not fade if they are not treated as national emergencies from day one.
Subsequent raids in other states have shown that when political will, intelligence and kinetic pressure align, children can be brought home. The contrast is now painful: similar operations elsewhere have produced results while Borno’s missing children remain in the bush.
Parents and elders have already asked the obvious question—why must Borno wait longer?
The human cost is not only measured in days. Prolonged captivity means fear, possible forced conversion, deprivation, and the slow erosion of any sense that the state will arrive in time.
Communities that send children to school despite years of insurgency are being taught a bitter lesson: education itself can become a target, and the response can feel distant.
Every extra week without a decisive rescue operation deepens trauma and risks more families pulling children out of classrooms.
This is not a failure of awareness. Proof-of-life videos have circulated. Councillors and parents have compiled names. Civil society, CAN, and constituency representatives have pleaded. What has been missing is the same concentrated national machinery that has worked when the political temperature is high enough.
Intelligence must be fused. Operations must be sustained, not episodic. Communities that still live under the shadow of ISWAP and Boko Haram remnants need visible, persistent security presence—not only after another motion is adopted.
Hon. Balami did his job by putting the numbers and the locations on the record. The House did its job by adopting the call. The test now sits with the security architecture and those who command it. One hundred and sixteen children and other citizens are not a talking point. They are a deadline that has already expired many times over.
Bring them home. Then make the next school raid harder, not merely the next press statement easier. The Republic that cannot protect its youngest citizens in the classroom will keep shrinking—one abducted child at a time.
-Daily Buzzwire
About the Author
