By Akintunde Babatunde
I am not writing this to say “I told you so.” I genuinely hate that framing, especially when lives are involved.
But I am writing this because silence would be a disservice — to the communities in Oriire that woke up on Friday to find their schools raided, their children missing, and their teachers dead; and to the broader conversation we must now have about how Oyo State got here.
On 15 May 2026, armed gunmen on motorcycles attacked three schools simultaneously in the Ogbomoso axis of Oyo State: Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yawota, Community Grammar School and L.A Primary School in Esiele (all within Oriire Local Government Area). Pupils, students and teachers were abducted. An assistant headmaster, Mr Adesiyan, was killed. An okada rider was shot dead for resisting the seizure of his motorcycle. The abducted vice principal’s vehicle was seized, driven to a nearby forest and set on fire. This was not a random act, it was coordinated, planned, and executed with precision. But unfortunately, It was also predictable.
Oriire Did Not Appear Out of Nowhere
In January 2026 (just four months ago) five officers of the National Park Service were killed in a bandit attack in Oloka Village, Orire Local Government Area. Same LGA.
Governor Seyi Makinde acknowledged at the time that preliminary investigations pointed to cross-border actors, armed bandits from neighbouring regions. That attack was a signal, and signals require responses. The response that came was the kind Nigeria has become accustomed to: a statement, a condemnation, promises of tactical deployment, calls for calm. What did not follow (at least not visibly) was a structural change in how northern Oyo’s security vulnerabilities were assessed and addressed.
I presented a paper at the Oyo Innovators Meetup organised by Prof. Seun Kolade at Enterprise Republic in December 2025, just weeks after similar conversations were happening in security circles.
The argument was that Oyo is not a high-intensity conflict state but it is increasingly exposed to national insecurity dynamics. Geographic spillover from the North West and North Central is real. The Ibadan-Oyo-Ogbomoso corridor is a high-value transit route, and criminals follow economic flows. LGAs in northern Oyo lack the security infrastructure (inner roads, lighting, local coordination frameworks) to mount adequate responses when incidents occur.
None of that analysis was original. It was widely known, frequently discussed, and consistently under-acted upon.
The Information Problem at the Heart of Insecurity
What I argued in December (and what the May attack confirms) is that insecurity in communities like Oriire is not just a policing failure. It is, first and fundamentally, an information failure.
Insecurity escalates when three conditions converge: early warning signals are ignored, information is delayed or distorted when it does travel, and trust in institutions is too weak for communities to report what they see. All three conditions were present in northern Oyo long before Friday’s attack.
Communities do not stay silent because they have nothing to say. They stay silent because the channels for speaking do not exist, the actors who should receive information are not trusted, and the consequences of speaking (vulnerability, stigma, reprisal) often outweigh the expected benefit. When farmers in Oriire observe strangers moving through their land at unusual hours, when herder-farmer tensions spike along forest edges, when local vigilante groups form because formal security has already failed… those are early warning signals.
They are not intelligence only in the absence of a system designed to receive them. The National Park attack in January was a signal that the system failed to adequately translate into preventive action. The May school attack is what happens after the next signal is also missed.
What Leaders Owe Communities
Let me be direct about the political dimension of this, because I think being indirect serves no one.
Northern Oyo’s vulnerability has been documented and has been raised in community meetings, legislative sessions, security briefings and media reports more than enough. The governance failures that create and sustain that vulnerability (weak local council presence in community safety, poor road infrastructure affecting response times, inadequate coordination between Amotekun, police, traditional rulers and local actors) are not secrets. They are known deficiencies in a system that has not been adequately reformed. Leaders at every level carry responsibility for what happened in Oriire. Not because they pulled the triggers, but because they had the information and the authority to build the systems that could have prevented or disrupted this attack, and those systems are not there.
Deploying tactical teams after an attack is crisis management. What communities deserve is governance that makes such attacks harder to execute, and impossible to deny through information suppression.
The attack on schools in Oriire also raises a question for those of us working at the intersection of media, technology and governance: what did we fail to do, and what can we do differently?
Media has a specific function in insecurity environments that is distinct from its general watchdog role. Verification of rumours, documentation of incidents before they become full crises, accountability journalism that names governance failures before they become tragedies.
These are operationally necessary and they require newsrooms with capacity and mandate to report on rural communities in northern Oyo, not just crisis-driven parachute journalism that descends when the worst has already happened.
Technology (early warning platforms, community reporting tools, mapping of incident patterns) can extend that capacity. But technology does not replace trust.
A community alert system means nothing if residents do not trust who receives the alert. An incident reporting app means nothing if the fear of reprisal makes reporting dangerous. The infrastructure of information is only as strong as the social trust it runs on.
What Must Follow
For security actors: the next operation cannot be another reactive deployment.
Northern Oyo needs a long-term community security architecture, co-designed with local institutions, that addresses infrastructure, intelligence-sharing and response capacity simultaneously.
For media: cover Oriire, Ido, Ibarapa, and the Ogbomoso axis not only when there is a crisis to photograph. Cover them as communities with early warning signals worth documenting.
For technology and civic actors: build the community information networks that make early warning actionable. The farmers, okada riders, market traders and community leaders of northern Oyo are the most proximate observers of what is happening in those forests. They deserve channels that actually receive their intelligence.
For leaders: the time for statements and partisan blame game has passed.
What these communities need now is a security response architecture that treats northern Oyo as a priority zone, not because it can generate media coverage, but because the people who live there deserve to send their children to school without fear.
The warning was there in January. It was there in December. It was there before that. The children and teachers of Oriire paid the price for our collective failure to hear it clearly enough.
We do not get to say we did not know.