Nigeria has spent twelve years and thirty million dollars announcing that schools are safe. The forest disagrees every time.

On Friday morning, gunmen arrived at Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Oriire Local Government Area, Oyo State. They came during lessons. They shot into the air. They took the principal, two vice principals, three teachers, and an unconfirmed number of students. They set the vice principal's car on fire on the way out and disappeared into the forest.

By Friday evening, Boko Haram had done the same thing in Askira-Uba, Borno State. Forty-two students and children from Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School, a village that shares a border with Sambisa Forest. Taken before anyone could count them properly.

Eighty-seven people across two states in twenty-four hours. One of them, Mrs. Rachael Alamu, filmed a video from captivity. She is the principal of Community High School. She looked directly into the camera. "I am making this video to ask for help from everyone, starting from the Federal Government of Nigeria."

She was still inside the forest when she said it.

By Sunday, the Senate had issued a statement. Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele condemned the abductions and called them an attack on Nigeria's future. He noted that $30 million had been raised globally in 2014 specifically to secure schools across Nigeria after the Chibok kidnapping. Twelve years ago. He said the National Assembly would use legislation to confront the trend. When plenary resumed on June 2.

You already know this pattern. Not because you have read about it before. Though you have. Because the shape of it is familiar. The attack. The video. The condemnation. The promise. The forest, still open.

The $30 million matters. Not because money is the whole story, but because someone decided in 2014 that the problem had a price tag and that price tag could be met. The Safe Schools Initiative produced frameworks, trainings, infrastructure. Borno had battalions. Oyo had Amotekun. There is a commissioner of police in both states.

Chibok happened in 2014. Two hundred and seventy-six girls taken from Government Secondary School in the middle of the night. The world noticed. Hashtags. Summits. Commitments. Three girls from that cohort are still missing today. The government said it learned from Chibok. New protocols. New funding. New attention to school security in the north-east.

The Dapchi kidnapping happened in 2018. One hundred and ten girls from Government Girls Science Technical College. Leah Sharibu remains in captivity. She turned 24 last week.

Every time, the response follows the same sequence. Condemnation. Military deployment. Investigation. Legislation promised. Funding announced. And then, at some point that nobody marks officially, the attention moves on. The forest stays open.

What changed this week is the geography. Oyo is not in the north-east. The families in Oriire were not operating under the assumption that their children's school was a target. That assumption belonged somewhere else, to someone else's tragedy, to the kind of place that shows up on security briefings.

It now shows up on theirs.

The attackers in Oyo reportedly waited until the troop patrol left. A police spokesperson confirmed this. "The incident took place barely a few minutes after troops on patrol left the community." They were watching. They knew the schedule. They planned around it.

That is not a failure of bravery. It is a failure of presence. Presence is not something you can fund in 2014 and assume is still running in 2026.

Nigeria has 18.3 million out-of-school children, according to Bamidele's own statement. Every school attack adds to that number. Not because children stop existing. Because parents stop sending them. Nobody names that in the condemnation statements. The school doesn't close because the government shuts it. It closes because the mothers stop walking their children there in the morning.

This is the part nobody says out loud in the Senate statements. The Senate leader was right that 18.3 million children are out of school. He did not say that the number keeps rising specifically because families in communities like Oriire and Askira-Uba have already made the calculation. The school is not safe. The risk of sending your child is not theoretical. The bandits are real, they are organised, and they know the patrol schedule.

Parents in those communities are not waiting for legislation. They are making decisions now. Some of them will pull their children out of school this week. Some already did after the last attack, and the one before that.

The out-of-school number is not a policy failure in the abstract. It is a collection of individual decisions made by mothers and fathers who looked at the available information and concluded that the system cannot protect their child. Every kidnapping makes more of those decisions more rational.

Mrs. Alamu said in her video: "I am making this video to ask for help from everyone."

She didn't say the government. She said everyone.

She's been in teaching long enough to know who she can count on.