This is why the commission matters, and why it deserves better than cynicism. First, it is our instrument of truth. Like the 9/11 Commission, its assignment is to establish what truly happened: how the attackers gathered, moved, and struck; what warnings existed and where they died; how the response was organised; and why 56 days passed before freedom. Transparency is not decoration on this process. It is the process.
Recently, Governor Seyi Makinde inaugurated the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the abduction of schoolchildren and teachers in Oriire Local Government Area. The panel is chaired by a retired Justice of the Court of Appeal, Professor Mojeed Owoade, and includes some of the most credible names in Nigerian public life, among them the human rights lawyer, Ayo Obe, and the democracy scholar, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim. I write to make a simple appeal to the people of Oyo State and to all Nigerians: give this commission an open mind, and give it your testimony.
I make this appeal as a scholar of homeland security who has studied mass abductions since Chibok, and I make it with a comparison that Nigerians should sit with. After the attacks of 11 September, 2001, the United States established the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known to the world as the 9/11 Commission. It was born in controversy. Politicians resisted it. Partisans predicted a whitewash. Grieving families demanded it anyway. What emerged was one of the most consequential public documents in modern history: a full accounting of what happened, why the systems failed, and what had to change. The 9/11 Commission Report did not bring back the dead. It did something else. It told the truth in public, it reformed the institutions that failed, and it taught a wounded nation how to prevent the next attack, and how to recover from any attack that still occurs. That is the standard against which the Oriire commission should be measured, and it is a standard within reach.
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Consider what happened in Oriire. On 15 May, armed men attacked three schools along the Ahoro-Esinele and Yawota axis and took away pupils, some as young as two years old, together with their teachers. Nothing like it had ever happened in the South-West. The mass school abduction, that signature atrocity of the North-East and North-West since Chibok, Kankara, and Jangebe, had arrived in Yorubaland. Fifty-six days of captivity followed, in open forest, under rain and sun.
And two men did not come home. The terrorists murdered two Christian teachers. Michael Oyedokun, the Mathematics teacher, was beheaded on the second day, and his killing was circulated on video for the world to see. A second teacher, a church deacon, was killed on the first Sunday of June. The rescued principal has testified that the killings were deliberate, carried out by captors who, in her words, knew the whole world was following the case. In my assessment, the selection of these two victims was not random. The murder of Christian teachers, staged for cameras, at a moment when Washington is openly debating the victimisation of Christians in Nigeria, reads as a calculated message directed beyond our borders, at the United States and its ongoing deliberations on religious persecution in this country. Whether that assessment is correct is precisely the kind of question this commission exists to answer with evidence, under oath, on the record.
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This is why the commission matters, and why it deserves better than cynicism. First, it is our instrument of truth. Like the 9/11 Commission, its assignment is to establish what truly happened: how the attackers gathered, moved, and struck; what warnings existed and where they died; how the response was organised; and why 56 days passed before freedom. Transparency is not decoration on this process. It is the process.
Second, it is our instrument of prevention. The 9/11 Commission did not stop at narrative; it redesigned intelligence sharing, border security, and emergency response. The Oriire commission carries the same charge: to recommend the reforms in school protection, early warning, forest corridor surveillance, and interagency coordination that will determine whether the South-West would suffer a second Oriire incident.
Third, it is our instrument of recovery. Terrorism cannot always be prevented; societies that survive it are those that learn to respond and heal. The commission’s recommendations on victim support, compensation, and community resilience will shape how Oyo State recovers from this wound and how it would absorb any future attack.
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Let me also issue a warning, respectfully but plainly: Stop playing politics with the lives of our people. In the weeks since the abduction, some voices accused the state government of orchestrating the incident, while others dismissed every accountability effort as political theatre. Children as young as two slept in a forest for 56 days. Two teachers were slaughtered. Any Nigerian who converts that suffering into partisan ammunition dishonours the victims and obstructs the truth. The proper answer to suspicion, from whichever direction it comes, is not louder propaganda. It is sworn testimony before a retired Justice of the Court of Appeal. Those who possess facts should bring memoranda. Those who possess doubts should bring questions. The hearing room, not the rumour mill, is where this contest belongs.
Finally, a word addressed directly to readers in the United States and across the global north: this commission is your business too. Do not read Oriire as another distant African tragedy. Nigeria is the largest nation on this continent, one in every five Africans is a Nigerian, and the arithmetic of its stability is brutal and simple. If terrorists can behead teachers and empty schools in the South-West, the region long considered Nigeria’s most secure, then the destabilisation of Nigeria is no longer a hypothesis, and a destabilised Nigeria means a destabilised Africa. And who pays when that happens? Who pays for the migration waves that would dwarf anything the Mediterranean has yet seen? Who pays for the reconstruction? Who pays for the wars that follow state collapse, as the world paid in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya?
The taxpayers of Washington, London, Brussels, and Berlin will fund the consequences of inattention, at a price a thousand times greater than the cost of attention today. That is why everyone, from the United Nations to Washington and Geneva, should follow the work of this commission with critical interest. Governor Makinde has called for international scrutiny, and the UN has examined Nigeria’s school abductions before, from the CEDAW inquiry after Chibok to the condemnations that followed Kankara and Jangebe. A rigorous, published commission report gives the world a government paper it can read transparently and judge on its evidence: an early warning document about the trajectory of Africa’s most consequential nation. Paying attention now is the cheapest security investment the global north will ever make.
The 9/11 Commission succeeded because a nation decided that truth mattered more than blame, and the world read its report because America’s stability was the world’s concern. Nigeria’s stability is no less the world’s concern today. I urge the people of the Pacesetter State, and Nigerians everywhere, to approach this panel with open minds, to testify without fear, and to hold the commission to the highest standard, while giving it the fair chance every honest inquiry deserves. And I urge the watching world to treat its work not as a spectacle but as a stake. The children of Esinele and Yawota, and the memory of two murdered teachers, are owed nothing less.
Oludare Ogunlana is a professor of cybersecurity in Texas, United States, and Founder and CEO of OGUN Security Research and Strategic Consulting LLC. He writes on homeland security, terrorism, and African security.
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