Freed Kebbi schoolgirls
This administrative paralysis is costing lives. Michael Ibrahim, a father whose four-year-old son is among the hostages, spoke on the situation.
“My son is a small boy. He doesn’t even know how to talk,” Mr Ibrahim told reporters. “We don’t know the condition the boy is in.”
That a school principal is “missing” and the federal government cannot verify the number of missing citizens weeks after an abduction points to a collapse in the relationship between the state and the governed.
It validates our previous finding: that within the Triangle of Terror, citizens often feel safer negotiating with bandits than relying on the state.
The Tactical Dilemma: Aerial sieges and human shields
Responding to the escalation, President Tinubu has ordered an “aggressive, round-the-clock aerial siege” on the forests straddling Kwara, Kebbi, and Niger States.
However, as we noted in our “five bloody days” report, air power alone cannot solve the banditry crisis in this specific topography.
The Kamuku and Kuyanbana forest reserves are vast, dense, and serve as natural bunkers.
More critically, the government faces a moral paralysis. The presidency admits security agencies often know the precise location of the bandit enclaves but are restrained from launching airstrikes.
“Our people are living around where they operate, so you can’t just go there,” Mr Onanuga explained, citing the risk of collateral damage.
The bandits have adapted to this restraint. By embedding themselves in rural communities and using hundreds of abducted students as human shields, they have effectively neutralised the Nigerian military’s air superiority.
The “aerial siege,” therefore, risks becoming a surveillance exercise rather than a decisive strike, leaving the dirty, dangerous work to ground troops who are often overstretched.
An existential threat to education
The cumulative weight of these abductions is threatening to crush the education system in northern Nigeria.
The Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) issued an ultimatum that could bring the sector to a halt.
Reacting to the attacks in Kebbi and Niger, NUT President Titus Amba warned that teachers would be withdrawn from classrooms if their safety could not be guaranteed.
“This is not merely a series of attacks on schools; this is an assault on the entire foundation of education,” Mr Amba declared.
If the NUT makes good on its threat, it would force the closure of schools across the North, inadvertently granting the terrorists – whose ideology often opposes Western education – a strategic victory without firing a shot.
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Conclusion: The prophecy fulfilled
As the 24 Kebbi schoolgirls undergo medical checks, the relief is palpable but fleeting.
President Tinubu’s administration finds itself in a race against time. The “aerial siege” and the deployment of “more boots on the ground” are standard military responses. But they are being deployed against an adversary that has mastered the geography of the Triangle.
PREMIUM TIMES’ earlier report asked how a “corridor of impunity” could swallow three states in five days. The answer, provided by the events of this week, is that the corridor remains wide open.
With the opposition PDP crying foul over “secret deals,” the UN demanding prosecutions, and parents in Niger State waiting for children who may never return, the government must move beyond reactive rescues.
It must dismantle the terror economy that makes the abduction of a 4-year-old asthmatic boy a lucrative business venture.
Until the “Triangle of Terror” is broken – not just by airstrikes, but by closing the political and physical gaps that allow bandits to roam free – families in Isapa, Papiri, and Tsanyawa will continue to wait in the dark, wondering when their own nightmare will end.
