By OBIAGELI “OBY” EZEKWESILI

To the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the Vice President, the Governors of the 36 States, the Federal Executive Council, the Members of the National Assembly, the State Houses of Assembly, and the entire political class that has captured and destroyed the Nigeria State:

Do not dare.

Do not dare open your mouths on May 27 to wish Nigerian children a “Happy Children’s Day.” Do not dare release the recycled, ghost-written platitudes your media handlers have already drafted. Do not dare stand in front of cameras, surrounded by carefully arranged children in matching uniforms, to perform a tenderness you have never extended to the millions of Nigerian children you have abandoned, betrayed, and condemned to lives of suffering.

You have no moral standing to wish anything to Nigerian children. None.

Consider what you are dishonorably wishing them.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 39 students and 7 teachers seized only days ago, on 15 May 2026, from a secondary school and two primary schools in Ahoro Esinele community in Oriire district of Oyo State – children aged between two and sixteen, snatched from the southwest in a chilling expansion of a terror that you swore would be confined to the north.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 25 schoolgirls of the Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Wasagu/Danko, Kebbi State, taken from their hostel at dawn on 18 November 2025, after gunmen killed the vice principal and most of whom are still missing as I write.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 303 students and 12 teachers of St. Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, seized on 21 November 2025 - children aged 10 to 18, boys and girls- whose abduction forced more than 20,000 Nigerian schools to close indefinitely.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 287 students of the Government Secondary School in Kuriga, Kaduna State, taken by gunmen on motorcycles on 7 March 2024 in broad daylight while you and your political colleagues posed for swearing-in photographs.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 15 children of Gidan Bakuso, Sokoto State, seized from their boarding school on 9 March 2024 as they slept.

You are wishing to the Chibok girls – over 90 of whom are still missing, twelve years after April 14, 2014, while you have moved on, and for your repugnant luxury, speedily rebuilt and redecorated Aso Villa, bought opulent hideous cars, and rotated power among yourselves as if those girls never existed. But their parents who gave birth to them continue to grieve and daily rain curses on the evil leaders that have shown no empathy towards them and their abducted daughters.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the children of Dapchi, Kankara, Kagara, Jangebe, Afaka, Greenfield, Bethel Baptist, Tegina – and to the many whose abductions never made the headlines because Nigeria had run out of capacity to grieve.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the at least 1,799 students seized in a dozen of the largest abductions since Chibok , and to the 670 children affected by at least 10 school kidnappings in less than two years - a litany of horror compiled not by your security agencies, but by international human rights organisations doing the work your government refuses to do.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the around 19 million Nigerian children - 27 percent- who do not attend school due to the threat of kidnappings, poverty and cultural factors, one of the highest numbers in the world.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 70 percent of Nigerian children aged 10 who cannot read a simple sentence – the foundational learning crisis that your governments at every level have refused to treat as the emergency it is.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the children buried under the rubble of Jos, Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, Borno, Yobe, and now Oyo – slaughtered in their sleep, in their schools, in their churches, in their mosques, in their farms – while your security architecture protects your convoys as you shamelessly drive around politicking in the land your selfishness has turned into a desolate territory.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the children of Makoko, whose homes you demolished, whose schools you erased, whose futures you bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal” that is nothing but state-sanctioned cruelty against the poor.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to the 35 million people the UN World Food Programme estimates could go hungry in Nigeria in 2026, among whom are millions of children whose stunted bodies and diminished brains are the direct ledger of your governance failure.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to children dying from preventable diseases in primary healthcare centres you have refused to equip, to children walking past abandoned school buildings to hawk sachet water in traffic, to the almajiri children you have used as political props for decades and then discarded, to the girl children married off before puberty in states whose laws you refuse to harmonise with the Child Rights Act.

You are wishing “Happy Children’s Day” to children whose parents cannot afford the food, the school fees, the medicines, the transport, or the safety that your governance failures have placed beyond their reach – even as you award yourselves allowances, SUVs, foreign medical trips, and pensions for life.

This is the reality. And the reality is not a “Happy Children’s Day.”

The reality is a National Day of Shame.

So I issue this warning, on behalf of every Nigerian parent, grandparent, teacher, and citizen who refuses to be insulted again:

Spare us your hypocritical statements wishing distressed children a “Happy Children’s Day”. Spare us your photo opportunities and deceitful performances. Spare us your empty words that carry zero weight for the safety of our children.

If you must dare speak on this May 27, then for once, speak the truth of your failures. Stand before Nigerians and confess that you have failed our children. Account for the public budgets that have not guaranteed the Nigerian children safety in their schools nor better education, health, and social protection. Tell us the names and current locations of every single child still in captivity – the Chibok girls, the Kebbi girls, the Niger State children, the Oyo children, and every other.

Tell the parents of these children exactly what your government has done and not done in the days, weeks, months, and years since each abduction.

Publish the audited figures on out-of-school children, on stunting, on learning poverty, and on child mortality. Tell us what specific, measurable, time-bound commitments you are making – not in 2030, not in some imaginary future, but this fiscal year - to end the abandonment and to make Nigerian schools safe.

Anything short of that is a desecration of the Children’s Day and constitutes a fresh wound on the badly scared soul of every Nigerian child.

A government that cannot protect its children has forfeited the right to celebrate them. A political class that has built its wealth on the broken backs of the poor has forfeited the right to address their children with affection. There is no moral universe in which the architects of this abandonment may also serve as its celebrants.

To Nigerian children: Some of us see you. The Nigeria you deserve is a country in which you are safe, educated, fed, healed, free to dream and work hard to be the best of anything you choose to become in this world. We will not stop to stand with you and for you. The shame of May 27, 2026belongs not to you, but to those who have governed you into this tragic condition.

Again, to President Tinubu and the rest of his ilk in Nigeria’s political class – who have sworn to a covenant of watching unconcerned that our children are abducted and their teachers killed – be silent on this day.

You have not earned the right to speak to our children today.

Don’t you dare. Period.

•Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili is Founder, Human Capital Africa (HCA), Founder, FixPolitics and the School of Politics, Policy and Governance - www.theSPPG.org, Co-founder, Transparency International, Former Federal Minister of Education, Federal Republic of Nigeria. She intended this piece for publication yesterday, May 27, 2026.

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