Oriire mass kidnap, forty-four lives, politics, and ignorance of the commentari

By Bamidele Ademola-Olateju

Let me say this plainly, people should not play politics with lives. The Oriire mass abduction is finally behind us. Troops of the Nigerian Army, working alongside the National Counter Terrorism Centre, the Defence Headquarters, Special Forces from the Army, Navy and Air Force, the Nigeria Police, the DSS, the NIA, the Civil Defence Corps, and local vigilantes and Amotekun, executed a coordinated operation that rescued 44 pupils and teachers taken from three schools in Oriire. Forty-four people who were snatched from their classrooms on May 15 walked out alive fifty-six days later. That is the headline, and the miracle. And yet, before the families had finished embracing their children, some were already at work, asking why it took so long, as though a rescue is a thing you order like fast food.

I have watched, with a mixture of pity and disgust, as people who have never sat in a situation room, never studied a hostage network, never lost a night’s sleep over a tactical map, stand on the sidelines and hand out verdicts. Two months, they cry, as if two months of silence was cheap. As if it was not two months of intelligence gathering, of quietly mapping a criminal network before a single boot moved. The operation spanned more than a month focused simply on identifying the ringleaders, mapping their web of informants, and dismantling their hideouts and logistics inside the forest. That is not delay, it is discipline.

Here is what the armchair critics refuse to reckon with; this was not a straightforward criminal gang holed up in a shack. This was a network embedded in terrain, protected by informants, operating in a case where the state resisted enormous pressure to take the quick-fix route of paying ransom, understanding that a payout today buys a bigger, bolder kidnapping tomorrow. It is easy to demand speed from a chair in Lagos or Abuja. It is another thing entirely to plan an assault on captors who are watching, who are armed, and who have already shown they will kill.

And let us not pretend the danger was theoretical. One teacher was killed while in custody, and another was killed by the terrorists while held captive. The rescue route itself had been sabotaged before, with assailants planting improvised explosive devices that wounded security personnel. So when people ask why the forces did not simply storm in on day one, I ask them, storm in with what plan, against a gang capable of planting IEDs on your own approach route? Against a network with eyes and ears in unexpected places? You do not charge blindly into a hostage situation and call it courage. What that becomes is a funeral.

This is why I keep saying it to the ears of anyone who has never been in government; for anyone standing outside the government and outside the decision-making rooms, you do not have the full picture, and you never will. You do not know what informants were being cultivated. You do not know what compromises inside the system had to be identified and worked around. You do not know how many operations were planned and aborted because intelligence showed the abductors would kill at the first wrong move. Conjecture, dressed up as commentary, is simply a lazy way of thinking.

It costs nothing to speculate from a keyboard. It costs everything to get a rescue wrong. To the government’s credit here, the outcome speaks for itself. The rescue involved no ransom and no concession, eight members of the gang were arrested and handed to the DSS, and the notorious kingpins whose release the kidnappers demanded remains in custody, facing prosecution. That is not a government that moved carelessly. That is a government, and a coalition of security agencies, that held the line under pressure, refused to fund the next atrocity, and still brought every living victim home. So before you write next time a crisis like this unfolds, ask yourself whether you are seeking truth or performing outrage? Lives were on the line, and they came home. That is the standard by which this should be judged, not the calendar