Former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, has issued a scathing rebuke to President Bola Tinubu, state governors, and the National Assembly, warning them against celebrating Children’s Day.
In a powerful statement published on her X account, Ezekwesili declared that May 27 should not be a day of celebration but rather a “National Day of Shame.”
She argued that the entire political class has captured and destroyed the Nigerian state, thereby forfeiting any moral standing to extend goodwill to the nation’s children.
The former minister’s fierce reprimand is rooted in the relentless wave of mass school kidnappings across the country.
She highlighted the most recent tragedy on May 15, where 39 students and seven teachers were seized from schools in the Ahoro Esinele community of Oyo State.
Ezekwesili also recalled the harrowing November 2025 abductions, including the raid in Kebbi State that left a vice principal dead and 25 schoolgirls missing, as well as the kidnapping of 303 students in Niger State which forced over 20,000 schools to shut down indefinitely.
These join a long list of historical raids in Kuriga, Sokoto, and the infamous 2014 Chibok abduction, where over 90 girls remain missing after 12 years.
According to Ezekwesili, the sheer scale of the crisis has pushed the country to a breaking point, noting that Nigeria has “exhausted its capacity to grieve.”
She disclosed that no fewer than 1,799 students have been kidnapped since Chibok, with at least 670 children affected by school abductions in the last two years alone.
This persistent insecurity has fueled a catastrophic education crisis, leaving approximately 19 million Nigerian children—27 percent of the school-age population—out of school, a statistic she described as the worst in the world.
Beyond security failures, the activist painted a grim picture of systemic child neglect and a severe learning emergency.
She cited devastating figures showing that 70 percent of Nigerian ten-year-olds cannot read a simple sentence, a crisis she claims governments at all levels refuse to treat with urgency.
Ezekwesili further condemned the demolition of the Makoko waterfront community, the continued exploitation of almajiri children as political tools, underage marriage in defiance of the Child Rights Act, collapsing primary healthcare centers, and the prevalence of children hawking in traffic.
In a direct challenge to the nation’s leadership, the former minister demanded that the political class use the day to publicly confess their failures rather than issue empty celebratory statements.
She called for full accountability regarding public budgets meant for child safety, the immediate disclosure of the names and locations of all children still in captivity, and the publication of audited data on learning poverty, stunting, and child mortality. “A government that cannot protect its children has forfeited the right to celebrate them,” Ezekwesili stated. “You have not earned the right to speak to our children today. Don’t you dare. Period.”
