Today, Nigeria marks Children’s Day. Across the country, schools that are still open will sing, children will be dressed in their finest, and speeches will be made about “the leaders of tomorrow. ” And somewhere — in Oriire, in Maga, in Papiri, in places we may never name — there are children who will not be there to celebrate at all.
Today, I cannot only celebrate. My heart bleeds.
The hunger we have normalised
As a nurse and a midwife, I have stood at the cot-side of children whose bodies tell a story no child should have to tell. A nursing colleague told me recently that admissions for malnutrition on her ward have been climbing steadily since 2023. She is not wrong. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reports that the number of acutely malnourished children needing treatment in Nigeria has risen by 23 percent in a single year, with severe acute malnutrition cases up by 69 percent.
An estimated 5.4 million Nigerian children are facing acute malnutrition. About 2 million of them are in its most severe and deadly form. Only one in five is receiving any treatment at all. In some local government areas of Katsina and Sokoto, nearly half of every child assessed in July 2025 was found to be severely malnourished.
A child cannot learn on an empty stomach. A child cannot grow on hope alone.
The classroom that became a hunting ground
Nineteen million Nigerian children are not in school. Some are kept away by poverty, some by culture, but a growing number are kept away by fear—the fear of becoming the next headline.
Since January 2024 alone, at least ten mass school kidnappings have taken more than 670 children. In November 2025, more than 300 pupils were seized from a single school in Niger State. And then, just twelve days ago, on the 15th of May 2026, gunmen stormed three schools in Oriire, Oyo State, and abducted the principal, teachers, and pupils. Among them was Michael Oyedokun — a mathematics teacher who had given over two decades of his life to educating Nigerian children. He was beheaded.
For years, this horror was confined to the North. It is no longer. The fear that has lived in a Zamfara mother’s chest now lives in an Oyo mother’s chest. No region is safe. No child is safe. And many of those taken with Mr Oyedokun are still in captivity tonight.
When home is the most dangerous place
For too many Nigerian children, the deepest danger is not in any forest. It is in the bedroom next door.
UNICEF reports that 9 in 10 Nigerian children under five have experienced some form of violence. Some are trafficked. Some are forced into labour before their hands have learned to write. Some are married off before they have finished growing. And some in homes that look respectable from the outside are systematically silenced into the kind of suffering that does not make the news.
As a parent and teen coach, I see the long shadow this throws. Children who were not safe at home become teenagers who do not know how to trust. They become adults who carry pain into the next generation. The cycle is not abstract. It is right here, in our families.
I look forward to the day
So today, I do not just celebrate. I grieve. And I dream.
I look forward to the day every Nigerian child eats three nutritious meals without fear of the pot running dry.
I look forward to the day a child walks into a classroom, and a parent’s heart does not skip a beat.
I look forward to the day every home is a sanctuary, not a site of suffering.
I look forward to the day no Nigerian teacher gives his life trying to give a lesson.
I look forward to the day “child” and “victim” stop sharing a sentence in our news.
What we can do, today
This is not a problem any one of us can solve alone. But silence is its own kind of complicity. If you have read this far, you can do one thing today:
- Say their names. Michael Oyedokun was a teacher. He had a name. So do the principal and the pupils still in captivity tonight. Refuse to let them become numbers.
- Hold your own children close. Look them in the eye. Listen to what they are not saying. Many Nigerian children who suffer most do so because no adult is paying attention.
- Speak up where you have a platform—at work, in your faith community, in your family WhatsApp group. Demand safer schools, food security, and real accountability for crimes against children.
- Support the organizations doing the work—UNICEF Nigeria, Save the Children, MSF, and the Nigerian Red Cross—with whatever you can give.
To every Nigerian child reading this one day, or whose parent reads it for them: you deserve more than survival. You deserve childhood. And those of us who can are still trying.
Rest well, Mr Oyedokun. We will not forget.
Latifah Ajetunmobi