In May 2026, a video went viral showing students of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, breaking down and destroying property on their own campus. Furniture broken. Walls scorched. Hundreds of students on campus, demanding justice for Chibuzo, a 100-level student allegedly tortured to death in the custody of the campus security group, Man O’ War — a death that, weeks later, still had no published findings attached to it.
Beneath the video, one comment stopped me. A user wrote simply, “We are getting there.” Not in support of justice for Chibuzo — in response to the destruction itself. As if tearing down the monument and building was somehow progress.
It is not. A vandalized building belongs to no government official. It belongs to all the students.
Vandalizing what is meant for us is not us getting there. It is the replication of our own ignorance in civic attitude, as it is proof that we feel the injury but were never shown what to do with it besides something.
My name is Aanuoluwapo Akorede (Benaris_Paints). I graduated from the Department of International Studies (Defense and Strategic Studies) at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Kaduna, Nigeria. This opinion article draws on a small research survey I conducted among students of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, alongside the FUTO unrest and a second, quieter case that proves the same claim from the opposite direction. I do not write as an expert. I write as a young Nigerian putting one claim to the rest of us directly.
We Are Getting There!
The Loud Half
The FUTO comment wasn’t an isolated mistake. It echoes the 2024 #EndBadGovernance protests in Kano and the 2020 #EndSARS unrest in Lagos. These were moments when legitimate grievance ended in property damage rather than pressure on the institution responsible.
The anger in each case was justified. Chibuzo’s death deserved outrage. SARS’s record deserved outrage. That isn’t in dispute. What’s in dispute is the exit chosen once the anger arrived. Justified anger still needs a target with a mechanism — an awareness, an office, a panel, a published finding — or it has nowhere to go but a wall. Burning the wall doesn’t indict Man O’ War. It indicts the absence of anything else within reach.
National Assets, Not National Memory
The Quiet Half
The May 15, 2026 Oyo State abduction marked the first time a massive, northern-style school raid breached Southwest Nigeria, a region previously considered relatively safe from such coordinated banditry. Forty-six people, consisting of 39 students and seven teachers, were kidnapped when terrorists simultaneously raided Baptist Nursery and Primary School (Yawota), Community High School (Ahoro-Esinele), and L.A. Primary School (Ahoro-Esinele) in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. Two of their teachers did not survive the ordeal. One teacher was killed during the initial armed assault on the schools on May 15, 2026. Mr. Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher, was brutally killed and beheaded by the terrorists while in captivity, an act the abductors filmed and shared online on May 17, 2026, to terrorize the public.
Fifty-six days later, on 10 July 2026, all the remaining victims were finally rescued, and the country exhaled in a way that felt, for a moment, like closure.
But I do not think closure is quite the right word, and this is where my argument actually lives. Fifty-six days is not a quick resolution — it is nearly two months of a country’s attention being sustained only because the victims were still missing. The moment they came home, so did the news cycle’s interest, and Oyo risks becoming another case Nigeria remembers only for as long as it stays unresolved. Compare that to the Chibok girls, some of whom remain missing more than a decade later: their case has stayed in national memory not because Nigeria chose to keep it alive, but because it was never allowed the mercy of an ending. That is the uncomfortable pattern I want to name: we do not seem to hold onto stories out of civic memory or accountability; we hold onto them only for as long as they refuse to resolve. Once a case closes, so does our attention, and that is arguably just as damning as the abductions themselves.
Chibok Was Never the Whole Story
In April 2014, Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from a government secondary school in Chibok, Borno State. Twelve years later, between 87 and 91 of those girls are still missing — the figure depends on which 2026 source you check: the UN’s CEDAW inquiry, the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, or the parents’ own open letter. The CEDAW Committee called this a grave and systematic violation, for which the Nigerian state bears responsibility, and found that at least 2,000 school children have been abducted from Nigerian schools since Chibok — a pattern that has since reached Oyo State, far outside the insurgency-hit northeast.
Chibok was not merely an isolated atrocity; it was the first widely publicised entry in a pattern that has repeated for over a decade, including the more recent wave of attacks on schools by armed bandit groups operating independently of Boko Haram. The mechanism is consistent: schools are targeted because they are soft, predictable, poorly defended concentrations of children, used for ransom, forced marriage, trafficking, or prisoner exchange.
The number that should anchor any serious article on this subject is not 276; it should be 2,500. As of June 2026, independent tracking data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and local watchdog reports show that at least 2,416 to 2,500 students have been abducted across 26 to 31 major mass school raids in Nigeria since the 2014 Chibok tragedy.
We did not sustain attention long enough to even know the missing number is still uncertain twelve years on. We called it a government problem and moved past it the same way we’d scroll past a post we didn’t want to engage with.
We Are Not Getting There!
One Gap, Two Exits
The civic attitude gap gives young Nigerians only two exits when something is taken from us: vandalize it or let it go. Neither requires knowing who is accountable, what office holds the duty, or what lever a citizen is meant to pull.
We are not getting there by vandalizing public properties. We are not getting there by quietly accepting that 91 girls have been missing for twelve years. We are not getting there because 39 students and 7 teachers were abducted, rescued, and then brushed off with “that’s government’s wahala.” Both are the same failure dressed differently — one in destruction, one in silence.
We will know we are getting there when a young Nigerian, faced with either kind of injury, can name the third option: not destructive measure, not silence, but the actual mechanism by which an injury becomes accountability. A pattern of mass school student abductions has been repeated at least 31 times across Nigeria since the Chibok tragedy in April 2014.
Thirty-one times over twelve years is not a tragedy. It is a policy failure with a measurable recurrence rate.
The actual mechanism by which an injury becomes accountability. The third option.
What Do We Actually Mean by Civic Education?
Before making any case for closing Nigeria’s civic attitude gap, I think it is worth being honest about what civic education used to mean and what it now needs to mean. The old model taught people to know their government — the arms of government, the electoral process, the rule of law. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete for the world young Nigerians actually live in.
UNICEF frames civic education as work that shapes engagement by building the competencies citizens need to participate in community, government, and politics — attitudes, skills, and knowledge together, not knowledge alone. In an age where a WhatsApp forward can shape an election faster than a manifesto can, civic education without critical thinking and media literacy is only teaching half the subject.
There is also a quieter debate underneath this one that I find more interesting than it first appears: what kind of citizen is civic education actually trying to produce? Research on the subject generally settles on three answers, and I think most Nigerians will recognise all three in people they know:
- The personally responsible citizen — honest, law-abiding, the neighbour who volunteers and gives to charity, but rarely asks why the problem needed charity in the first place.
- The participatory citizen — the person who understands how local government works and uses that knowledge to push for change through the proper channels: town hall meetings, petitions, elections.
- The justice-oriented citizen — the one who looks past individual acts of goodwill and individual votes, and asks what structural rot is producing the problem in the first place, then organises collectively to fix it.
Nigeria, if I am honest, has produced plenty of the first type and precious few of the third. We are a country of good neighbours and reluctant reformers. That is not an insult; it is a diagnosis, and diagnoses are the first step toward treatment.
None of this happens in a vacuum, either. Nigerian democracy already has its own stated values on paper: freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law, separation of powers, transparency, popular sovereignty, credible elections, tolerance of opposing views, and legitimacy, among others (Nnamdi, 2009). The problem was never a shortage of values on paper. The problem is the distance between what is written in our democratic charter and what is practised at the ward level, the polling unit, the family dinner table where politics gets dismissed as “not my business.” Closing the civic attitude gap, in the end, is really about closing that distance.
If the civic attitude gap is going to close, it will not close through another workshop or another hashtag. It will close through habit, and habit is built early. The first thing I would recommend, without hesitation, is pushing civic education back into primary school, not just secondary school government classes that most students forget the week after the exam. Research on Nigerian political socialisation keeps returning to the same point: children who understand how government works before they are old enough to vote grow into adults who actually show up to vote. That is not a controversial claim; it is simply something Nigeria has been slow to act on.
Second, civic education in 2026 cannot just mean knowing how a bill becomes law. It has to mean media and information literacy — teaching young people to pause before they share, to ask who benefits from a claim before they repost it. Misinformation does not spread because Nigerians are gullible; it spreads because nobody ever taught us to slow down. A civics curriculum without media literacy today is like teaching someone to swim without ever mentioning the current.
Third, INEC’s own initiatives — the Voter Education Manual, the youth ambassador programme — need less publicity and more funding. These are not bad ideas; they are underpowered ones. An electoral body that already knows rejected ballots and low turnout trace back to poor voter education has no excuse for treating that education as an afterthought rather than a budget priority.
Fourth, and this is the one I feel most strongly about: Nigerian youth need to convert energy into organisation. The 2023 election proved young Nigerians can mobilize — over nine million new voters registered, more than three-quarters of them under thirty-five, a wave the #EndSARS protests arguably set in motion. But mobilisation without follow-through is just noise with good timing. A hashtag that trends for a week does nothing if nobody is still watching the National Assembly by the following month. Civic attitude is not a single act of voting; it is the discipline of staying present after the votes are counted.
Conclusion
So are we getting there? Honestly, not yet. But “not yet” is different from “not at all,” and that distinction matters more than it sounds. Nigeria’s youth are not apathetic by nature; the numbers make that clear enough — the same generation dismissed as politically disengaged is the one that registered in the millions and forced a national conversation nobody expected in 2020. What is missing is not enthusiasm. What is missing is structure: the civic education that should have started before we could vote, the media literacy that should have armed us against manipulation, and the habit of staying engaged once the cameras leave. Closing that gap will not happen through one election cycle or one generation’s outrage. It will happen the way most real change happens in a country this size — slowly, unevenly, and only if enough young Nigerians decide that showing up once is not the same as showing up for good.
Aanuoluwapo Akorede is a humanitarian policy strategist and political language analyst based in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, Nigeria. LinkedIn: Aanuoluwapo (Aribani) Akorede. X and Instagram: @Benaris_menthorate.
