The cheers had barely died down after the release of the Oriire school children and their teachers when another video surfaced. And this one didn’t bring relief. It brought shame.
In the clip, the freed students and teachers, still visibly shaken, stood in a line and sang in unison: “Thank you.” Hands clapped. Smiles were forced. Cameras rolled. The audience? All of us including our dear Politicians because we are all part of the problem.
It should have been a moment of sober reflection. Instead, it became a performance. A ritual we are fast normalizing in Nigeria: hailing public officials for doing the bare minimum of the job they swore an oath to do.
Let’s be clear. These children were abducted because the system failed them. They were taken from classrooms that should have been protected. They spent days, maybe weeks, in captivity because those charged with providing security did not. And yet, the first thing we ask of them upon release is to sing praises to the same system that failed to prevent their ordeal.
That is not gratitude. That is gaslighting.
We have a name for it now, though it has existed for years. “On your mandate we shall stand.” It plays out at airports, at project commissioning, at hospital visits, tragically. Citizens are mobilized to sing, dance, and chant for politicians who show up after a crisis.
It’s a tradition we are learning to imbibe with disturbing speed. We celebrate officials for fixing roads they neglected, for paying salaries they delayed, for rescuing people they couldn’t protect. Accountability has been replaced with adulation.
In the case of Oriire, the question no one asked on camera was simple: Why were these children taken in the first place? Who will be held responsible for the security lapse? What guarantees do parents have that this won’t happen again next term?
Instead, we got a cheer.
Every day, the evidence is in front of us. Schools without fences. Communities without police presence. Intelligence that arrives too late. A security architecture that reacts instead of prevents.
And yet we are told to be thankful when, after the damage is done, someone shows up with a microphone and a convoy.
This is not peculiar to education. It cuts across all sectors. We thank officials for restoring electricity that shouldn’t have gone off. We hail them for clearing hospital backlogs they created. We roll out drums for palliatives that only exist because the economy collapsed.
We have turned failure into a campaign opportunity.
Those children and teachers deserve more than a song. They deserve justice. They deserve answers. They deserve a government that is embarrassed enough by its failure to fix the problem, not one that is proud enough to demand applause for cleaning up its own mess.
Holding leaders accountable is not ingratitude. It is citizenship. It is the only way to dismantle the culture that tells a traumatized child to sing “thank you” to the very structure that couldn’t keep her safe.
Until we eradicate this “on your mandate we shall stand” syndrome, we will keep sitting on a ticking time bomb. The next abduction is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.
And when it happens again, will we gather the next set of victims to say “thank you”?
Or will we finally demand better?
