Oby Ezekwesili told President Bola Tinubu and Nigeria’s political leadership on May 27, 2026, not to issue Children’s Day greetings while millions of children remain exposed to insecurity, poverty and poor access to education. In a statement released on Children’s Day, she said officials had no business “performing a tenderness” for cameras when so many children have been “abandoned, betrayed, and condemned to lives of suffering.”
Ezekwesili tied her rebuke to the children still missing from the Chibok, Dapchi, Kuriga and Kankara abductions, and said many of the affected children remain unaccounted for years later. She also pointed to recent attacks and kidnappings affecting schools in Oyo state, Kebbi state and Niger state, saying the pattern shows that Nigeria’s schoolchildren are still living with the same fear that has haunted families for more than a decade.
Her sharpest words were reserved for the Chibok case, where she said over 90 girls were still missing twelve years after April 14, 2014. That anniversary has remained one of the most painful symbols of Nigeria’s insecurity crisis, and Ezekwesili used it to argue that May 27 should not be treated as a routine day of celebration when children are still being taken from classrooms and kept from learning.
She called the situation a National Day of Shame and pressed officials to publish audited figures on out-of-school children, stunting, learning poverty and child mortality. Ezekwesili said a government that cannot protect its children has forfeited the right to celebrate them, and told Nigerian children that the country they deserve is one in which they are safe, educated, fed, healed, free to dream and work hard.
The message lands on Children’s Day, observed every May 27, with Nigeria still facing the same linked crises that have shadowed the holiday for years: school insecurity, missing children and weak child welfare indicators. Ezekwesili’s challenge is simple and direct. Before there can be celebration, she said, the state must first answer for the children it has failed to protect.
