On May 15, 2026, 42 pupils and education workers from Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota; L.A. Primary School; and Community Grammar School, Esiele were abducted and taken into the vast wilderness of the Old Oyo National Park.
Fifty days later, they remain unaccounted for, trapped in a conflict that has stretched beyond the forests of Oyo State into the depth of national anxiety.
Not the ordinary silence of rural dusk settling over farms and footpaths, but a deeper, more oppressive silence – the kind that followed gunfire into a community. It has not left since then. In Esiele, Yawota, and Ahoro-Esinele, silence now has texture. It sits on doorsteps, lingers in empty classrooms, and hangs over households where parents still wait for children who left for school and never returned.