46 children were kidnapped.

Taken, and we would soon forget.

It is a strange thing, how grief has become routine in this country. How we wake up, unlock our phones, scroll through our feeds, and find another horror waiting for us like an unpaid bill. Another tragedy. Another headline. Another set of faces we have never met but somehow already know how to mourn. This time it is Oyo. Children taken from where they should have been safest. Children stolen from classrooms, from desks still warm from their little bodies, from books they probably did not even want to read that morning. Children whose biggest concern should have been whether they would pass an exam, or what snack they would buy on their way home, or whether their friend would share biscuits with them during break. Instead, they are now another national emergency. Another breaking news notification. Another reason for us to stop whatever we are doing and whisper to ourselves, God, not again.

And that is what crushes me. Not even the shock anymore, because shock requires surprise, and Nigeria has long beaten surprise out of us. It is the familiarity of it. The dreadful recognition. The way your stomach sinks not because this is unimaginable, but because it is painfully imaginable. Because we have seen this movie too many times. We know its plot. We know its rhythm. The videos will flood the internet. People will cry into their front cameras. Voices will shake. Captions will carry words like heartbreaking, unacceptable, pray for Oyo. Politicians will release statements that say everything and mean nothing. Security agencies will assure us they are “on top of the situation.” Newscasters will wear the appropriate expressions of concern. We will all repost. We will all rage. We will all grieve loudly enough for the algorithm to notice. And then, slowly, quietly, predictably, the noise will fade. Something else will happen. Another scandal. Another celebrity controversy. Another fuel price increase. Another election speech. Another distraction. And these children, these real children with names and dreams and unfinished homework, will begin their journey into the archive of Nigerian forgetting.

Because this is what we do here. We forget professionally. We forget with remarkable efficiency. We package our outrage into trends and once the trend expires, so does the urgency. We have done it before. We screamed for Chibok until our throats cracked. We changed profile pictures. We marched. We held signs. We said Bring Back Our Girls so many times it became a kind of national hymn. And then time did what time does in this country. It dragged our attention elsewhere. It buried urgency under repetition. It taught us that even the deepest pain can become background noise if stretched long enough. Chibok became history while many of those girls were still missing. Dapchi came and joined the list. Kankara joined. Kaduna joined. Niger joined. Village after village, school after school, child after child, and every single time we react as though this is an interruption instead of what it truly is: a pattern. A sickness. A nation so accustomed to bleeding that it has stopped reaching for bandages.

And what sort of darkness must live inside a person to kidnap a child? I keep asking myself this because I cannot understand it. I do not want to understand it. There are certain evils the human mind should reject completely. To look at a child and see leverage. To hear the trembling panic in their voice and calculate profit. To know that somewhere a mother is collapsing to the floor because her child is missing and still feel nothing except greed. That is not ordinary wickedness. That is something rotten beyond language. There is something almost demonic about it, something so stripped of human feeling that it feels as though the soul itself has vacated the body. Because a child is innocence in its rawest form. A child is trust. A child still believes the world makes sense. To violate that trust, to weaponize that innocence, to make terror a child’s memory of school, is an act so monstrous it should shake a nation to its core.

But what shakes me even more is how little it seems to shake the people who are supposed to govern us.

How do leaders hear this news and still sleep soundly? How do they issue polished statements and continue their schedules as though this is merely another administrative inconvenience? How do they stand behind podiums, draped in authority, and tell us rescue efforts are ongoing as though those words should comfort parents who do not know whether their children are cold, hungry, crying, or alive? There is something grotesque about how practiced they have become at public sympathy. The carefully arranged concern. The rehearsed solemnity. The empty promises wrapped in official language. “We are monitoring the situation.” “We are deploying necessary resources.” “We assure citizens that security is our priority.” Priority? What a cruel joke. If security were truly a priority, Nigerian children would not need courage just to attend school.

And this is where the anger rises in me until it becomes tears. Because what exactly are we supposed to do with this exhaustion? How many times can a people cry out before their voices begin to sound ridiculous even to themselves? How many times can we bury our fear under resilience before resilience becomes another word for surrender? Nigerians have become too good at surviving things that should never have happened. We adapt to horrors with terrifying speed. We normalize the absurd. We adjust our expectations downward until basic safety begins to feel like luxury. We tell ourselves at least it was not our child this time. At least it was not our state. At least they are “working on it.” We negotiate with despair because hopelessness is too heavy to carry openly.

And things keep getting worse. That is perhaps the most frightening part. There was a time when every new tragedy felt like rock bottom. Now rock bottom feels like a floor with trapdoors. Every month reveals a lower level. Every headline asks us to redefine what is survivable. Inflation rises. Hunger deepens. Insecurity spreads like wildfire. Trust in leadership evaporates further each day. The nation feels tired in its bones, as though the land itself is exhausted from carrying the weight of our failures. There is a heaviness hanging over everything, a quiet understanding that something is deeply broken and nobody in power seems either willing or able to fix it.

And still, we continue.

We wake up. We go to work. We laugh when we can. We make jokes because sometimes laughter is the only rebellion left. We cry online because it is one of the few spaces where our helplessness can be witnessed. And there is nothing wrong with that grief. There is nothing wrong with the tears, the videos, the shaking voices. They matter. They are proof that we have not yet become entirely numb.

But I am afraid.

Afraid of how short our memory has become.

Afraid of how quickly sorrow expires here.

Afraid that these children in Oyo will become another chapter we reference briefly before moving on to the next disaster.

Afraid that one day news of kidnapped children will no longer disturb us because repetition will have sanded down our horror into indifference.

And if that day comes, then perhaps the kidnappers will not be the only ones guilty of theft. Because what would have been stolen from us by then is something even more precious than safety. It would be our humanity. Our ability to still be outraged. Our refusal to accept evil as ordinary.

So yes, cry. Rage. Post the videos. Scream into your cameras if you must. Let your voice break. Let your anger show. But do not let your grief become seasonal. Do not let your outrage have an expiration date. Do not let Oyo become another memory we perform sadness for until the next kidnapping gives us fresh content to mourn.

Because if all we ever do is grieve loudly and forget quickly, then we are not confronting this tragedy.

We are rehearsing it.

And somewhere in this country, another child is already walking into a classroom tomorrow believing they will make it home.

That thought should keep all of us awake.