Teachers, children, worshippers: Why we can’t look away anymore

“Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption in the land — it is as if he had slain all mankind. And whoever saves one — it is as if he had saved all mankind.” — The Holy Qur’an, 5:32. There are moments in a nation’s life when silence becomes a form of complicity. When the weight of what has happened demands not careful political language, not measured diplomatic hedging, but plain and unambiguous moral clarity. This is one of those moments. Nigeria is grieving. Oyo State is grieving. And every parent who has ever packed a child’s school bag, every teacher who has ever stood before a classroom, every citizen who still dares to believe in the promise of education is grieving too. In the space of a few terrible days, bandits descended on a school in Oyo State, dragging staff and students into the bush with the casual brutality of people who have learned, to their great advantage, that Nigeria rarely holds them accountable. And then, as if to announce that they recognise no limit to their savagery, they murdered one of the teachers — in cold blood, in a public display of raw viciousness, in the most brutal fashion imaginable. A teacher. Not a soldier. Not a combatant. Not anyone involved in the dispute, politics, or grievances — whatever they may be — that these criminals use to justify their existence. A teacher. A man who woke up that morning, most likely thought about his students, about the lessons he had planned, perhaps about what he would eat for lunch, about his own children, a man with his own story and life challenges — and never came home. This is not who we are as a people. This is not what our faiths command. This is not what our cultures permit. And it must not be what our future holds. The kidnapping of school children is not new to Nigeria. We have lived with this horror long enough that there is a risk — and it is a real and insidious risk — that we begin to accept it as part of the landscape of Nigerian life. The names of places have become shorthand for national trauma: Chibok, Kagara, Kankara, Greenfield University in Kaduna, Salihu Tanko Islamic School in Niger State. And now, Oyo State joins that list. But what happened in Oyo carries a particular weight, because Oyo State is not in the far north, where the federal government and too many commentators have long treated security failures as a regional problem, someone else’s burden. Oyo is in the south-west. It is the home of one of Nigeria’s oldest and most storied civilisations. It is a state with a governor, commissioners, local government chairmen, traditional rulers, and all the apparatus of modern governance. And yet bandits walked into a school — in broad daylight — and took children and their teachers away. What was done to that teacher, what was done to those children, what is being done to many communities by bandits and violent extremist groups has only one name — it is terrorism. There is no softer word that captures the truth of it. Through successive administrations since the start of the insecurity crisis, Nigerians have spoken directly to their governments to curb the scourge of terrorism in our land. Once again, we speak directly and without diplomatic softening, calling on the government to act now and save lives. You have the instruments of state. You have the armed forces, the intelligence services, the Department of State Services, the police, and all the constitutional authority that flows from the Nigerian people. The question is not whether you have the tools. The question is whether you have the will. Use every resource you have. Deploy every intelligence unit, every tactical asset, every human network you can bring to bear, to bring those abducted students and staff home alive. Hunt down the criminals who murdered that teacher. Hunt them not for revenge — but for justice, and for deterrence, and because a state that cannot protect its teachers and students has forfeited the right to call itself a functioning government. We are tired of condolence visits, messages of concern, and condemnation from political leaders. The families of the victims are not reading press releases — they are sitting in their homes, staring at the places where their children used to sit, wondering if they will ever see them again. The widow of the murdered teacher is not consoled by condolences from Abuja or Ibadan. She needs justice. She needs to know that her husband’s death counted for something, that it was not simply absorbed into the endless catalogue of Nigerian tragedies and forgotten by the next news cycle. Likewise, the federal government cannot do this alone, and it must stop being used as an excuse by state and local authorities to abdicate their own responsibilities. Every governor in Nigeria, including the governor of Oyo State, has a duty — not a suggestion, not a good-faith aspiration, but a constitutional duty — to protect the lives and property of citizens in their state. Every local government chairman has security responsibilities. Every traditional ruler has moral authority that can be mobilised. Every community leader and concerned citizen has local intelligence that state security agencies lack. From here on, Nigeria either protects its educators and its children, or it admits it has abandoned them. On the very same day that a teacher was murdered in Oyo State, news came from the United States of America that struck with its own devastating force. Two teenage gunmen walked into the Islamic Center of San Diego in America and opened fire on Muslim worshippers who had gathered to pray. Three Muslims, including a Muslim guard at the mosque, were killed. People who had gone, as Muslims do every day in every country on earth, to seek peace with their Creator — and who never came back home. We mourn these victims as we mourn our own, because they are our own. The ummah — the global Muslim community — is one body. When any part of it is in pain, the whole body feels it. The geography is different; the grief is the same. But we must also be honest about the context in which this attack occurred, because honesty is not just a moral virtue — in this case, it is a practical necessity if America is serious about preventing the next attack. Anti-Muslim violence in America does not happen in a vacuum. It is not a random phenomenon, generated by nothing, explained by nothing. It has roots. Those roots run through the sustained dehumanisation of Muslims in American public discourse — by politicians, by media personalities, by certain religious leaders who have built careers and fundraising machines on the idea that Islam and the West are in a permanent civilisational war. When a senator or a media commentator describes Muslim immigrants as an invasion, as a fifth column, as enemies within, or calls Islam a death cult on TV, they are not simply speaking. They are acting. They are creating a social and psychological environment in which violence against Muslims becomes, for certain unstable or radicalised individuals, not just permissible but righteous. They are, in the most precise sense of the word, giving permission. Words have consequences. This is not a difficult idea. Parents teach it to children. It is the premise of defamation law, of hate speech legislation, of every framework human societies have developed to manage the power of language. We do not accept, in any other context, that speech is consequence-free. We should not accept it here. The key finding in a study conducted by the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV), Australia, titled “Islamophobia in the Digital Age” and covering the period August 28, 2019 to August 27, 2021, is that of 3,759,180 Islamophobic tweets analysed, 86% originated from users in just three countries: India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The full report is available on ResearchGate: “Islamophobia in the Digital Age: A Study of Anti-Muslim Tweets”. The United States plays an outsized role in driving the global prevalence of Islamophobia. It is not merely one country among many. It is the most powerful country on earth, with a media apparatus whose reach is global, a political culture that is watched and imitated across continents, and cultural exports that shape how the world imagines itself. When Islamophobia is glorified as “free speech” and hate speech from self-styled theologians is amplified in American public discourse—when it is given the imprimatur of political legitimacy and broadcast across cable news channels and social media platforms that reach billions—it does not stay in America. It travels. It emboldens bigots in Nigeria and elsewhere. It reinforces the narrative of civilisational conflict that groups like Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Qaeda, the terrorists we call bandits, and their Christian equivalents use to recruit and radicalise. The connection is not speculative. Researchers who study radicalisation have repeatedly documented how American and European anti-Muslim rhetoric appears in the propaganda materials of violent extremist groups in Muslim-majority countries. In Nigeria, we have seen how the hateful rhetoric of American preachers and politicians has seeped into our national discourse— inspiring local hate preachers and feeding narratives of a mythical Islamisation agenda and, more recently, the so-called “Christian genocide.” The cycle feeds itself: Western Islamophobia fuels Muslim extremism, which in turn fuels more Western Islamophobia. And the people who pay the price, as always, are the innocent—the teacher in Oyo, the worshippers in the American mosque. As ordinary Nigerians living through a period in which the temptation to retreat into “tribalism” — to care only about those who look like us, worship like us, vote like us — is very strong, we must be wary of politicians, media influencers, and preachers ready to tell us that the source of our problems lies with “those other people over there.” We must reject that retreat. We must reject it not because we are naive about our differences, theological or cultural, and challenges — but because we understand, from the deepest wells of our faiths and traditions, that justice is indivisible. You cannot selectively apply the principles of human dignity and sanctity of human life. All lives. You cannot say that the life of a Nigerian Christian teacher matters and the life of an American Muslim does not, or vice versa. You cannot decry terrorism in Oyo State while excusing or explaining away terrorism elsewhere. Consistency is not just an intellectual virtue here. It is a moral one. The same principle that makes us weep for the murdered teacher in Oyo makes us weep for the worshippers gunned down in an American mosque. The same commitment that makes us demand accountability from the Nigerian government for its failure to protect its citizens makes us demand that American political leaders, Christian evangelical groups and media figures be held to account for the hateful rhetoric and Islamophobia they create and export around the world, including into Nigeria. Kamor is the Executive Chairman, Muslim Public Affairs Centre [email protected]