30 Children Were Kidnapped in Oyo State. We Trended for 48 Hours and Then Moved On. This Is the Problem.
More than 30 pupils and teachers were kidnapped in Oyo State recently. Teachers went on strike. Parents protested. The story dominated social media for a moment — a news cycle, maybe two. Then the World Cup draw happened, a celebrity posted something, and Nigeria’s attention moved on.
This is not a new pattern. It is the pattern. And the fact that it is predictable does not make it less damning — it makes it more so.
We have developed a collective attention span for tragedy that is calibrated precisely to the length of a trending topic. Something horrific happens. We express outrage — genuine, visceral outrage. We share graphics, we post threads, we demand accountability. And then, without anyone making a decision to stop caring, we simply do. The algorithm moves. The timeline refreshes. And the children are still wherever they are.
The teachers who went on strike deserve more than a weekend of solidarity. The parents of those children deserve more than hashtag support that evaporates when the next drama surfaces. And frankly, we deserve to interrogate ourselves honestly about the kind of civic attention we are capable of sustaining.
Security in Nigeria has become normalised as a background crisis — something that exists in the news the way traffic exists in Lagos. Terrible, constant, seemingly unchangeable, and therefore eventually invisible. That normalisation is doing work for the people who should be held accountable for it. Every time we move on, we give them permission to do the same.
We are not asking anyone to be miserable forever. We are asking for the kind of sustained pressure that actually moves governments. Not a trending topic. A movement. There is a difference, and we keep confusing the two.
The children of Oyo State deserve better than our attention span. But right now, our attention span is all we have to offer. So let us at least be honest about how short it is.
