45 Days in Captivity: The Children I Could Not Stop Thinking About

Yesterday was Monday.

Ordinarily, that means one thing for me.

It is the day I write my #50PlusDad Reflection, a weekly meditation on what it means to do life with my four-year-old son after becoming a father at close to 52.

This week, I had no shortage of stories.

My son and I had travelled out of state.

We shared moments that made me laugh.

Others made me think.

My work as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) confronted me with difficult questions about parenting, family, and the lives children inherit from adults.

I had more than enough material.

Yet I wrote nothing.

Not because I lacked words.

But because one thought refused to leave me.

The children abducted in Borno and Oyo States.

Today marks 45 days since many of them were taken from their families.

Forty-five days.

As I watched my son play, laugh, eat, and sleep safely beside me, I found myself asking a question no parent should ever have to ask:

Where are those children tonight?

Have they eaten?

Are they frightened?

Are they ill?

Have they been comforted by anyone?

Do they still believe someone is coming?

Those questions silenced every other story I wanted to tell.

What troubles me almost as much as their captivity is something else.

Our silence.

Public outrage appears to have faded.

The headlines have moved on.

Life has resumed.

But those children remain where they have been for forty-five unimaginably long days.

Kidnapping is first a failure of the State.

It is evidence that government has failed in its most fundamental duty—to secure life and protect its people.

Everything that follows, including the painful debate about ransom, is merely the consequence of that first failure.

We argue about whether ransom should be paid.

Perhaps we should first ask why families are left carrying burdens that belong to the State.

Like many Nigerians, I have found myself wondering what ordinary citizens can do.

We have learned to provide alternatives for almost everything government struggles to provide.

When electricity fails, we buy generators.

When public schools fail, many seek private schools.

When public security feels inadequate, those who can afford it hire private security.

But what alternative exists when children are carried away by armed criminals?

I do not have an answer.

That may be the hardest sentence I have written in a long time.

I simply do not know.

Perhaps today’s reflection is not meant to provide solutions.

Perhaps it is meant to resist forgetting.

To insist that while we continue our routines, somewhere in Nigeria, children who should be in classrooms are still in captivity.

Children who should be hearing their parents say, “Good night,” are instead falling asleep in uncertainty.

And just as I prepared this reflection, another attack occurred during the NECO examinations in Borno State.

Some students were abducted.

Many have thankfully been rescued.

One is still missing.

The danger has not passed.

As a father, I cannot look at my son without thinking of those children.

As a child safeguarding advocate, I cannot speak about protecting children while remaining silent about their prolonged captivity.

As a citizen, I cannot accept that forty-five days should begin to feel normal.

So today, I offer no grand solution.

Only a simple plea.

Let us not forget them.

Because sometimes the first casualty of a prolonged tragedy is not hope.

It is memory.

And when a nation forgets its children, it begins to lose its soul.