Former Minister Ezekwesili Accuses FG of Committing Crimes Against Children

• Oby Ezekwesili has condemned the Nigerian government for failing to protect schoolchildren, calling abductions by terrorists “proof of state collapse” and “deliberate negligence.”

A former Minister of Education, Obiageli Ezekwesili, has accused the Nigerian Government of committing crimes against children across the country.

Ezekwesili made the allegation while reacting to the abductions of students from the Government Girls’ Comprehensive Secondary School Maga in Kwara State and St Mary’s Catholic School in Niger by terrorists.

According to her, the government’s failure to protect every Nigerian child represents “the highest acceptance of governing without legitimacy.”

In a statement issued on Monday, November 24, on X, Ezekwesili said the “cancerous level of systemic corruption that metastasised into the country’s political culture is totally imploding Nigeria.”

“All our institutions including our once strong military and judiciary are now so terribly compromised and incapable of delivering on their mandate. Why? Endemic corruption gradually ate up the very values on which they were founded and once functioned and rendered them the impotent institutions we now know,” she stated.

She also warned that the government’s consistent disregard for good governance “would be the bane of Nigeria as a country.”

Citing reports from UNICEF and Save the Children, Ezekwesili noted that more than 1,680 students were abducted in 70 attacks between 2014 and 2022, while another 816 students were taken in 22 attacks between 2023 and November 2025.

“After more than a decade of holding government accountable for the preventable atrocities committed against Nigeria’s school children, one has reached a point where outrage no longer feels adequate and repetition feels like an insult to the memory of the lost.

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“The latest group of abducted children are not just hostages of terrorists; they are hostages of the unforgivable failure of governments and the political class that refuse to be moved, and to a people whose empathy has been steadily eroded. The children’s abductions are not ‘incidents.’ They are proof of state collapse in its most basic duty—the protection of our greatest human asset—our children.”

Referencing the Chibok girls, Ezekwesili said that after 10 years, the government “has forfeited any claim to ignorance, surprise, or learning curve. What we have is deliberate negligence, and deliberate negligence is a crime.

Let it be known that to continue to govern without rescuing all our abducted children and protecting the rest in their schools is the highest acceptance of the President of Nigeria that he governs without legitimacy.”