By Clement John
ABUJA — Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar on Monday attacked President Bola Tinubu over the abduction of schoolchildren and teachers in Oyo State and the killing of civilians, including a pregnant woman, in Katsina State, accusing the president of reducing governance to post-tragedy press releases.
Speaking through his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said the recurring tragedies reflected not just a security breakdown but a collapse of leadership at the highest level.
“President Tinubu must stop governing by obituary statements. Enough of the recycled outrage. Enough of the empty threats.
Nigerians are dying, and this government keeps responding with press releases,” Atiku said.
He described as a “tired ritual” the pattern of presidential condemnations followed by threats that perpetrators would face the “full wrath of the law,” saying Nigerians had heard the script too many times for it to carry any meaning.
Atiku said the Oyo abductions and Katsina killings were not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern in which criminals operated with confidence because they no longer feared
the Nigerian state.
“When terrorists can invade schools, abduct children and teachers, butcher pregnant women, sack entire communities, and disappear without consequence, it is because the authority of the state has collapsed,” he said.
The former vice president also raised alarm over what he described as government attempts to suppress images and documentation of the attacks from reaching the public, warning that such conduct would amount to something far worse than incompetence.
“If this government is indeed more interested in censoring evidence of mass killings than in preventing the killings themselves, then that is not merely incompetence — it is cruelty of the highest order. No serious government hides the blood of its citizens to protect political optics,” he said.
Atiku called for the immediate rescue of all abducted victims in Oyo State, decisive security action in vulnerable communities, and a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s security architecture.
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