Don’t Reward Failure: Tinubu’s Children’s Day Hypocrisy and the Case for Voting Him Out -By Jeff Okoroafor

In the grand theatre of Nigerian governance, few productions are as meticulously choreographed as the annual Children’s Day spectacle at Eagle Square. The bunting is hung. The schoolchildren are bussed in. The speeches are teleprompted, the adjectives triple-checked, the photo opportunities calibrated to the millimetre. This year, President Bola Tinubu, speaking through a proxy as has become his custom, delivered a message of surpassing tenderness. “Your opinion matters, your ideas matter, your well-being matters,” he declared, reading from a prepared text while the assembled children looked on. “We are committed to building a governance culture where children are not merely seen, but genuinely heard.”

It was a beautiful speech. It was also, demonstrably, a lie.

The chasm between the rhetoric of Children’s Day and the lived reality of Nigerian children under President Tinubu’s administration is not merely wide; it is an indictment. It is the distance between a President who says “your well-being matters” and the 87 Chibok girls who remain in terrorist captivity twelve years after their abduction, their childhoods stolen, their futures suspended in a nightmare from which this government has proven utterly incapable of awakening them. It is the distance between the promise that “no child should feel invisible” and the more than fifty schoolchildren—including toddlers—abducted in a single day from three schools in Borno State just two weeks ago, on May 15, 2026. It is the distance between the declaration that every child deserves “protection” and “the dignity of belonging” and the 440,000 Nigerian children treated for severe acute malnutrition in 2025 alone—the highest figure ever recorded by Médecins Sans Frontières in any of the 77 countries where it operates. Nigeria did not merely lead the world in child malnutrition admissions last year. It was, by MSF’s own assessment, in a league of its own, a global epicentre of preventable childhood suffering, all on President Tinubu’s watch.

This is the government that now asks Nigerians to believe that it is building “a nation where every child can dream boldly, grow safely, learn freely, and succeed honourably.” The evidence, marshalled in damning abundance, tells a different story. It tells the story of a government that has failed Nigerian children in every measurable dimension—their physical safety, their nutritional survival, their access to education, and their protection from violence. And it demands, as a matter of moral and civic urgency, that Nigerians refuse to reward this failure with a second term in 2027.

The Children Who Never Came Home

Let us begin with the most fundamental obligation any state owes its children: the duty to keep them alive and free. On April 14, 2014—twelve years, one month, and thirteen days ago—276 girls were abducted from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. The world watched in horror. Celebrities tweeted. Governments made promises. The hashtag trended.

Today, 87 of those girls remain in captivity.

This is not a historical tragedy frozen in the past. It is an ongoing, present-tense atrocity, a wound that has been permitted to fester across four federal administrations, including three years of the Tinubu presidency. In April 2026, parents of the still-missing girls issued an open letter that read less like advocacy and more like a cry from the abyss. “We call on the international community to intervene and secure the release of our daughters,” they wrote, having evidently concluded that their own government either could not or would not bring their children home. In May 2026, the government’s Coordinator of the National Counter Terrorism Centre, Major General Adamu Laka, assured the nation that the administration “has not given up.” But the parents of Chibok do not need assurances. They need their daughters. And after three years of “not giving up” under President Tinubu, the number of girls still missing from that single abduction remains 87. That is not a record of effort. It is a record of failure, and it is measured in the tears of mothers who have now waited over a decade to hold their children again.

But Chibok, for all its symbolic power, is only the most famous case. The machinery of mass child abduction has not slowed under President Tinubu; it has accelerated. Consider the events of May 2026 alone—the very month in which the President stood at Eagle Square and proclaimed that children’s safety was a core principle of his government.

On May 13 and 14, armed men attacked schools in Askira Uba and Chibok Local Government Areas of Borno State, abducting 42 pupils. Amnesty International, responding to these attacks, issued a statement that should shame every official in the Aso Rock Villa: “The possibility of abduction is forcing millions of children to abandon education.”

Then, on May 15, attackers stormed three schools in a single town—Government Day Secondary School, Mussa Central Primary School, and a SUBEB Primary School—and kidnapped over 50 children, including toddlers. Teachers and parents watched helplessly as armed men herded their young students into the bush. As of this writing, their whereabouts remain unknown.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the latest entries in a catalogue of horror that has defined the Tinubu era. In November 2025, over 300 students and teachers were abducted from St. Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, Niger State, triggering widespread panic across the northern region. In April 2026, eight children went missing after a raid on an orphanage in Kogi State. Also in April, at least 100 civilians, including children, were killed in a Nigerian Air Force airstrike that “misfired” on a village market in Yobe State. Amnesty International cited survivors who described children among the dead and dying.

The cumulative toll is staggering. According to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, violence has killed or injured approximately 700 people and displaced over 12,000 in the first few months of 2026 alone. A Vanguard newspaper analysis documented 137 separate terrorist and kidnapping attacks across 34 states in just four weeks between February and March 2026. Children are disproportionately among the victims—killed, orphaned, traumatised, and, increasingly, afraid to set foot in a classroom.

When President Tinubu tells Nigerian children that their “well-being matters,” where exactly does that concern manifest? In the ransom negotiations that never conclude? In the security strategies that never succeed? In the commiseration messages that are issued after every mass abduction, as if the government were a helpless bystander rather than the constitutionally mandated guarantor of public safety?

The Silent Emergency: Hunger and Malnutrition

If the security crisis represents the government’s failure to protect children from violent death, the malnutrition catastrophe represents its failure to protect them from slow, preventable death. And on this score, the data is not merely alarming—it is a national disgrace.

In May 2026, Médecins Sans Frontières released its annual report on global malnutrition, and the findings for Nigeria were devastating. In 2025, more than 440,000 Nigerian children were treated for severe acute malnutrition by MSF—the highest number the organisation has ever recorded in Nigeria, and the highest burden of child malnutrition among the 77 countries in which MSF operates worldwide. To state this plainly: Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy under a President who campaigned on economic revival, produced more malnourished children requiring emergency medical intervention than any other country where MSF works—more than war-torn Yemen, more than crisis-stricken South Sudan, more than any nation on earth.

The broader picture is even grimmer. The United Nations World Food Programme warns that nearly 35 million Nigerians are at risk of hunger in 2026, including 3 million children facing severe acute malnutrition. UNICEF reported that an estimated 33 million Nigerians experienced food insecurity during the May–August 2025 lean season, with approximately 3.5 million children expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition. The World Bank has documented that 110 out of every 1,000 Nigerian children die before their fifth birthday; that 40 percent of Nigerian children are stunted; and that 52 percent are not developmentally ready for school—a statistic that condemns half of the next generation before they ever see the inside of a classroom.

This is not an act of God. It is not a natural disaster. It is the consequence of policy choices—choices about budgetary allocation, about social investment, about the priority accorded to the most vulnerable citizens. President Tinubu’s government has been in power for three years. In that time, inflation has eroded household purchasing power to historic lows. The removal of fuel subsidies, however defensible as a long-term fiscal reform, was executed without adequate social safety nets to cushion the most vulnerable. The result is that millions of Nigerian families can no longer afford to feed their children adequately, and the state’s response—the much-advertised Nutrition 774 Initiative, the Renewed Hope Social Impact Intervention—has been manifestly insufficient to meet the scale of the crisis.

When 440,000 children require emergency treatment for malnutrition in a single year under a government that claims to be “scaling up cost-effective nutrition services,” the gap between promise and performance is not a matter of capacity. It is a matter of priority. And the children who die from malnutrition—quietly, invisibly, far from the cameras at Eagle Square—do so knowing, in the most profound sense, that their well-being did not matter enough to the people who govern them.

The Education Emergency

Perhaps the most frequently cited metric of Nigeria’s failure to its children is the number of out-of-school children. Under President Tinubu, that number has been subject to a bureaucratic dispute that is itself damning. UNICEF and other international organisations estimate that approximately 15 million Nigerian children are out of school—the highest number of any country in the world. The federal government disputes this figure, with the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, claiming that ongoing data verification suggests a “significantly reduced” number. Even if one accepts the government’s own disputed figures, the picture remains catastrophic: an estimated 12.4 million children have never attended school at all, while 5.9 million dropped out early.

The government’s response—capturing over two million learners in the 2025/2026 Annual School Census and mapping nearly one million out-of-school children for reintegration—is welcome as far as it goes. But it does not go nearly far enough. One million children reintegrated against a deficit of at least 12 million, and possibly 15 million, represents a gap that will take more than a decade to close at current rates—and that assumes no further deterioration in security or economic conditions, an assumption that the facts do not support.

Meanwhile, the funding picture is bleak. Only N3.53 trillion was allocated to the entire education sector in the 2026 appropriation bill. In March 2026, human rights lawyer Femi Falana raised the alarm that over N97 billion in Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) funds remained unaccessed by state governments, which had failed to provide the required counterpart contributions. Even when funds were accessed, Falana noted, “some state governments failed to properly utilise them for the intended purposes.” The government allocated N116 billion to the Nigerian Education Loan Fund while, as critics noted, allocating “zero for Almajiri, Out-of-School Children Commission.”

The result of this systemic underinvestment and maladministration is a generation of Nigerian children who are being denied not merely literacy and numeracy but the very possibility of a future. President Tinubu tells them their “ideas matter.” But what ideas can a child develop when she has never been inside a classroom? What potential can she realise when her government has decided, through its budgetary choices, that her education is not worth the investment?

The Moral Bankruptcy of Empty Words

It is in the context of these realities that the President’s Children’s Day address must be assessed—not by its eloquence, which is considerable, but by its honesty, which is non-existent.

Consider the claim that “we are moving from reactive protection to proactive empowerment, building a secure, responsive, and institutional ecosystem where every Nigerian child has a clear path to reach their full potential.” Where is this secure ecosystem for the 87 Chibok girls still in Boko Haram captivity? Where is it for the 50 children abducted from Borno schools on May 15, 2026? Where is it for the 23 pupils kidnapped from an orphanage in Kogi State in April? Where is it for the 440,000 children who required emergency treatment for malnutrition last year?

Consider the claim that the Child Rights Act “has been domesticated nationwide.” This is technically true and practically meaningless. Domestication of a law on paper does not protect a single child from abduction, malnutrition, or the collapse of her school. A law that is not enforced is not a law; it is a decoration, and the Tinubu administration has treated the Child Rights Act as precisely that—a credential to be cited in speeches, not a mandate to be fulfilled.

Consider, most egregiously, the President’s exhortation to children to “shun violence, thuggery, cultism, substance abuse, cybercrime and bullying” and instead “embrace discipline, hard work, patriotism, honesty, compassion, and excellence.” There is something profoundly indecent about a government that has failed to secure children’s schools, failed to feed them adequately, and failed to educate them turning around to lecture those same children about morality. Children do not need lectures from a government that cannot protect them. They need a government that keeps its promises. Moral instruction from a state that has abdicated its moral responsibilities is not statesmanship; it is gaslighting.

The Verdict of History

The Nigerian Constitution, in its Chapter II, articulates the “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy.” Among these is the directive that “the State shall direct its policy towards ensuring that children, young persons and the aged are protected against any exploitation whatsoever, and against moral and material neglect.” This is not a suggestion. It is not an aspiration. It is a constitutional obligation, and it is an obligation that the Tinubu administration has comprehensively failed to discharge.

The failure is not for lack of warning. The 2026 budget was passed amidst widespread criticism that social sector allocations were inadequate. Civil society organisations have repeatedly documented the gap between the administration’s rhetoric and its resource allocation. Former Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola, himself a senior figure in the governing APC, recently described the “Renewed Hope Agenda” as a “scam,” citing the rise in out-of-school children from 18.3 million to 20 million and the classification of approximately 130 million Nigerians as multidimensionally poor. Former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi has described the administration’s approach to child welfare as a “betrayal of the Nigerian child,” pointing to the jarring contrast between the President offering scholarships to children in Saint Lucia while Nigerian children languish without access to basic education.

These are not partisan attacks from the opposition. They are indictments from across the political spectrum, and they are rooted in facts that the government does not dispute—because it cannot.

2027: The Choice

Elections are the mechanism by which citizens hold governments accountable. The 2027 general election will present Nigerians with a choice: to reward failure or to demand better.

The case for rewarding failure is, on the evidence, non-existent. President Tinubu’s government has had three years to demonstrate its commitment to Nigerian children. In that time, 440,000 children have required emergency malnutrition treatment in a single year; millions remain out of school; 87 Chibok girls remain in captivity twelve years after their abduction; and not a single month passes without a mass kidnapping of schoolchildren. The President’s response to this litany of catastrophe has been to deliver beautiful speeches at Eagle Square while the bodies pile up and the classrooms empty out.

No amount of rhetorical elegance can compensate for this record. No Children’s Day address, however artfully crafted, can erase the reality that Nigerian children are less safe, less nourished, and less educated under this administration than they were when it took office. The President may tell children that their opinions matter. But the only opinion that will truly matter in 2027 is the one expressed at the ballot box. Nigerians have a duty—to the 87 girls still in Sambisa Forest, to the 440,000 malnourished children who fought for their lives in MSF clinics last year, to the millions who have never seen the inside of a classroom, to the toddlers abducted from their primary schools—to ensure that this government’s failure is not rewarded with a second term.

A government that cannot protect its children does not deserve to govern. A President whose promises to children are contradicted by every available statistic does not deserve re-election. And a nation that re-elects such a government, knowing what it knows, forfeits the moral standing to ever again claim that its children matter.

The children of Nigeria are not asking for much. They are asking for safety. They are asking for food. They are asking for the chance to learn. They are asking, in Jessica Nufi’s words at Eagle Square, for “a Nigeria where every child belongs.” The Tinubu administration has proven, across three years of irrefutable evidence, that it cannot give them these things.

In 2027, Nigerians must give this government the only response that failure of this magnitude deserves: the exit door. The children are watching. History is taking notes. There must be consequences for the betrayal of a generation.

Jeff Okoroafor

Jeff Okoroafor is a social accountability advocate and a political commentator focused on governance, accountability, and social justice in West Africa.