Statement on the Terrorist Attacks and Abductions in Oyo and Borno States
The Naija Marxists condemn the barbaric terrorist attacks of 15 May 2026, in which armed gunmen stormed schools in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State and Askira-Uba LGA of Borno State, killing a teacher and a commuter, and abducting no fewer than 87 students and teachers. We extend our deepest solidarity to the families of the murdered, to the communities living in terror, and to every child whose right to education has been violently stolen. These are sons and daughters of the Nigerian working class and peasantry, and they have been failed by every institution that was supposed to protect them. We are disgusted and angry, and we refuse to move on.
How We Got Here
What happened in Oyo and Borno on 15 May did not come from nowhere. Nigeria is a capitalist, neocolonial economy in an advanced state of decay. There is no serious industrial base. Agriculture has been gutted in favour of oil rents and extraction. The fuel subsidy was stripped from the poor. The naira was floated into ruin. Smallholder farming and local industry have been destroyed by decades of import dependency and deliberate neglect. The result is tens of millions of young people with no land, no jobs, no functional schools, and no stake in a stable society. Capitalism concentrates wealth at one pole and produces mass misery at the other, and in Nigeria it has done this with particular brutality.
It is in that material vacuum, and not through the scheming of any hidden hand, that armed insurgency grows. When a system cannot provide for the majority of its people, barbarism fills the space. The young men carrying weapons are products of the same poverty and abandonment as the children they are abducting. The peasant driven off his land, the graduate without a job, the artisan whose livelihood was destroyed by imported goods: these are the concrete human beings whose desperation armed groups exploit and whose children they recruit. The ethnic and religious colouring of these conflicts is a distraction from the class content of what is essentially the violent decomposition of a society that capitalism has failed.
Insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and underdevelopment are one crisis with one root: the class structure of Nigerian capitalism and its inability, at this stage of decay, to meet the basic needs of the majority. No security operation will end this, because you cannot defeat a social condition with a gun.
The Government: Blood on Their Hands
The Nigerian government bears direct responsibility for this tragedy. The Inspector-General of Police flew to Oyo to be photographed offering condolences. The Senate called the attacks “disturbing” and moved on. Ministers issued statements and returned to their offices. The children remain missing! This is the full extent of what the Nigerian state has to offer: words, photographs, and silence, repeated after every attack, with no consequence and no change.
This is theatre, not governance. As Engels wrote, the modern state is an instrument for the exploitation of the majority by a propertied minority, and the Nigerian state confirms this every single day. A ruling class whose children attend private schools abroad has no urgent material interest in securing public schools at home. That is the straightforward logic of a class that views itself as above the people it governs. No security apparatus, however well-funded, can defeat a social condition. Only the transformation of that condition through the organised power of the working class can end it.
The Nigeria Union of Teachers: A Leadership That Has Abandoned Its Members
On 17 May 2026, the NUT Oyo State Wing, through State Secretary Salami B. Olukayode, issued a circular calling on teachers across the state to observe three days of fasting and prayer for the safe return of their abducted colleagues and students.
Read that again. Eighty-seven members and students are in captivity. A teacher was beheaded. A worker was murdered in broad daylight. And the union’s answer is a prayer session at 12 noon.
We do not mock the personal faith of our brothers and sisters. But we state this without apology: prayer has never ended an insurgency and it never will. In the entire history of the working-class movement, no union has ever won a single concession from a ruling class on its knees. The NUT leadership knows this, and they are on their knees anyway.
Where is the strike action? Where is the demand that every NUT member in Oyo State walk out until the Oyo State government gives a full account of the security failures in Oriire LGA on 15 May? Where is the ultimatum that no child returns to school without guaranteed physical protection for every teacher and student? Where is the demand for the resignation of every state security official who failed these schools? Where is the march to the governor’s office? The NUT has the organisational capacity to shut down public education across an entire state. That is real power, and its leadership has chosen to fold that power away and reach for a prayer circular instead.
This is a betrayal. A layer of union officials so thoroughly incorporated into the bourgeois state, so accustomed to managing their members rather than mobilising them, that they have forgotten what a union is for. A union that will not fight is a circus at best and a pressure valve at worst, and the NUT leadership must be held to account.
What Must Be Built, and Who Must Build It
The Nigerian working class needs revolutionary political leadership: leadership that connects the beheading of a teacher in Oyo to the removal of fuel subsidies, to the collapse of the rural economy, to the army of unemployed youth this system produces and abandons, to the global capitalist order and its local managers. Leadership that does not dissolve into press statements or prayer sessions when the moment demands action.
That leadership does not yet exist in organised form in Nigeria, and that absence is itself part of why the masses remain trapped between a predatory state and the barbarism that state failure produces. The spontaneous anger of the masses, however righteous, is not enough on its own. As Lenin wrote, the proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle, ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society, rallying its ranks ever more closely. But that process does not happen automatically. It requires a disciplined vanguard of the most conscious sons and daughters of the working class, committed to turning that anger into sustained political power.
That is what the Naija Marxists are building: a genuine people’s vanguard — not a pressure group, not an NGO, not another electoral party trading on the desperation of the poor. A movement built on the unfinished struggles of Nigerian workers and peasants who fought exploitation without ever having the revolutionary political instrument their struggle deserved.
If you watched a teacher get beheaded and felt not just grief but rage at the system that produced that moment, if you are a worker, a student, a farmer, a young Nigerian who is tired of burying people and receiving condolences from the same political class that dug the graves, then you already understand what we are saying. Prayer will not resolve a structural crisis. Nor will the ballot box of a rigged bourgeois democracy. Nor a messiah from Abuja. Organisation will.
Building from the ground up the mass working-class movement capable of seizing this country’s future from those who are destroying it — that is the work, and it cannot wait.
Come and build it with us.
Organise. Study. Build the Vanguard Party of the Workers of Nigeria.
Forward to the Nigerian Workers’ Revolution!
The Naija Marxists Movement
May 2026