Atiku's Aide Demands DSS Invite Sunday Igboho Over Oyo Kidnapping Claims

Paul Ibe, media aide to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, has called on the Department of State Services and other security agencies to formally invite Yoruba Nation agitator Sunday Igboho for questioning, following Igboho's claim that he knows the identities of the politicians responsible for the abduction of students and teachers in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State.

Ibe made the call in a post on X on Thursday, arguing that if Igboho genuinely possesses that information, the appropriate response from security agencies is not silence but action.

"Since Sunday Ighoho claims to know those behind the abduction of students and teachers in Oriire, Oyo State, I think that the State Security Service and other security agencies need to invite him to release those names to them," Ibe wrote.

Igboho had made the claim while addressing members of the National Association of Nigerian Students, asserting that politicians were behind the kidnappings and threatening to name them publicly if the attacks did not stop. He did not name anyone in that address.

A threat to name names, without actually naming them, is a familiar move in Nigerian public discourse. It can be a genuine warning, a negotiating posture, or political theater depending on who is doing it and what they want. What it is not, on its own, is actionable intelligence. Ibe's point, stripped to its core, is that if the claim is real, it should be handed to the people equipped to act on it. If it is not, the public deserves to know that too.

Either way, children are still missing. Every available option should be on the table.

But Ibe did not stop at Igboho. He used the moment to raise a harder question, one that has been hovering over the national conversation about kidnappings for weeks.

He asked why the Tinubu administration has remained publicly silent about the abduction of more than fifty schoolchildren in Mussa, Borno State, which also occurred on May 15, 2026, the same day as the Oriire kidnappings. While the Federal Government dispatched a high-level delegation to Oyo State, approved 1,000 forest guards, and deployed a specialized rescue squad in response to Oriire, no comparable public response has been directed toward Mussa.

"Why is Tinubu and his government mute over the Borno abduction? Are those school children not Nigerians?" Ibe wrote.

"When will the Commander-in-Chief and Consoler-in-Chief send a delegation to Mussa like it did in the case of Oriire? When will Borno and other vulnerable states get their own forest guards?"

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the kind that demand a direct answer from the presidency, and the absence of one is itself a statement.

To be fair, Borno State has its own operational security architecture through Operation HADIN KAI, and the dynamics of kidnap response in the northeast differ significantly from those in Oyo. But the optics of a highly visible federal response to one abduction and near-total public silence on another, happening on the same day, are difficult to explain away on operational grounds alone.

Ibe framed his broader frustration plainly.

"Why wait for a tragedy to occur before the Tinubu government takes action to stem insecurity in our country?"