Children’s Day in Nigeria is supposed to be a day of colour — uniforms, parades, prizes, the noise of young people being celebrated simply for existing. This year, that noise was drowned out by a different sound: the silence of empty classrooms in Oyo State, where armed men stormed three schools, seized dozens of pupils and teachers, and left a community to grieve the killing of one of those teachers days later. A video has since circulated of another teacher, a gun to her head, forced to relay her captors’ demands to the world.
As a trauma-informed learning design and behavioural science practitioner, I want to resist the urge to simply express outrage and move on — because outrage without analysis changes nothing. What happened in Oyo is not just a security failure. It is a leadership failure, a values failure, and a profound rupture in the psychological contract between a society and its children. And it has lessons for every leader, in every sector, who claims to care about the people under their charge.
Leadership is a safety architecture, not care rhetoric
Behavioural science has long established that psychological safety is the precondition for learning, performance, and growth. A child cannot absorb a lesson if part of their brain is scanning the exits. An employee cannot innovate if they’re bracing for the next round of layoffs announced by tweet. Leadership, at its core, is the design of conditions under which people can be present — fully, without armour.
When we talk about “leadership” in Nigeria right now, the conversation cannot stop at condemning attackers. It must extend to the leaders — political, institutional, community — whose job it was to anticipate risk and build redundancy into the system. Reports indicate that intelligence about heightened threats existed before some of these attacks. A leader’s first duty is not charisma or vision-casting; it is the unglamorous, often invisible work of risk mapping, early-warning systems, and follow-through. Safety is not a department. It is a leadership output.
Value of life is demonstrated, not declared
Every institution — a school, a company, a government — communicates what it actually values through where its resources go, not through its mission statements. A school that cannot afford a perimeter fence but can afford a new administrative block is making a statement about priorities, whether or not anyone says it out loud.
For those of us in coaching and behavioural work, this matters because the people we coach — executives, parents, teachers — are watching these signals constantly, often subconsciously. Trust, motivation, and loyalty are not built by slogans about “our greatest asset is our people.” They are built by what gets funded, what gets inspected, and what gets fixed before it becomes a tragedy. Leaders who want to be trusted must audit their actions against their stated values with brutal honesty.
Trauma doesn’t end when headlines move on
For the children who were taken — and even those who weren’t, but who now sit in classrooms wondering if they’re next — the psychological aftermath will outlast the news cycle by years. Trauma is not linear, and it does not respect timelines. A current event can reopen something from years past, especially when it involves children, school, and the loss of safety in a place that should be protected.
Trauma-informed leadership means building systems — in schools, in workplaces, in families — that anticipate this long tail: ongoing access to counselling, predictable routines that rebuild a sense of control, and adults who are themselves supported enough to hold space for children’s fear without transmitting their own.
What this asks of us
Grief alone is not a strategy, but neither is numbness. The middle ground is engaged, sober action — at whatever scale we can manage.
Four calls to action for leaders, coaches, and citizens
- Audit your ‘duty of care’ gap. Whether you run a school, a business, or a household, identify one area where your stated values and your actual safeguards don’t match — and fix it this month, not “eventually.”
- Normalise psychological first-aid conversations. Don’t wait for a crisis to teach the people you lead — staff, students, children — how to name fear, regulate distress, and ask for help. Build this into routine, not just emergency response.
- Support organisations doing the unglamorous safety work. Groups working on school safety infrastructure, community protection, and trauma recovery in affected regions need resources and advocacy far more than they need sympathy. Direct attention and funds there.
- Hold leadership accountable to follow-through, not just statements. When officials promise rescue, investigation, or reform, track it publicly. Accountability is a behavioural intervention — it changes what leaders prioritise the next time.
Children’s Day should be a celebration of futures. Right now, in parts of Nigeria, it is a reminder of how fragile those futures are when leadership treats safety as an afterthought. The work of rebuilding that safety — psychological and physical — belongs to all of us who claim to lead anyone, anywhere.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
