The coordinated attacks on three schools in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State have shattered the illusion that the South-West is insulated from Nigeria’s school-abduction nightmare. Gunmen stormed Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota; Community Grammar School, Esiele; and L.A. Primary School in broad daylight, killing two people, including assistant headmaster Joel Adesiyan, and abducting pupils and teachers.

What unfolded in those quiet communities was not an isolated crime but a strategic incursion. The assailants exploited a glaring security vacuum: residents say there is no police station in the area, and security agents reportedly arrived about two hours after the attack, by which time the gunmen had vanished into forests bordering the Oyo National Park.

This is a regional emergency. The South-West, once regarded as a relative safe haven, now lies on the frontline of expanding terror networks operating from forested corridors that stretch through Oyo, Osun, Ekiti, Ondo and Ogun, and link up with violent cells in Kwara and beyond. Earlier attacks on Oyo National Park rangers, massacres in Kwara communities and assaults on churches and villages across the zone all point to a methodical spread of insurgent and bandit activity.

Governors Abiodun Oyebanji, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Dapo Abiodun, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, Ademola Adeleke and Seyi Makinde can no longer rely on rhetoric or fragmented state-level responses. They once showed what coordinated resolve could achieve when they defied initial federal resistance to establish the Amotekun Corps. That same urgency is now required, but on a deeper, more professional scale.

The first step should be an emergency regional security summit, leading to a permanent joint security office and the appointment of a regional security coordinator, agreed with the Federal Government but driven by the governors. Amotekun must be strengthened, not sidelined: better funding, training, equipment, and integration with police, military and vetted local networks such as the Oodua Peoples Congress are essential.

Beyond boots on the ground, the region needs intelligence-led operations: mapping and monitoring forests, deploying surveillance technology, and building community-based early-warning systems around schools, worship centres and transport routes.

The cost of inaction is already measured in lives lost, children traumatised and communities abandoned. The South-West still has a narrow window to prevent the entrenchment of a full-blown terror theatre. That window will close if its leaders fail to act together, decisively and now.