“Bandits, Bandits”: The Teacher Who Heard the Screams Before the Guns

Oyo State – Olatunde Zacheus was the only staff member at Community High School, Ahoro Esinle, on the morning of May 15. He had slept over in the community the night before, so when pupils began arriving for their tests, he was the one who gathered the junior students into the school hall to begin without waiting for his colleagues.

It was an ordinary decision made for an ordinary reason: efficiency. It would turn out to be the last ordinary decision of his day.

Zacheus was mid test when he heard it, a sound that did not belong in a school hall, rising first as confusion and then as unmistakable panic. Students writing their exams began screaming two words over and over: “Bandits, bandits.”

In an interview with Nigeria Info FM, recounting the moment for the first time in detail, Zacheus described how quickly the morning turned. Gunmen had stormed both Community High School and Yawota Baptist Nursery and Primary School simultaneously, and within minutes, the calm of a Friday morning test had become the opening scene of what would become a 56 day nightmare for 44 pupils and teachers.

What followed, in Zacheus’s telling, was not a single dramatic abduction but a slow unraveling: children too frightened to move, teachers trying to calm students while realising they themselves had no way out, and the gunmen moving through the compound with the calm efficiency of men who had planned this for a while.

The pupils and teachers taken that morning would spend the following eight weeks being marched through the forest bordering the Old Oyo National Park, relocated constantly at night whenever their captors suspected security forces were closing in. Two teachers, Joel Adesiyan and Michael Oyedokun, would not survive the ordeal.

Zacheus’s account joins a small collection of testimonies that together have built the fullest public record yet of what happened at Ahoro Esinle and Yawota, from the first scream in a classroom to the final rescue announced on July 10, when security forces confirmed all 44 victims had been recovered and nine suspected kidnappers neutralised.

What makes Zacheus’s version distinct is its position in the timeline. Where other survivors have described the middle of the ordeal, the treks, the beatings, the chaining, Zacheus’s testimony captures the exact hinge point, the instant an ordinary school day became something else entirely, recorded in the words of the one teacher who was there when it started.

He has since returned to teaching, though he has not spoken publicly about whether he has gone back to Ahoro Esinle itself. What he has said, clearly, is that the sound of two words, shouted by frightened children on a Friday morning, is not something that leaves easily.

Security agencies say the wider network responsible for the Oriire abductions remains only partially dismantled, even with the victims home. For Zacheus and the pupils he once sat with in that school hall, the reckoning with what happened is, in its own way, still ongoing.