● As kidnappings Surge, Fear Deepens Across Communities
● Residents protest, block highways over rising abductions, killings
● Farmers, travellers, traditional institutions increasingly targeted as security agencies intensify operations
By Temitope Aribisala
Ondo did not descend into fear in one dramatic plunge. It decayed into it, quietly, under a watch that prefers rhetoric to responsibility. Today, the so-called Sunshine State is a territory under siege, not by a foreign army, but by the cumulative consequences of hesitant leadership.
The state suffers the scourge of inefficient governance and a troubling normalisation of insecurity that has flourished under Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa’s tenure.
What confronts the people surpasses episodic violence that shocks the conscience. It is violence that has become predictable and routine. Kidnappers now operate as recurring phantoms haunting the state. Gunmen emerge from bushes, invade homes, intercept highways, abduct farmers and humiliate communities with a brazenness that suggests not merely criminal audacity but institutional slackness.
This is the lived reality behind the official communiqués, the rehearsed reassurances and the administrative calm projected from Alagbaka.
Under Aiyedatiwa, insecurity in Ondo has grown from scattered incidents into a pattern of governance failure. Each abduction, each killing, each protest, each blocked highway forms part of a grim ledger that no volume of public relations can erase. Governance is not judged by press statements; it is judged by whether citizens can travel without fear, farm without dread and sleep without listening for the sound of approaching gunmen.
On those indices, the verdict from the ground is increasingly damning.
The tragedy is not only that insecurity exists, but that it has been allowed to fester, expand and entrench itself while the machinery of government appears perpetually a step behind events. Criminal networks adapt swiftly. Communities scream for help. The state responds after the damage is done, issues assurances, deploys tactical teams and retreats into silence until the next incident forces another reactive cycle.
This is not strategy. This is governance by aftermath.
Once upon a recent past, Ondo enjoyed a modest reputation for relative calm within the Southwest. It was not immune to Nigeria’s broader security challenges, but it retained a rhythm of stability that reassured residents and investors alike. That fragile equilibrium has now been ruptured. The state’s security architecture, under the current administration, appears overstretched, under-coordinated and disturbingly reactive.
Communities across Akure North, Owo, Ose and surrounding areas now speak a language of collective anxiety. Fear has ceased to be an emotion; it has become a routine condition. Parents track movements with obsessive caution. Traders close early. Villagers whisper warnings about forest routes. Farmers abandon distant farmlands not out of laziness but out of self-preservation.
And still, the official tone often oscillates between optimism and denial.
The abduction of residents within estates in Ilu Abo was not merely another crime statistic; it was a symbolic collapse of the illusion of spatial safety. Gunmen reportedly emerged from nearby bushes, seized a returning couple and shot a neighbour seated in front of his residence. That operation did not occur in a remote forest corridor. It unfolded within a residential setting, in proximity to everyday life.
When armed criminals operate with such composure in populated neighbourhoods, it reveals a dangerous perpetuation of risk. It suggests that perpetrators no longer fear swift consequences and that deterrence has weakened.
Since the crisis began, Governor Aiyedatiwa’s response has become so predictable that it inspires more scepticism than confidence. Citizens have watched this script replay too many times to mistake it for decisive governance.
The protests that erupted in Ilu Abo and Eleyeowo were not spontaneous emotional outbursts devoid of context. They were structured expressions of accumulated frustration. Residents blocked the Akure–Owo highway, paralysing traffic and forcing attention onto their plight. They did not protest for spectacle; they protested because fear had outgrown patience.
Placards spoke of kidnappings. Voices narrated sleepless nights. Testimonies revealed near-abductions around Akure Airport and repeated attacks within their communities. These were not rumours manufactured by political opponents; they were lived experiences articulated in the language of desperation.
When citizens abandon routine and take to highways, governance has already lost a portion of its credibility.
Perhaps the most chilling indicator of the state’s security erosion was the killing of Oba Kehinde Falodun during a failed abduction attempt in Agamo community. Armed assailants reportedly invaded the monarch’s residence, seeking to kidnap him and members of his household. Resistance was met with fatal violence.
The symbolism of that incident cannot be overstated. In Yoruba cosmology and governance tradition, a palace is not merely a residence; it is a spiritual and communal fortress. When a monarch is no longer insulated from armed invasion, it signals a deeper rupture in the architecture of protection. It tells the people, in the starkest possible language, that no institution is beyond the reach of violence.
Under such circumstances, platitudes about security improvement ring hollow.
Ondo’s insecurity is no longer localised; it is diffused across multiple corridors. Travellers abducted along the Benin–Owo highway. Farmers seized on their way to farms. surveyors kidnapped in rural settlements. youth leaders abducted and held for days. health workers attacked near transit routes. These are not isolated anomalies. They form a constellation of recurring breaches that expose systemic lapses.
A government may survive one major security shock. It cannot indefinitely survive a pattern of recurring insecurity without its competence coming under legitimate scrutiny.
Agriculture, once a quiet pillar of Ondo’s rural economy, now groans under the weight of fear. Farmers increasingly avoid distant farmlands, not because they lack diligence but because the journey to the farm has become a gamble with life. Stories of kidnappings along forest paths circulate widely, reinforcing a culture of economic withdrawal.
An insecure agrarian landscape does not merely threaten food supply; it undermines rural livelihoods, disrupts local markets and accelerates economic precarity. Governance that cannot secure farms ultimately sabotages its own economic base.
Highways, too, have transformed into corridors of apprehension. The Benin–Owo axis has acquired a reputation that discourages night travel and erodes public confidence. Transport operators now factor insecurity into operational decisions. Passengers delay journeys. Some travel only in convoys. Others avoid certain routes entirely.
Safe passage within a state’s territory is a fundamental benchmark of administrative effectiveness. Persistent abductions along major roads suggest gaps in surveillance, patrol coordination and intelligence deployment that cannot be explained away indefinitely.
Governor Aiyedatiwa’s administration has consistently offered reassurances of safety. Yet reassurance without measurable improvement gradually degenerates into administrative rhetoric. Citizens do not evaluate security through speeches; they evaluate it through lived experience. And their lived experience continues to contradict official optimism.
The opposition has seized on this contradiction, accusing the administration of incapacity in addressing insecurity. While partisan criticism is expected in any democracy, the persistence of violent incidents lends weight to concerns that might otherwise be dismissed as political grandstanding. When attacks recur across months without decisive disruption of criminal networks, the narrative of administrative weakness gains traction.
The Amotekun Corps, established to strengthen regional security, now sits at the centre of public interrogation. Its conceptual promise was clear: local intelligence, rapid response and community-rooted enforcement. Yet recurring kidnappings across Ondo have revived uncomfortable questions about funding, equipment, strategic deployment and political will.
A security outfit that exists more as symbolism than operational force risks becoming a ceremonial shield against a real threat.
What appears increasingly evident is a governance posture trapped in reaction rather than prevention. Incidents occur. Security agencies respond. Investigations commence. Appeals for calm follow. Then another incident erupts, exposing the insufficiency of preventive intelligence. This cyclical pattern creates the perception of a state perpetually chasing crime instead of pre-empting it.
Effective leadership during crisis demands urgency, visibility and strategic coherence. Critics argue that Aiyedatiwa’s leadership style has not projected the level of decisive engagement required by the scale of the crisis. Communities demand direct engagement, sustained presence and visible reassurance grounded in action rather than ceremonial statements.
Where leadership appears distant, insecurity assumes psychological dominance.
It must also be said, without euphemism, that Aiyedatiwa’s ascension to power was accidental, a consequence of constitutional succession following the death of his predecessor. Accidental leadership, however, does not excuse sustained underperformance. If anything, it imposes a heavier obligation to prove competence, capacity and strategic clarity.
Instead, many residents perceive a government more invested in political consolidation and image management than in confronting the existential security anxieties of its people. Commissioning ceremonies, celebratory narratives and administrative optics cannot mask the deeper unease that pervades towns and villages.
Public discourse increasingly frames the present era as one of stagnation layered atop insecurity. Critics argue that, despite significant federal allocations and internally generated revenue, tangible developmental strides remain modest while insecurity expands. The optics of governance appear disproportionately ceremonial in a period that demands operational seriousness.
In quiet conversations across the state, a recurring metaphor has emerged: the years of the locusts. Not as poetic exaggeration, but as a description of erosion—erosion of safety, confidence, productivity and trust in leadership.
A society does not collapse overnight. It erodes through repeated institutional hesitations, deferred decisions and leadership that fails to match rhetoric with resolve.
The psychological toll of insecurity now runs deep. Villages sleep lightly. Urban neighbourhoods adopt early closures. Social life contracts. Movement becomes calculated. Fear seeps into daily routines, reshaping behaviour in ways that statistics cannot fully capture. The erosion of civic confidence may, in the long term, prove more damaging than the immediate violence itself.
Governance, at its constitutional core, rests on a covenant: the protection of lives and property. That duty is neither ceremonial nor negotiable. When insecurity persists at scale, it signals more than a security lapse; it reflects a governance deficit that demands unsparing scrutiny.
Ondo today stands at a precarious intersection where insecurity, perception of leadership distance and reactive governance converge. Criminal networks exploit institutional gaps with alarming efficiency. Communities respond with protests and public appeals. Political critics sharpen their attacks. Yet the central question remains unchanged: where is the decisive, sustained and strategic overhaul of security architecture?
History will not remember how many statements were issued. It will remember whether kidnappings reduced, whether highways became safe, whether farmers returned to their fields and whether citizens regained confidence in the protective capacity of their government.
For now, the prevailing sentiment across many communities is not anger alone but weary disillusionment. People no longer react with shock to new incidents; they respond with resigned expectation. That transition from outrage to resignation is perhaps the most damning indictment of governance, because it signals that insecurity has been normalised.
Leadership is tested most severely in moments of crisis, not in periods of ceremonial calm. The escalating insecurity in Ondo represents one of the defining governance challenges of Aiyedatiwa’s tenure. Recurrent kidnappings, attacks on traditional institutions, highway abductions and community protests have collectively shaped a narrative that cannot be dismissed as partisan exaggeration.
If the administration fails to disrupt this trajectory decisively, the political and historical judgment may be severe. Governance that allows fear to entrench itself within the daily consciousness of citizens risks forfeiting its moral legitimacy, regardless of administrative rhetoric.
Ondo does not merely need assurances. It needs intelligence-driven security reform, coordinated enforcement, sustained patrol architecture, stronger local security integration and leadership that confronts reality without cosmetic optimism. Anything short of that will prolong the current cycle of reaction, reassurance and relapse.
Until then, the Sunshine State will continue to live under a gathering shadow, where governance appears hesitant, criminals appear emboldened and citizens are left to navigate their own survival within a landscape of recurring dread. In the final analysis, the measure of any administration is not the elegance of its proclamations but the safety of its people. On that scale, the verdict forming across Ondo is becoming increasingly scathing, increasingly unsparing and increasingly difficult to ignore.
