Nollywood star and film director Femi Branch has strongly rebuked Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde, appealing to Nigerian politicians to stop using vulnerable children as pawns in dirty political games. Reacting to the long-awaited release of the 46 schoolchildren and teachers who were abducted from the Oriire Local Government Area, the 56-year-old actor expressed deep disappointment over public remarks made by the governor, which heavily insinuated that the mass kidnapping was a staged political setup engineered by his rivals. The victims finally regained their freedom on Friday, July 10, 2026, after spending a grueling 56 days in captivity following their May 15 abduction from local primary and grammar schools in Ogbomoso.
In a viral video shared via his verified Instagram page, a visibly emotional Femi Branch pointed out that the innocent victims have suffered enough under the country’s broken educational system and do not deserve to have their real-world trauma downplayed for political leverage. Branch specifically flagged Governor Makinde’s timeline commentary, where the state executive explicitly noted that the mass abduction suspiciously occurred at 9:00 AM the morning after he officially declared his intention to run for the 2027 presidency at 4:00 PM the previous day.
“The governor came out and said he declared to be president at 4:00 PM and by 9:00 AM the next morning is when they packed the children away, thereby insinuating that it was a political game,” Branch stated. “Can we just leave these poor children out of our dirty politics? Please, I’m not attacking or calling out anybody; I’m just appealing to us to leave the innocent children out of our madness.”
The thespian heavily emphasized that instead of weaving political conspiracy theories, the state government’s immediate focus should be entirely directed toward providing intensive medical checks, professional psychological rehabilitation, and trauma care for the deeply shaken pupils and teachers who survived nearly two months in the dense forest.
