A storm of national outrage is building over Nigeria’s continued rehabilitation and reintegration of individuals described by security authorities as repentant Boko Haram and ISWAP fighters, with critics accusing the state of turning justice upside down and dangerously blurring the line between victims and perpetrators of mass violence.
Under the military-led deradicalisation framework known as Operation Safe Corridor, hundreds of former insurgents have passed through psychological counselling, vocational training, and ideological reorientation programmes before being released back into civilian life. Government officials present the initiative as a counterterrorism strategy aimed at weakening insurgent ranks and encouraging defections.
But across grieving communities in the North-East, that explanation is being received not as policy — but as provocation.
Families who have buried children, lost entire villages, and spent years in displacement camps now watch a state apparatus that appears willing to process alleged killers through rehabilitation pipelines while survivors remain trapped in trauma, poverty, and uncertainty.
To critics, this is not peacebuilding. It is what they describe as a moral collapse dressed in security language.
They argue that Nigeria has created a system where the most brutal actors in one of Africa’s deadliest insurgencies are gradually folded back into society through administrative procedures, while the victims of those same atrocities continue to struggle for basic dignity, recognition, and justice.
The anger is sharpened by a painful contrast: in the same country where mass abductions, village burnings, and killings have defined entire regions, the state is now seen by opponents of the policy as prioritising “reintegration success stories” over accountability for atrocities that shattered thousands of lives.
Security analysts who question the approach warn that Nigeria is gambling with a fragile national environment where banditry, insurgency, and communal violence still overlap. They caution that releasing individuals linked to violent extremist networks, regardless of rehabilitation claims — introduces a permanent trust deficit between citizens and the state.
Human rights advocates further argue that the policy sends a dangerous psychological message: that participation in large-scale violence can eventually be processed, softened, and rebranded as “repentance,” without a clear and transparent path to justice for victims.
In displacement camps scattered across the North-East, the contrast is bitter. Survivors of attacks continue to depend on humanitarian aid, many still searching for missing relatives, while national discussions in Abuja revolve around reintegration quotas, deradicalisation batches, and security “success metrics.”
Opponents of the programme say this is the heart of the crisis — a state attempting to manage an ongoing war not through closure or accountability, but through administrative recycling of combatants.
Even among moderates, concern is growing that Nigeria’s rehabilitation model is outpacing its justice architecture. There are fears that without transparent trials, victim compensation frameworks, and community consent mechanisms, the programme risks deepening resentment and weakening public confidence in the state’s ability to protect its citizens.
Government defenders insist the alternative, is worse — a perpetual war with no exit strategy, and continued overcrowding of prisons and detention facilities with low-risk defectors who may never be fully reintegrated.
But for critics, one question continues to echo across the ruins of affected communities.
How does a nation forgive those it has not first held accountable — and still expect its wounded to call it justice?
— By Manasseh Bem Paul Ashukus