After the Negotiations… After the Reintegration… What Became of the Victims?

By Law & Society Magazine Investigations

The Man Who Refused to Die

When the bandits caught up with Aliyu Hassan, they did not shoot him. Death by bullet would have been too quick. Instead, they tied his hands and feet, dragged him into a nearby hut, poured petrol over his body, struck a lighter and walked away, convinced the flames would finish what they had started. His only crime was returning to his family’s farmland in Katsina State.

Like thousands of displaced farmers across Nigeria’s North-West, Hassan had hoped to salvage what remained of a livelihood destroyed by years of armed violence. His family had already abandoned their village after repeated attacks. Farming was the only means of survival they had left.

The attackers accused him of hiding money. He told them he had none. They demanded to be taken to his father’s house. He explained there was no home to return to because insecurity had already driven the family away. The explanation changed nothing.

As the fire engulfed him, Hassan rolled desperately across the sand, screaming for help until the flames eventually died. A passer-by later found him barely alive and rushed him through a succession of hospitals before he finally received treatment. He survived. But survival, he would later discover, was only the beginning.

Months after the attack, Hassan remained displaced. His village was still unsafe. His farm remained inaccessible. The men who tried to burn him alive were still somewhere in the forests stretching across Katsina and neighbouring states. His story is horrifying. It is also painfully ordinary.

Across northern Nigeria are thousands of men, women and children whose lives have been permanently altered by banditry, terrorism and mass violence. Some escaped kidnappings. Others watched relatives murdered before their eyes. Many fled burning homes carrying little more than the clothes they wore.

Yet while governments negotiate with armed groups, announce reintegration programmes and celebrate the surrender of so-called repentant fighters, another population continues waiting. Not for rehabilitation. For justice.

After the Headlines Fade

For nearly a decade, Nigeria’s response to banditry has swung between military offensives and negotiated settlements. Entire policy frameworks have been built around persuading armed groups to surrender, lay down their weapons and rejoin society. Supporters argue that dialogue saves lives where military campaigns alone have failed. Critics counter that negotiations reward violence and encourage future criminality.

That debate has dominated national discourse. Far less attention has been paid to the people left behind. The farmer who cannot return to his land. The widow raising children inside a displacement camp. The schoolgirl whose education ended the day armed men stormed her classroom. The trader whose shop was reduced to ashes. The community that no longer exists except in memory.

If Part I of this investigation examined how negotiations with bandits evolved, Part II traced the rise and collapse of reintegration efforts, while Part III questioned whether peace can endure without accountability.

This final chapter asks a different question.

What happens to a country when reconciliation focuses on those who carried the guns while those who lived under them remain forgotten?

The Village That Paid Twice

In Dekara, a quiet community in Niger State’s Borgu Local Government Area, residents believed they had done everything necessary to save themselves. Bandits had imposed a ₦10 million levy on villages across the district. The demand was explicit. Pay or prepare to bury your dead.

Families contributed what little they had. Farmers sold livestock. Traders pooled resources. Community leaders collected the money and handed it over, hoping the payment would purchase the one thing government had been unable to guarantee. Security.

The gunmen accepted the money. Then they returned. This time, they set the community’s primary school ablaze. The destruction of Central Primary School shattered whatever confidence remained that negotiations with armed groups could offer lasting protection.

Residents had paid.

They had complied.

They had trusted the promises of criminals because they believed they had no alternative.

Still, the violence came.

For many analysts, the attack exposed the fundamental weakness of negotiating from a position of fear. Extortion is not peace. It is merely violence paid in advance.

A Country Learning to Live With Fear

Banditry in Nigeria has changed.

What began as largely opportunistic cattle rustling has evolved into an organised criminal enterprise stretching across multiple states, sustained by kidnapping, illegal taxation, arms trafficking and increasingly sophisticated financial networks.

In many rural communities, armed groups no longer wait to kidnap wealthy individuals. Entire villages are taxed. Farmers pay before cultivating their fields. Transport operators pay before using rural roads. Herders pay before accessing grazing routes. Failure to comply often attracts devastating consequences.

The result is the emergence of what security experts increasingly describe as a parallel authority operating outside the Nigerian state. In these territories, bandits determine who farms, who trades, who travels and, in some cases, who lives. Communities caught between armed gangs and an overstretched security architecture often make impossible choices.

Pay the levy.

Raise ransom.

Abandon the village.

Or die.

The Business of Terror

Perhaps no public official has captured this transformation more candidly than Katsina State Governor Dikko Umaru Radda. Banditry, he observed, has become a business. His assessment goes beyond rhetoric.

Like every successful criminal enterprise, the violence now sustains an entire economy. Kidnapping generates ransom payments. Extortion finances arms purchases. Illegal mining provides additional revenue. Livestock theft supplies black markets stretching beyond Nigeria’s borders.

Intelligence leaks, according to the governor himself, sometimes emerge from within government institutions and security agencies, allowing criminal groups to evade military operations almost as quickly as they are planned.

If those observations are accurate, Nigeria is confronting more than isolated criminal gangs. It is confronting an underground economy built on insecurity. That reality raises difficult questions about the long-term effectiveness of policies centred primarily on persuading individual commanders to surrender. Removing one gang leader does little if the financial incentives driving the violence remain intact.

The Peace That Never Arrived

Official announcements often speak of restored calm. Military operations eliminate camps. Bandit commanders surrender. Governments declare progress. Yet beyond the press conferences lies another Nigeria. A Nigeria where farmers still avoid fertile land because they fear ambush. Where parents hesitate before sending children to school. Where villages emptied years ago remain overgrown and abandoned. Where internally displaced families continue living in temporary shelters long after the television cameras have disappeared.

For these communities, peace is measured differently. It is not the number of weapons surrendered. It is whether children can walk to school without armed escorts. It is whether farmers can harvest crops without paying protection money. It is whether families can sleep through the night without wondering whose turn will come before dawn.

Until those questions receive affirmative answers, many victims argue that peace exists only in official statements.

The Invisible Majority

Nigeria has spent years counting surrendered fighters. It has devoted considerably less effort to counting broken communities. The woman widowed by a midnight raid. The child who still wakes screaming after witnessing executions. The elderly man who has not visited his ancestral home in five years. The teenager whose education ended when her school closed indefinitely. These stories rarely feature in policy debates. Victims seldom sit at negotiation tables. Few are consulted before reintegration programmes are announced.

Yet they are the people expected to live with the consequences long after governments declare success. Their silence has become one of the greatest blind spots in Nigeria’s response to insecurity. And while the nation debates how to rehabilitate perpetrators, millions of survivors are still searching for a chance to rebuild their own lives. For many of them, that journey has barely begun.

The Republic of Displacement

For every village that makes the headlines after a deadly attack, dozens more disappear quietly. There are no breaking news alerts when families abandon ancestral homes under the cover of darkness. No television cameras follow the elderly as they leave behind generations of history. There are no official ceremonies marking the closure of schools that may never reopen or the farms that will no longer be cultivated.

Yet these silent departures have become one of the defining features of Nigeria’s insecurity crisis. Across the North-West and North-Central, displacement is no longer an emergency. It has become a way of life.

According to humanitarian agencies, Nigeria remains one of Africa’s largest displacement crises, with millions of people uprooted by conflict, banditry and communal violence. While the insurgency in the North-East accounts for a significant proportion of the displaced population, the rapid expansion of banditry across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna and Niger states has created a second humanitarian emergency that often receives far less international attention.

Entire communities have emptied.

Villages that once echoed with the sounds of children, livestock and market traders now stand deserted, their mud walls collapsing under years of neglect. Footpaths have disappeared beneath weeds. Roofs have caved in. Wells have dried up.

Some settlements no longer exist except on old electoral maps. For those forced to flee, displacement is not simply the loss of shelter. It is the loss of identity. Farmers become refugees in their own country. Community leaders lose the people they once governed. Children grow up without ever knowing the villages their parents still call home.

Many displaced families now live in overcrowded camps, unfinished buildings, schools converted into emergency shelters or with relatives whose own resources were already stretched before they arrived.

Temporary arrangements have quietly become permanent realities.

A Harvest of Fear

Long before food prices began dominating national conversations, insecurity had already begun reshaping Nigeria’s agricultural landscape. Across vast stretches of the North-West, farming has become one of the country’s most dangerous occupations.

Fields that once produced maize, millet, sorghum and beans now lie uncultivated because their owners fear they may never return alive. Others cultivate only small portions of their land, choosing fields closer to military checkpoints while abandoning larger, more fertile plots deep inside rural communities.

The consequences extend far beyond the affected states. Every abandoned farm represents food that will never reach Nigerian markets. Every farmer prevented from planting contributes to shrinking food supplies. Every harvest lost pushes prices higher for families hundreds of kilometres away. Banditry is no longer merely a security crisis.

It is an economic crisis.

It is a food security crisis.

It is an inflation crisis.

When economists discuss rising food prices, they often focus on exchange rates, transport costs and inflationary pressures. Those factors matter. But behind every expensive bag of maize is another story. Sometimes it is the story of a farmer who paid ransom instead of buying fertiliser. Sometimes it is the story of a community that abandoned hundreds of hectares after repeated attacks. Sometimes it is simply the story of land that has become too dangerous to cultivate. The cost of insecurity is now reflected on dinner tables across Nigeria.

The Taxation of Terror

Perhaps nowhere has the collapse of state authority become more visible than in the emergence of what residents increasingly describe as “bandit taxation.” Communities no longer fear only kidnappings. They fear invoices.

Across several affected states, armed groups routinely impose levies on villages before planting seasons. Farmers are ordered to pay before accessing their own land. Livestock owners must pay to graze cattle. Traders contribute levies before transporting goods through certain rural corridors.

These are not isolated acts of extortion. They increasingly resemble parallel systems of governance. Where government authority has weakened, armed groups have filled the vacuum, collecting revenue, enforcing rules and punishing defiance with extraordinary brutality.

The implications stretch beyond criminality. Taxation has always been one of the defining powers of government. When armed groups successfully impose taxes across large territories, they are doing more than stealing money. They are exercising authority. That reality should concern policymakers as much as the violence itself.

Children of the Crisis

The youngest victims rarely appear in official security briefings. Yet they may carry the longest scars. A child who spends formative years moving from one displacement camp to another loses more than classroom instruction. Friendships disappear. Routine disappears. Stability disappears.

Psychologists have long warned that prolonged exposure to violence fundamentally alters childhood development. Anxiety, depression, behavioural disorders and post-traumatic stress become increasingly common among children exposed to repeated attacks. In many communities, fear has become an inherited condition.

Children who never witnessed the first attacks still grow up hearing gunfire in family conversations, watching parents panic whenever motorcycles approach and learning evacuation routes before they learn multiplication tables. For many, insecurity becomes normal long before peace ever does.

The Schools That Never Reopened

Few images better symbolise Nigeria’s security crisis than empty classrooms.

The world remembers Chibok.

It remembers Dapchi.

It remembers Kankara.

But behind those internationally recognised names lies a quieter tragedy unfolding in hundreds of communities. Parents increasingly question whether education is worth risking a child’s life. Teachers seek transfers from vulnerable rural schools. Some refuse postings altogether.

Entire communities have watched education grind to a halt because armed groups transformed classrooms into targets. Every attack creates another generation of parents who hesitate before sending children back to school. Every closure widens educational inequality between urban and rural Nigeria. For girls, the consequences are often irreversible.

Interrupted education frequently leads to early marriage, economic dependence and reduced opportunities that can last a lifetime. The long-term damage extends beyond individual families. A country cannot build human capital while schools remain battlefields.

The Women Who Carry the Burden

Conflict rarely treats men and women equally. When communities collapse, women often become providers, caregivers and protectors simultaneously. Many lose husbands to violence while assuming responsibility for entire households inside displacement camps where opportunities for income are scarce.

Humanitarian organisations have repeatedly documented increased risks of sexual exploitation, trafficking, domestic violence and child marriage in communities affected by prolonged displacement. Economic hardship compounds every vulnerability. A mother who cannot feed her children becomes more susceptible to exploitation. A teenage girl who leaves school because her family fled violence becomes more vulnerable to forced marriage. A widow who loses farmland loses not only income but independence. The conflict continues long after the shooting stops.

It simply changes its victims.

The Cost Nobody Calculates

Governments routinely estimate the financial cost of military operations. Far less attention is given to the hidden economic losses accumulated year after year. How much productivity disappears when entire farming communities abandon their land? What is the lifetime economic cost of children denied education? How much investment avoids regions associated with insecurity? How much talent leaves rural Nigeria permanently because professionals refuse to return?

These losses rarely appear in budget documents. Yet they may ultimately exceed the direct costs of fighting banditry itself. The country’s insecurity crisis is not merely consuming lives.

It is consuming development.

It is consuming opportunity.

It is consuming the future.

The Measure of Peace

For government officials, peace is often measured through statistics. Fewer attacks. More arrests. Weapons recovered. Bandits neutralised. Those indicators matter. But for the people living inside conflict zones, peace is measured differently.

Can farmers cultivate without paying armed men? Can children attend school without fear? Can women walk to markets safely? Can displaced families return home?

Until those questions are answered positively, declarations of victory will continue sounding incomplete to the people who have sacrificed the most. This is because for millions of Nigerians, the greatest tragedy is not that violence came.

It is that years later, normal life has still not returned.

To be contibued.

Part I: When Terror Pays: Inside Nigeria’s controversial experiment with “repentant” bandits

Part II: When Terror Pays: How Nigeria’s search for peace left thousands waiting for justice

Part III A: When Terror Pays (PART III A): When peace comes without justice

Part III B: When Terror Pays (PART III B): The world has been here before

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