By Kachi Okezie, Esq
Nigeria is drifting into dangerous territory, where the line between mercy and amnesia is no longer just blurred, it is being deliberately erased. The so-called “repentant” terrorists being reabsorbed into society and “empowered” to the detriment of their victims! Borno State has “spent at least N10 billion ($7 million) on the rehabilitation and reintegration of “repentant” Boko Haram fighters in just two years, even as more than 120,000 Christian survivors of the insurgency languish in squalid displacement camps with no budgetary provision for their welfare,” a TruthNigeria investigation has found. The revelations mirror a similar pattern uncovered in Benue State last month, where government resources were also directed toward rehabilitating armed militants while their victims (mostly Christians) remained abandoned in Internally Displaced Persons’ camps.
This week, 744 “former” terrorists were declared “graduates” of a 24-week de-radicalisation, rehabilitation and reintegration programme in Gombe State. They are now being released back into society, not with weapons, but with state-funded grants and a clean slate fashioned in secrecy. All of this has unfolded quietly under the banner of Operation Safe Corridor, and almost entirely outside the formal criminal justice system.
That fact alone should unsettle anyone who understands and believes in the rule of law and separation of powers in a democracy. Because what is happening here is not rehabilitation as commonly understood; it is substitution. The courts, where evidence is tested, guilt is established and justice is not only done but seen to be done, have been sidestepped. In their place, we have an opaque administrative process that asks the public to accept, on faith, that individuals who once took up arms against the state are now “repentant”. By whose authority? On what evidential basis? And accountable to whom?
The Constitution is supposed to answer those questions. And it does. It vests judicial power in the courts, not in military camps or ad hoc committees. In any functioning constitutional democracy, repentance is not a shortcut around trial; it is, at best, a factor to be considered ONLY, after guilt has been proven. What Nigeria is witnessing instead is the quiet construction of a parallel judicial system, one in which the Executive investigates, judges and absolves, all behind closed doors. That is not pragmatism. It is the erosion of the separation of powers, and it edges uncomfortably close to something older and more dangerous: rule by fiat.
But the deeper damage is philosophical. The Social Contract, that unspoken agreement between citizen and state, rests on a simple exchange: individuals surrender the right to exact private vengeance, and the state, in return, guarantees protection and justice. When the state fails to punish those who have violently torn up that contract, it undermines its own legitimacy. When victims watch their attackers re-enter society with government support while they remain in displacement camps, the promise of justice begins to ring hollow. The message is stark and corrosive: the system does not protect you; it manages outcomes.
Defenders of the programme often gesture towards restorative justice, pointing to examples abroad. But even the most liberal systems understand that mercy has limits. In the United Kingdom, serious offences, especially those involving terrorism or mass violence, are never simply erased after a brief period of good behaviour. They remain on the record because the law recognises a hard truth: those who fundamentally reject the social order through violence cannot be lightly reabsorbed without risk. That is in a society with far stronger institutions, surveillance and social safety nets in place. Nigeria, by contrast, is confronting rising insecurity, yet appears willing to believe that six months in a camp can undo years of ideological indoctrination, grooming and preparation for evil.
That belief is not just optimistic; it is beyond reckless. Radicalisation is not a switch that can be flicked off through vocational training and classroom lectures. It is a deep psychological and ideological transformation, often reinforced over years. To claim it can be reversed in 24 weeks requires a leap of faith that would be questionable even in the most controlled conditions. Yet here, the process is shrouded in secrecy. There is no public accounting for crimes and addressing offending behaviour, no transparent criteria for release, no visible mechanism for long-term monitoring to prevent recidivism. Without those safeguards, “rehabilitation” begins to look less like a solution and more like a gamble; one with potentially devastating consequences.
Then there is the question of incentives. In a country where millions of law-abiding young people struggle for opportunities, the state is effectively offering financial support, training and reintegration packages to those who once took up arms against it. However unintended, the signal is perverse: crime pays, hard graft doesn’t! It risks suggesting that violence is not just survivable, but ultimately negotiable. That is not justice; it is a violent distortion of it. And it must stop.
And beneath all of this, by the way, lies something even harder to quantify: memory. Every quiet release and every untested claim of repentance chips away at the sacrifices of those who fought and died to keep the country safe and intact. Soldiers who fell in the forests of Sambisa, officers ambushed in the line of duty: these were not abstract casualties. They were individuals who believed, rightly or wrongly, that the state they served would uphold the very laws they died defending. To bypass those laws now, to allow alleged perpetrators to re-enter society without trial, actually cheapens their valour and risks turning those sacrifices into something transactional, almost incidental.
None of this is to argue against rehabilitation as a principle. Societies must, at times, find ways to reintegrate those who have gone astray. But rehabilitation without accountability is not reconciliation; it is evasion. And evasion, when institutionalised, corrodes trust and destroys a nation faster than any insurgency could.
Nigeria cannot build stability on quiet compromises that undermine its own legal foundations. It cannot ask its citizens to believe in justice while demonstrating that justice is not to be taken seriously but is negotiable behind closed doors. If these programmes are to continue, they must be subjected to the same scrutiny, transparency and constitutional discipline as any other exercise of state power. They must go through the judicial process and court system. Anything less risks setting a precedent far more dangerous than the problem it seeks to solve.
In the final analysis, the question is not whether these 744 men have changed. It is whether the state has.
Kachi Okezie, Esq is a legal practitioner and member of the Nigerian Bar Association, Abuja branch (Unity Bar)
