By Olugbenga Adebamiwa
In a country drained by a decade and a half of insurgency, grief has hardened into skepticism, and policy pronouncements are now judged less by their intent than by their tone. It was against this delicate national mood that Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Staff, Olufemi Oluyede, offered a striking defence of the military’s deradicalisation strategy, invoking scripture to explain a policy many citizens already view with unease.
Speaking on March 26, 2026, at the inaugural lecture of the Armed Forces Joint Doctrine and Warfare Centre in Abuja, the defence chief addressed a question that has long simmered in public discourse, why rehabilitate those who once terrorised the nation? His answer drew on the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son, suggesting that even those who have strayed grievously should be afforded a path to redemption. Most of those surrendering, he argued, remain Nigerians who should be given “a window to repent” rather than be driven further into extremism.
The reaction was immediate and profound. For many, the analogy fell flat. The Prodigal Son, after all, is a tale of personal failure and familial forgiveness, not one of orchestrated violence, mass abductions, or ideological warfare. To place insurgents linked to Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province within such a moral frame struck critics as an unsettling compression of vastly different moral universes. Mercy, they counter, cannot be abstracted from justice without risking the erosion of both.
Yet the policy at the heart of the controversy is neither new nor improvised. Operation Safe Corridor has been a fixture of Nigeria’s counter-insurgency architecture since 2016, spanning administrations from Muhammadu Buhari to Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Designed to encourage defections, the programme combines psychological rehabilitation with vocational training and eventual reintegration into society. Its logic is rooted in a broader understanding of asymmetric warfare, that insurgencies are not defeated by force alone, but by fracturing their ranks and draining their ideological appeal.
There is, in this, a measure of strategic alignment. Encouraging surrender can yield intelligence, reduce the number of active combatants, and avoid the spiralling costs, human and financial of perpetual warfare. History offers precedents. From Iraq to Afghanistan, attempts at total elimination have often proven deceptive. Closer to home, Nigeria’s 2009 Niger Delta amnesty demonstrated that, under certain conditions, reintegration can stabilise a volatile theatre.
But the Nigerian experience with deradicalisation remains uneven. Independent assessments have repeatedly pointed to the programme’s limitations, its limited appeal among hardened ideologues, the suspicion it arouses in host communities, and persistent questions about transparency and criminal relapse. It has shown the greatest promise among low-level recruits, those forced, drafted, or economically driven into insurgency, rather than among commanders or doctrinally committed fighters.
Crucially, the military has not abandoned force. Daily operations across the North-East and North-West continue to involve airstrikes, raids, and targeted offensives. Thousands of insurgents have been killed or captured in recent years. The defence chief’s remarks were narrowly framed around those who surrender voluntarily, though in a climate of ongoing attacks, such distinction is easily lost. What might have been a technical clarification instead landed as a moral provocation.
The public anger that followed has, in some quarters, transformed into darker speculation. On social media, claims that the Nigerian state itself sponsors terrorism resurface with weary regularity. These assertions, while emotionally resonant in a nation battered by violence, remain unsubstantiated. There is no credible evidence that the federal government or the military as institutions systematically fund or enable insurgent groups. The more plausible drivers of the conflict are well documented, ransom economies, illicit mining networks, porous borders, ideological radicalisation, and deep-seated governance failures.
Nigeria’s armed forces have themselves borne heavy losses in the fight against insurgency, a reality that complicates narratives of deliberate complicity. The persistence of such theories speaks less to hidden truths than to a profound deficit of trust between state and citizen, a deficit nourished by years of insecurity, perceived impunity, and uneven justice.
This is the dilemma at the heart of Oluyede’s remarks. The doctrine he articulated, kill the irreconcilable, rehabilitate the redeemable, aligns with contemporary counter-insurgency thinking. Yet doctrine alone cannot command public confidence. In a nation where victims often feel forgotten and communities remain vulnerable, the optics of mercy without visible justice are politically volatile.
The controversy, then, is not merely about one speech or one analogy. It is about the fragile contract between a state and its people in a time of protracted crisis. Nigerians are not rejecting rehabilitation in principle, they are demanding evidence that it works, that it is just, and that it does not come at the expense of accountability.
Until those assurances are both demonstrated and seen to be demonstrated, every appeal to forgiveness, however well-intentioned, risks sounding, to many ears, like a sermon delivered in the shadow of unresolved grief.
©️ Adebamiwa Olugbenga Michael is a Lagos-based journalist and policy analyst, and publisher of The Insight Lens Project, offering principled, data-driven insights on Nigeria and West Africa.
