For years, families of people arbitrarily arrested and detained in a military barracks in Maiduguri have been exploited by security agents and lawyers who claim they can get their loved ones released. Now, calls coming from detainees suggest there is a new opportunity for them to bribe their way out.
“There,” he said. Hanging beside the driver in a commercial tricycle, Haruna* pointed at the front yard of a house on the east side of the 1000 Housing Estate in Maiduguri. “I gave him the money at this point.”
The scene he described happened over ten years ago, in 2014. Two years earlier, Nigerian military officers had arbitrarily arrested two of his younger brothers alongside other residents of Bama, a town in Borno, northeastern Nigeria. Someone had told him that a high-ranking official of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) — a voluntary security outfit formed to tackle Boko Haram insurgents — could help him get his brothers back. He introduced him to this person in Maiduguri, the state capital, and that was when the cash exchange happened.
“We heard he had access to the [Giwa] barracks, and he can do and undo,” Haruna explained.
When they met, the CJTF official said the authorities would have to open files for each of the 26 people arrested, which would cost him ₦150,000. This was a lot of money back in 2014, when it was equivalent to $915.
“I don’t know what kind of file they went to open.”
After paying this money, the CJTF kingpin became elusive. Haruna lost direct access to him. Whenever a middleman contacted him, he kept saying he was still on the matter — each reassurance holding less weight than the one before it.
Since 2009, states in northeastern Nigeria — especially Borno — have been caught in the middle of a savage insurgency occasioned by the rise of the Boko Haram terrorist group. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the conflict has led to the direct death of about 35,000 people as of 2020. Hundreds of thousands more people have lost their lives due to starvation, poor healthcare, and other tragedies caused by the crisis. On top of that, over 2.2 million people are still internally displaced in the region.
In their response, Nigeria’s armed forces have often been found to engage in gross human rights violations, including mass arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, and years-long detention of suspects without trial. At the centre of many of these abuses sits the Giwa barracks, a military detention facility in Maiduguri. Here, tens of thousands of civilians have been held unlawfully — many times for close to a decade — and thousands have lost their lives. According to Amnesty International, between 2011 and 2020, up to 10,000 died in custody as a result of the Boko Haram crisis, “many of them in Giwa Barracks”. The NGO’s investigations also revealed that many of the mass arrests were based on random profiling “rather than evidence of criminal wrongdoing”. The scale of this problem meant that many families were desperate to get their loved ones back, believing them to be innocent — and, in the process, many of them became victims of financial exploitation.
Over the years, detainees at Giwa barracks have occasionally been released in batches — 275 detainees in 2016, 876 children later that year, and 333 more underage detainees between 2019 and 2020. In July 2021, the Nigerian Army announced that it had approved over a thousand detainees for release after clearing them of wrongdoing. Since then, more and more people have regained their freedom from the notorious barracks.
For the first time, starting in August 2023, the military authorities have even allowed detainees to phone their families and have arranged visitation at the barracks. Another unusual thing is happening, though. Families are receiving calls from their detained loved ones, who say there’s an opportunity to fast-track their release if they pay some money — usually between ₦50,000 and ₦200,000.
We asked Nigeria’s military authorities about these findings but did not get a direct response. “I have no insight into this. Please ask the spokespersons at the DHQ [Defence Headquarters]. It’s within their purview,” replied Army spokesperson Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu. He later explained that this is because counter-insurgency operations in the North East are a joint task force effort coordinated by the DHQ. However, when we reached out to the Director of Defence Media Operations, Major General Edward Buba, he passed the buck back to the Nigerian Army, insisting that “Giwa barracks falls under the[ir] purview.”
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