The Deradicalised is a five-part series. In 2016, the Nigerian government launched a multi-sectoral programme tagged “Operation Safe Corridor” to deradicalise and rehabilitate “low-risk” Boko Haram members and encourage insurgents to embrace peace. But years into its operation and after about a thousand people were graduated in different batches, extraordinarily little was really known about …
Insecurity has, for many years, occupied a central position among an array of dire problems Nigerians face. For people in the northeast, it manifests mainly as the Boko Haram insurgency. For those in other regions of the north and middle-belt, we have banditry, inter-communal conflicts, and clashes between herders and farming communities. In the south, …
Read more “Why Local Conflict-Reporting Lacks Depth And What Journalists Can Do Differently”
Thousands of women in Borno have had to raise their children alone because their husbands, arbitrarily accused of being members of Boko Haram, are jailed by the Nigerian Army. But they are not planning to give up hope. Hauwa has not heard from her husband in many years. In 2015, her town, Bama, Borno State, …
Read more “Knifar: Women Facing Forced Family Separation By Soldiers Cry Out”
Realising that the Nigeria Police cannot curb crime alone, vigilante groups in a southwest state have stuck to ancient practices of reducing insecurity and seem to be succeeding. When Olajide finally joined the Supreme Eiye Confraternity as a sophomore at the Olabisi Onabanjo University in Ogun State, it was not because he wanted to stand out. He …
Read more “Insecurity Forcing Ogun Communities To Use Traditional Safeguards In Combatting Crime”
By Kunle Adebajo and Murtala AbdullahiPhotography by Kunle Adebajo and Murtala AbdullahiVisualizations by Yuxi Wang and Jillian Dudziak A bare-chested old man lies in the emergency room of a government hospital in northeast Nigeria. An intravenous line sticks out from his right arm and an arrow from his left shoulder. A second arrow, with the tip now detached from its shaft, rests on a …
Read more “An Encroaching Desert Intensifies Nigeria’s Farmer-Herder Crisis”
‘Civil wars ignite and escalate in ways that are predictable; they follow a script,’ writes author Barbara F. Walter. How close are developments in Nigeria to this time-tested script? For decades, social scientists have researched factors which, combined, best predict that a country will experience civil war. Nigeria ticks a lot of the boxes. Wars …
Read more “How Civil Wars Start and Lessons for Today’s Nigeria”