Nigeria’s increasingly close brush with terrorism has thrown up a couple of dilemmas, some more pressing than the others.
For those who have survived at the tip of its spear, the dilemma has often involved how to move on after their loved ones have been killed, livelihoods destroyed and houses razed.
Crammed into filthy refugee camps dripping with squalor, they usually have enough time to compare and comprehend wounds.
A country that continues to experience the constant trauma that terrorism engenders must also now count the cost of continuously being in the eye of the storm. It is always one issue or the other with the conversation often veering wildly between the serious and the ridiculous.
There have been conversations on whether IDPs camps should be closed, the treatment that should be accorded those who have previously taken up arms against the Nigerian state but are now supposedly repentant of their heinous crimes.
Conversations along that line are often heated and engrossing. Recently, two men who govern two of Nigeria‘s most volatile states had their take on the vexed issue of repentant terrorists.
First to go was the much-maligned Mr Nasir el-Rufai, the Kaduna State Governor. Dishing out truly horrifying figures on the security challenges facing his state as compiled by Samuel Aruwan, the Commissioner of Internal Security and Home Affairs, Mr El-Rufai lamented that Kaduna State lost 1,192 residents to bandit attacks across the state in 2021, while 3,348 citizens were kidnapped.
He soon took leave of his lamentation to launch a scathing attack on the whole idea of ‘repentant terrorists’ which many have beentoo eager to push recently.
He said: “We continue to emphasize that as a state, we do not believe that there is any phenomenon like `repentant bandits’.
