Rage. Rehab. Repeat.
From bloodlust to barracks and back to the bush — is Nigeria’s Operation Safe Corridor just a vacation for jihadis?
By Mike Arnold
The man who chopped her husband’s head off got six months of carpentry class and a graduation ceremony. She got a tarp next to a sewage ditch and has to sell her body to feed her children.
And he has at least a thirty to fifty percent chance of going back and doing it all over again.
They call it Operation Safe Corridor. Six months at a camp in Gombe. Three meals a day, carpentry class, tailoring, fish farming, government imams, cap and gown. Last month 744 walked out the gate.
Ten years in, and the Nigerian government has never published a recidivism number.
Saudi Arabia runs one to two years with lifetime aftercare and reports recidivism around ten to twenty percent. Indonesia and Denmark land in the same range. Nigeria runs six months with no aftercare and drops these animals back where their old commanders still operate — back among the men who taught them to swing the axe twice when the first blow doesn’t finish the job, to lift the head while it’s still warm and grin into the camera, to feel like gods for a moment with another man’s blood on their hands.
That feeling does not wash off in six months of fish farming. It is demonic. It is what they go home for.
The receipts are already in. Ba’ana Bdiya, a graduate, arrested for an ambush that killed Nigerian soldiers. Goni Farouq and Amir Zabu, both graduates and both Boko Haram commanders, caught planning attacks on troops. Eight people killed in Bama by an IED planted by graduates. Borno Governor Babagana Zulum has stated publicly that “repentant” Boko Haram members end up as spies for the insurgents.
And just the other day, a lawyer named Maxwell Opara filed suit in the Federal High Court in Abuja to suspend the program and force the prosecution of these 700 men for terrorism, murder, and kidnapping.
Daily Trust pulled the spending records last week. ₦605 million traced through documented contracts — dormitory construction, consultancy fees — paid out to house the men who burned the villages. That is the floor, not the ceiling. The European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States have all quietly chipped in.
Now look at her again.
Her village burned. Her husband hacked to death in front of her. Her children walked three days to a camp the government says does not exist. She sleeps under a tarp next to a sewage ditch. Her son is the right age to be recruited by the men who killed his father. Her body is what she has left to feed him with.
The man who chopped her husband’s head off graduated last month. The Nigerian government built him a dormitory and paid a consultant ₦47 million to draw the plans for it.
She got a tarp.
Ten million Nigerians displaced, denied, and forgotten — while the men who displaced them are inside the only government program with a budget, a curriculum, a graduation ceremony, and a press release.
That is the choice Nigeria made.
Rage. Rehab. Repeat.
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#EarthShaker