Key Points
- Dr. Yahuza Getso flatly rejected the “repentant Boko Haram” label, saying a terrorist remains a terrorist regardless of government rebranding.
- He warned that dialogue with armed groups cannot succeed unless their supply chains, financial networks and access to medical care are dismantled simultaneously.
- His criticism lands as data shows Borno State spent N4.3 billion on livelihood support for former insurgents in 2025, more than it spent on its university teaching hospital.
Dr. Yahuza Getso does not mince words. Nigeria’s habit of calling former Boko Haram members “repentant” is, in his view, not just a matter of poor semantics. It is a form of deception.
Speaking on Trust TV on March 31, the security expert laid out his objections plainly. “The government used to say repentant bandits, repentant Boko Haram.
This is a language I never believed in and I will never believe it,” he said. “A Boko Haram member is still a Boko Haram member; if it’s a bandit, it’s just a bandit.”
His message to the Federal Government was equally direct: “Stop playing games, stop playing with the intelligence of Nigerians, stop deceiving us.”
A costly program with troubling returns
The government’s deradicalization effort, officially known as Operation Safe Corridor, has been running since 2016. It was designed to reform and reorient low-risk members of the group, modeled loosely on the Niger Delta amnesty program.
Thousands have passed through it. But what they return to, and what they do next, is where the debate gets uncomfortable.
A review of Borno State’s 2025 full-year budget performance document showed the state spent N4.3 billion on livelihood support for former insurgents during the year, while capital expenditure for the Borno State University Teaching Hospital stood at N2.7 billion, a lower figure than what went to the reintegration program.
Meanwhile, frontline soldiers deployed in Yobe and Borno states have accused government-backed “repentant” fighters of leaking sensitive military information to their former commanders, describing the policy as a “deadly mistake that continues to cost lives.”
In March and April 2025, 600 and 390 “repentant Boko Haram members” respectively graduated from the program, receiving cash and startup equipment. Some have even been recruited into the security services.
Critics say the lack of long-term evaluation makes it impossible to know how many have genuinely disengaged.
Dialogue without teeth
Getso’s critique goes beyond the labeling. He said he raised similar concerns during the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari, warning then, as he does now, that negotiations with armed groups cannot produce meaningful results unless the underlying infrastructure sustaining those groups is simultaneously dismantled.
That means cutting off supply chains. It means targeting financiers. It means denying access to the medical care and logistics networks that keep these groups operational between attacks. Without that, he argued, dialogue becomes a revolving door.
Doubts about the sincerity of former insurgents have persisted since the program’s early days, with fears that some participants may revert to militancy or act as informants, especially if they feel disaffected or ostracized after reintegration.
A pattern of failed promises
Getso’s remarks arrive against a backdrop of escalating violence. Attacks by Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West Africa Province, have continued in the northeast even as the reintegration program expands.
In September 2025, more than 60 civilians were killed when insurgents attacked a resettlement village in Darul Jamal, on the Nigeria-Cameroon border, an area that had been declared safe and used as a showcase for the state’s return-of-displaced-persons strategy.
What Getso is arguing is not that reintegration is inherently wrong. It is that the government’s framing of it, and its execution, betrays a deeper unwillingness to be honest with Nigerians about what is actually happening in the country’s northeast, and why.
