Nigeria’s Reckoning: Why peace begins where terror ends, by T.J Ishola

Nigeria stands today like an old baobab scarred by lightning—upright, stubborn, alive, yet bearing the burns of storms it did not invite. For more than a decade, insurgency and banditry have carved fear into the nation’s northern landscapes, turning farmlands into frontlines and villages into verbs of flight. What began as an eruption of extremist violence metastasised into a sprawling ecosystem of terror: ideologues cloaked in theology, criminals baptised by grievance, and opportunists nourished by chaos.

Yet, amid recent military gains and renewed clarity from the country’s defence leadership, Nigeria finds itself at a decisive threshold. The question before the nation is no longer whether peace is desirable—it is—but what price we are willing to pay for it, and to whom.

This moment matters because the cost of equivocation has been ruinously high. According to humanitarian assessments of the Lake Chad Basin crisis, Nigeria alone hosts about 3.2 million internally displaced persons, with millions more across neighbouring states relying on emergency aid. Entire communities have been uprooted, not by floods or famine, but by men who made violence their language and terror their currency. These figures are not sterile statistics; they are living metaphors—children whose classrooms dissolved into camps, farmers whose seasons ended in smoke, elders whose memories outnumber their hopes.

Against this backdrop, the Nigerian Armed Forces have recorded measurable successes. Insurgent camps have been dismantled, supply lines disrupted, and hundreds of fighters neutralised or forced into retreat. These gains are not triumphalist banners; they are fragile footholds, earned at great cost. They demonstrate something crucial: the state is not helpless, and terror is not invincible.

It is precisely at such moments—when momentum begins to tilt—that nations are tempted to bargain with their tormentors. And it is here that Nigeria’s debate has sharpened.

When General Christopher Gwabin Musa appeared before the Senate following his appointment as Minister of Defence, he spoke with the blunt clarity of a man who has seen too many ceasefires rot into ambushes. He rejected the language of negotiation not out of bravado, but from experience. “There should be no negotiation with criminals,” he said, warning that talks and ransom payments only fertilise future violence. Money exchanged in the name of peace, he argued, returns as bullets and bombs. In a separate warning earlier in the year, he was even more explicit: so-called peace deals with bandits are “worthless,” because they are neither rooted in remorse nor restrained by honour. If armed groups genuinely seek peace, he insisted, “they should lay down their weapons and surrender.”

These are not the words of a man intoxicated by force. They are the words of a soldier wary of illusion. In conflicts across the world, the most dangerous phase is often not open warfare but false calm—the quiet in which armed groups rearm, reorganise, and return deadlier than before. Nigeria has seen this movie too many times.

And yet, the call for dialogue persists, carried by influential voices whose intentions are not always malevolent but whose prescriptions are deeply contested. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has long argued that engagement with armed groups can reduce bloodshed, claiming that dialogue may coax fighters away from violence. Professor Usman Yusuf has also warned against a purely kinetic strategy, arguing that force alone cannot resolve grievances embedded in poverty, exclusion, and historical neglect. In widely circulated statements, he has rejected what he perceives as an over-militarisation of the response to banditry, urging a broader social lens.

These arguments are not frivolous. No serious observer denies that insecurity feeds on governance failures, economic despair, and social fracture. Violence does not germinate in a vacuum. But to acknowledge roots is not to excuse fruits. Explanation is not exoneration.

What Nigeria must guard against is the subtle moral slide where context becomes camouflage, and understanding morphs into indulgence. The Niger Delta militancy, often cited as a precedent, arose from environmental devastation and economic dispossession in a region that supplied the nation’s wealth while inhaling its poison. Even then, amnesty was controversial, conditional, and imperfect. To equate that struggle with the mass kidnapping of schoolchildren, the slaughter of farmers, the burning of churches and mosques alike, is to flatten moral distinctions that matter.

Terrorism in northern Nigeria has not been a protest staged at power; it has been violence visited upon the powerless. Its victims are overwhelmingly ordinary people—Muslim and Christian, Hausa and Fulani, farmer and trader. The insurgent’s gun has not discriminated by creed or class. To suggest that such violence can be neutralised through cash-for-calm arrangements is to mistake a wildfire for a negotiable neighbour.

History offers sobering lessons. Colombia’s long war with the FARC ended not because the state paid militants to stop shooting, but because sustained military pressure converged with a structured process of disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration. Weapons were surrendered, not recycled. Accountability was imperfect, but violence was renounced. By contrast, Pakistan’s Waziristan accords showed how ceasefires without enforcement merely grant insurgents time to regroup. Peace without surrender, it turns out, is just intermission.

Nigeria’s challenge, therefore, is not choosing between war and peace, but between real peace and rhetorical peace. Real peace is demanding. It requires insurgents to abandon arms, submit to screening, face justice where crimes have been committed, and enter rehabilitation where possible. It also requires the state to pair firmness with fairness: to rebuild communities, restore livelihoods, reform education, and reassert governance in places long abandoned to fate.

This is where the Defence Minister’s position matters. His insistence on no negotiation is not a rejection of mercy; it is a defence of meaning. Mercy without accountability dissolves into mockery—especially for victims. A mother whose child was abducted is not consoled by knowing her child’s captor received a stipend. A village razed by bandits does not rebuild itself on the promise that attackers will behave better next season.

The Northern Elders Forum and other regional voices have rightly warned against rhetoric that deepens division or paints entire communities with the brush of criminality. They are correct. Nigeria must resist the lazy slide into ethnic blame. But unity cannot be purchased by silence in the face of terror. Togetherness that asks victims to swallow injustice is not unity; it is enforced amnesia.

Nigeria is not Syria. It is not Libya. It is not Iraq. Those states collapsed under the weight of fractured sovereignty and foreign interventions that hollowed out institutions. Nigeria’s institutions are strained, sometimes scandalously imperfect, but they exist. The armed forces, despite limitations, are holding the line. To declare the country already defeated is to echo insurgent propaganda more effectively than any video release.

This is why language matters. When influential figures imply that the state must bargain its way out of terror, they unintentionally validate the insurgent’s central thesis: that violence pays. General Musa’s counter-message is therefore not merely strategic; it is symbolic. It tells both citizens and combatants that the Nigerian state still believes in consequence.

The path ahead is narrow and unforgiving. Military pressure must continue, not as collective punishment but as targeted enforcement. Surrender corridors must be real, humane, and transparent. Rehabilitation must be conditional, monitored, and paired with justice. Development must follow security, not precede it. And political leaders—north and south—must finally confront the failures that allowed extremism to masquerade as destiny.

Nigeria’s peace will not arrive on a negotiation table stained with ransom receipts. It will arrive when guns are laid down, not traded; when terror is renounced, not rationalised; when the state protects the innocent without bargaining with their tormentors.

The baobab still stands. Scarred, yes—but standing. And if Nigeria chooses clarity over confusion, resolve over romance, justice over convenience, it may yet grow new leaves where fire once licked the bark.

Peace, after all, does not begin with words. It begins where terror ends.