In what looks like a poor imitation of the Amnesty Programme in the Niger Delta, a bill seeking to establish an agency for rehabilitation of repentant Boko Haram members is about to be passed into law by the Senate.
But unlike the Amnesty Programme in the Niger Delta where the ex-agitators were known and reasons for their agitation were well spelt out, the Boko Haram insurgents are terrorists who derive joy in killing innocent people without provocation and justification. The recent bill by the former Governor of Yobe State and Senator representing Yobe East, Ibrahim Geidam, cannot, therefore, be said to have met the criteria for which an Amnesty Programme in the Niger Delta was established.
Among other curious motives, the Geidam bill titled ‘Establishment of the National Agency for the Education, Rehabilitation, Deradicalisation and Integration of Repentant Insurgents in Nigeria and for Other Connected Purposes’, seeks to deradicalise repentant insurgents and equip them with requisite skills.
According to Senator Geidam, the bill “will help rehabilitate and reintegrate the defectors, repentant and forcefully conscripted members of the insurgent group, Boko Haram, to make them useful members of the society and provide an avenue for reconciliation and promote national security.
“It will also encourage other members of the group who are still engaged in the insurgency to abandon the group, especially in the face of the military pressure and enable the government to derive insider-information about the insurgency group for greater understanding of the group and its inner workings”.
The Yobe East Senator also believes that the bill “will enable government to use the defectors to fight the unrepentant insurgents”.
Details of the bill show that the proposed agency will rely majorly on funds from the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), and 0.5 per cent of the allocation of the six North East States.
The Tide finds inexplicable the rationale behind the idea of creating an agency to rehabilitate veritable savages when the victims of their bestialities are languishing in internally displaced persons’ (IDPs) camps.
There is no gainsaying the fact that for the eleventh year running, the Boko Haram terrorist group has remained a raging inferno that costs the country so much in human and material terms. Worst is the apparent helplessness of the Federal Government to contain the monster. The government’s assurance that Boko Haram would soon be history has become trite. The more the government promises to decimate the terrorist group, the more vicious it becomes.
But is the rehabilitation of the lunatic group the solution to insurgency in the country? The answer is No. It is against this backdrop that we frown at the reported release of 1,400 Boko Haram ‘’suspects’’ and a bill currently before the Senate for the establishment of a national agency to educate and rehabilitate repentant insurgents. The bill, which has already passed the first reading in the Red Chamber, is a mockery of the fight against insurgency and the unspeakable tragedy that has been wreacked on the nation by the Boko Haram sect in the last one decade.
It is appalling that members of a terrorist group who should be charged with treason and subjected to condign punishment are being treated with kid’s gloves.
For us, the idea of establishing an agency to take care of the terrorists who gleefully celebrate the decapitation of fellow humans and the casualties resulting from their bestialities is irreconcilable. The bill is curious and raises more questions than answers. Is the rehabilitation of members of the lunatic band the appropriate action to assuage the grief of widows and orphans left behind by those who died fighting against these same fanatics?
If the bill sails through, how do we get justice for so many officers and men of the Nigerian Armed Forces who, in the service to their fatherland, have paid the supreme price fighting Boko Haram? How would the government justify the humongous amount of the nation’s resources, including borrowing, that had been channelled into confronting the terrorists?
It is also unthinkable that the government will have to spend borrowed money to rehabilitate those who have immensely contributed to its financial crisis, should Geidam’s bill become law.
Again, how do we distinguish between pretenders and genuinely-repentant insurgents?  What is the guarantee that many, if not most of the supposedly repentant insurgents will not find their way back to the fold of their fellow fanatics after gathering information that will enable them to wreak havoc in greater measure?
Like many other Nigerians, we fear that releasing the ‘repentant’ Boko Haram militants into civilian population could be counter-productive as there is high likelihood of hardened fighters returning to the terror group to commit more atrocities, just as there is the likelihood that the bill, if passed, will breed more insurgents.
The bill is, therefore, not only needless, but also a misplaced priority. This is even so that the nationality of the insurgents may be difficult to ascertain.
We also doubt if the Boko Haram elements who kill for no cause or justification can be rehabilitated. We advise that funds meant to rehabilitate them should be used to correct infrastructural decay in the area of roads, electricity and water supply. Better still, the funds can be used to fund the Army, the police and other security agencies as well as proper equipment to fight the insurgents.
Meanwhile, we believe that the situation in the North-East has been properly taken care of with the establishment of the North East Development Commission (NEDC). That commission should be well-funded and well-equipped to tackle all the socio-economic malaise which breed insurgents in that geo-political zone.
It will amount to a waste of resources to channel resources that are supposed to be used to bring an end to terrorism and the orgy of violence into setting up an agency in the name of rehabilitating a terrorist group that does not care a hoot about human lives.
We believe that the country is currently at war with insurgents, and the war must be fought to its logical conclusion. Deradicalisation can only come after the terrorist group has been defeated. Therefore, Geidam’s bill at this moment when the war is on amounts to putting the cart before the horse.
The bill, if passed into law, will not only offend the sensibilities of all the victims of Boko Haram’s insanity, it will also be an indication of appeasement if not outright capitulation. If this happens, both the sponsor and the Senate that passed the bill into law will be as quilty as the Boko Haram lunatics that have made the country a theatre of needless war for the past 11 years. Nigerians are watching.