Nigeria’s Secret Deals With Boko Haram Undercut Its Public Resolve

For years, the debate over Nigeria’s response to terrorism has centred on one uncomfortable question: whether dialogue with killers is a path to peace, or surrender dressed up as strategy. The government has grown more comfortable forgiving insurgents than confronting the conditions that keep producing them. Two recent developments show that the problem is not just the state’s posture toward terrorism, but its proximity to it.

According to an exclusive report from The New Humanitarian, Nigeria has maintained a ceasefire with Boko Haram for roughly three months, tied to negotiations that freed 360 civilians abducted from Ngoshe village in Borno State earlier this year. The truce, in place since June, is likely to be extended for another 40 days. The arrangement reportedly involved a ransom payment of 3.7 million Dollars, which the government denies making.

This is an active, undisclosed accommodation with the same group responsible for the loss of  nearly 350,000 civilian lives over the past seventeen years. An arrangement negotiated even as the state publicly maintains that it will not enter talks with Boko Haram. Analysts quoted in the reporting caution this may be a transactional truce rather than a step toward durable peace, and it notably excludes ISWAP, whose fighters continue clashing with Boko Haram regardless.

A government that tells its citizens it does not negotiate with terrorists, while quietly doing exactly that to recover hostages, is managing a credibility problem it created for itself. That problem deepens as senior officials speak about armed groups in language that sounds less like counter-terrorism and more like reconciliation.

National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu drew criticism after remarks at the High-Level African Counter-Terrorism Meeting in Abuja, where he described terrorists in Nigeria’s North-West as people who want peace, calling them “our brothers.” Video of the comment spread widely and provoked accusations that Ribadu was too sympathetic to the terrorists, with critics arguing the language could weaken the government’s counter-terrorism messaging and demoralise communities that had already endured repeated attacks.

Days earlier, Chief of Defence Staff General Olufemi Oluyede had reached for a different but related framing, describing the state’s posture toward terrorists through a comparison to the biblical prodigal son, arguing that perpetrators of terror deserve rehabilitation because they are Nigerians, and asking rhetorically whether the prodigal son would ever have returned if that window had not existed.

At the same time, Bauchi South Senator Shehu Buba is fighting renewed allegations that he sponsored bandit kingpins operating in the country’s northeast. A whistleblower identified as Hassan Husseini has accused the senator of harbouring bandit kingpins and named him among prominent politicians allegedly sponsoring banditry. The claims are not new. In 2024, Bauchi state governor Bala Mohammed made similar accusations against Buba, which the senator denied. The latest accusations have now resurfaced with enough force to trigger public calls for a formal investigation.

Buba has denied everything, calling the footage manipulated and the campaign against him politically motivated, and says he has filed legal action against his accusers in courts in both Nigeria and Niger.

The fact that such an allegation is plausible enough to dominate northern Nigeria’s news cycle for a week says something about how thoroughly banditry has fused with political life. Nigerians are being asked to accept that terrorism is an external calamity visited upon “our own country,” in the NSA’s own framing, while lawmakers are suspected of bankrolling the people carrying it out.

Long before the current wave of allegations and quiet diplomacy, state governors were already sounding the alarm that they had no real power to act. Nasir El-Rufai, as governor of Kaduna, spent years publicly rejecting any talk of dialogue or amnesty for bandits, insisting his state would neither negotiate with criminals nor support clemency for them. He repeatedly acknowledged that his hands were tied, disclosing that Kaduna had been writing to the federal government since 2017 asking that bandits be formally designated terrorists, a status that would legally widen the scope of military action against them.

Security is a federal matter under Nigeria’s constitution, therefore states have no police force of their own, no authority to prosecute terrorists, and no jurisdiction to strike the kind of deals, or launch the kind of offensives that only the federal government can authorise. Governors like El-Rufai could fund operations and issue tough statements, but the actual power to act sits entirely with the centre.

That is what makes the ceasefire disclosure and the allegations against the senator so damning. The one arm of government with the constitutional authority to act decisively is the same one secretly negotiating  with terrorists while denying it publicly, while being slow to investigate people of interest over alleged links to the groups terrorising the country.