The failed recruits threatening to join Boko Haram

ON Christmas Day this week, the US Government and the Nigerian authorities responded to the “climate change” operations in the North-West. They went after the terrorists “doing something” in Nigeria’s North-West, to copy the Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s characterisation of 9/11. For years, certain so-called northern leaders have reframed massive acts of genocide as “climate change”, so maybe it’s time the climate shifted a little bit. The moment the news hit the airwaves, it was received with applause by decent people, while terror sympathisers like Sheikh Gumi immediately began shedding their egbere tears.

 Early this week, one of the regular readers of this page forwarded to me a disturbing video currently circulating on social media, in which a group of young men who were reportedly disqualified from Nigerian military recruitment training lambasted the authorities for their fate, threatening to avenge their disqualification by joining terrorist groups. By now, in a serious country, those criminals would be undergoing prosecution, but the Nigerian authorities have long mollycoddled terrorists. Imagine anybody in Saudi Arabia or the United States threatening the State with terrorism!

As a young Man O’War member, I toyed with the idea of joining the Nigerian Army in the early 90s, but rumours that some Yoruba boys had to claim northern ethnicity to improve their chances of selection discouraged me. Of course, life is as God ordains, but what’s this business of threatening your country with terrorism because you failed as a recruit? In the footage under reference, at least three of the affected recruits are seen openly denouncing the authorities and vowing to extract their own pound of flesh, describing their experience as humiliating and unjust. Of course, acts of outrage like this one derive their motivation from Nigeria’s geo-ethnic imbalance and the failure to treat crime with iron resolve. Surely, this is one occasion we must be unrestrainedly thankful to the military instructors for booting out these potential terrorists in uniform.

Aren’t these sulking boys Boko Haram members/enablers? This year, the terror outfit carried out several deadly attacks in Borno State. On September 5, it killed more than 60 people in Darul Jamal. Then in October, it seized the border town of Kirawa, where it razed the district head’s palace, a military barracks and dozens of homes, forcing over 5,000 civilians to flee to Cameroon. Let’s not even mention the different mass abductions. Boko Haram and its splinter group, ISWAP, revived operations in Sambisa forest and the Lake Chad basin, killing at least 2,200 people by the first half of this year alone, a figure that surpasses the entire record for 2024. In the North-West, the government confronts an estimated 30,000 terrorists operating across loosely organised gangs. Whether you are thinking of ISWAP, Ansaru or Lakurawa, the trail of wanton bloodshed is a long one. Go to Zamfara, Sokoto, or Kebbi. In the North-East, there are over 2.3 million IDPs, and recent attacks and floods have displaced thousands more, cutting off communities like Rann.

The security agencies should track these guys down if they haven’t done so already. Military recruitment is serious business. For as long as anyone remembers, recruits have been disqualified during training. Threatening to join terrorists because you failed during training means that your intentions were never pure from the start. For many years now, there have been reports of egregious acts of sabotage by certain members of the armed forces in theatres of war. An ex-soldier once claimed that a supposed colleague shot him because he was killing too many Boko Haram members! And if you don’t recall how certain northern leaders accused the then Army chief Azubuike Ihejirika of the same crime, you will at least notice the depraved arguments of a so-called professor who is now warning the Minister of Defence, Christopher Musa, against launching an offensive on Fulani terrorists. Apparently, for these morally crippled individuals, their beloved kith and kin have the right to perpetually bury the rest of Nigeria in abattoirs.

As social identity theorists inform us, certain individuals derive self-esteem from group membership, and when a terrorist group frames itself as the protector of a marginalised ethnic, religious, or regional identity, sympathisers adopt that identity and view the group’s cause as their own. Again, terrorist propaganda often promises meaning, belonging, significance, or a sense of empowerment. Thus, when personal needs for certainty, status or revenge are unmet, joining or sympathising with a violent cause can satisfy those psychological cravings. Cognitive mechanisms (dehumanising victims, blaming external forces, and shifting responsibility) allow such people to detach morally from terrorist violence.

That’s why I sometimes wish the Nigerian government would allow youths from other parts of Nigeria access to ammunition for self-defence, under certain well-defined parameters. If the youths of, say, Igangan in Oyo State had access to ammunition—or a state policing outfit that could protect them—could Fulani terrorists have staged the June 2021 atrocity there?

Failing to punish terrorists can only embolden them. If the failed military recruits who are now telling Nigerian youths that terrorism is a viable backup after military disqualification are not dealt with now, they are going to cause the country irreparable damage over time. A government should not sit idly by while certain depraved individuals purvey destructive ideologies and stir ethnic strife. All too often, the Nigerian government fails to act, or acts half-heartedly, when terrorists devastate the country. In my April 2025 piece titled Refusing to trace CBEX funds is economic/security sabotage, I showed how Nigerians lost $1 bn to Ponzi scams in the past decade and argued that refusing to trace CBEX funds is deliberate economic and security sabotage. I cited Obafemi Awolowo’s distinction between individual and national morality and the position of philosophers like Locke/Hobbes on the government’s duty to protect citizens. I called for using Interpol, financial intelligence and digital forensics to track the criminals and their havens.

 If you freeze assets, prosecute perpetrators and stop foreign economic terrorists and local collaborators from further looting, what you are doing is protecting your sovereignty. A situation where the so-called foreign “investors” continually rip off Nigerian states (e.g., Ogun State jet seizure) through shady deals cannot be ideal. By the same token, allowing potential terrorists in military uniform to get away with subversion amounts to an open endorsement of their position. I rise.

culled from Tribune