By Amayindi Yakubu
Another week, headlines keep reading like a national wound. We are yet to recover from the psychological trauma of the abduction of students and teachers who were kidnapped from schools in the northwest. More than two thousand people have been killed by bandits and insurgents in the first half of 2025 alone. These figures are not statistics, they are the lives of people like you unlawfully stolen.
However, critics and well-meaning Nigerians are asking a question: why do we resort to negotiating with bandits rather than eliminating them? This is a real question that demands honest answers, meanwhile, if you are in the shoes of the parents of those children, you might not be thinking that way at all.
This does not justify the fact that Nigeria resorts to engaging those criminal elements in diplomatic talks, which is wrong in the first place, and could have been prevented had it solved the issues of insecurity from the early stage with force. But now it has to play diplomacy because the lives of those children matter more than the subject of negotiating. The point remains that bargaining with bandits risks creating a lucrative market for abduction. If violence pays, violence repeats itself again and again.
People’s objections are not merely moral theatre as some political cabals see it. Their reasoning is rooted in how incentives work. Those heartless terrorists can reliably extract concessions; they make more future attacks. Banditry risks becoming an industry rather than a crime wave in Nigeria.
Some House of Representatives members and other critics are right to press for transparent answers to who negotiated, what was exchanged, and how it will affect long-term security policy. Demanding such clarity is part of the public’s job in a democratic state like ours.
Yet the practical dilemma cannot be ignored because of only placing the acts before us. When a parent begs for a child’s life, the calculus is human and immediate. The government is caught between the anvil and the hammer, facing a terrible trade-off for refusing to negotiate on principle and taking actions that might endanger the lives of victims when they are used as a shield by terrorists. The moral clarity of the no-negotiation stance meets the raw urgency of a hostage crisis. Then we move into another drama of rhetorical hypocrisy. It is into that fraught space that Sheikh Ahmad Gumi has stepped, and his recent comments have sharpened the debate over principle and practice. Gumi has been a controversial figure for years due to his intervention in talks and negotiations. He visits forest camps, speaks for fighters, and has argued that branding them terrorists will only harden their positions. Recently, in a separate move that raised eyebrows, he declared he would advocate for the pardon of a detained separatist leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, provided that the leader offered remorse and a call for peace. But I think Gumi should show remorse for the lives of those kidnapped by bandits, he says we should not brand as terrorists. The inconsistency matters both practically and ethically, where we treat armed criminals with broad allowances because they are convenient interlocutors, we risk normalising impunity in our society. Where we demand ritual remorse from a man behind bars before urging clemency, we imply that advocacy is a scarce resource to be spent only on those who meet the right preconditions.
There is also a strategic cost we might pay, negotiations that occur in darkness breed rumours and resentments. How much did we pay them? What if we have injected that security finance, what if we have recruited enough armed personnel? If you logically think about it, the resources we send to reactive efforts would have paid off if we channeled them in the right place and at the right time.
Communities that suffer attacks hear of deals and wonder what was traded for their children’s lives. If surrenders come with concealed incentives or if some fighters are quietly eased back into criminal economies, the temporary peace is brittle and often short-lived. Reports that some militants who surrendered in past programmes later returned to violence are a cautionary tale. This is not an argument for cruelty. If the state chooses to negotiate, it must do so transparently, with tight conditions, state oversight, and a clear legal framework for any reintegration.
When we think about it, what the country lacks is not so much a single moral answer as a consistent public policy. There should be a nationally agreed protocol for engagement, who may negotiate on behalf of the state, what can be exchanged, how payments or amnesties are recorded, and how results are measured. National assembly oversight can and must be part of that architecture. A republic cannot have ad hoc bargains that appear to be private deals and then be surprised when the same actors reappear with the same methods. Wait a minute, why are we talking too much about negotiations as if this has become our latest counter-terrorism approach? Make negotiation the exception, not the rule.
This debate is painful because it forces us to confront a fundamental question about the kind of state we want to have as Nigerians. Do we prefer the expedient relief of occasional bargains that secure immediate returns, or the slower, more complex work of building a system that makes bargaining unnecessary? The short answer is that we cannot afford to choose only one
If Sheikh Gumi’s argument is about mercy and rehabilitation, let the plea be consistent. If lawmakers insist negotiation must end, let them provide the alternatives that make that stance practicable. And if the state chooses to engage, let it do so in daylight and with a plan that breaks criminal economies rather than fuels them.
The children taken in our towns and the families who keep vigil deserve more than selective compassion and secret deals. They deserve a nation that applies its principles evenly, that protects its citizens transparently, and that builds institutions strong enough to make negotiation a last resort instead of a recurring routine. That is the only path from bargaining to genuine security. The choice is urgent, and the moral cost will be measured in the lives we save or fail to save. The future of Amina, Segun, and Chike should not be at the mercy of brute beasts in the bush.
