Introduction

The Operation Safe Corridor’s non-kinetic approach brings a unique dimension to Nigeria's counterinsurgency efforts. It complements the dominant militaristic approach that is often mired in controversy over human rights violations and documented atrocities like extrajudicial killings and indiscriminate community violence, with a peaceful option for low risk, repentant, and willing ex-fighters to be deradicalised, rehabilitated, and reintegrated into society. As of February 2025, The Guardian reported that 2,190 clients had been successfully reintegrated and over 130,000 persons had surrendered to Nigerian authorities since its inception in 2015. However, public buy-in and support for the programme is limited by three major factors, namely: near-exclusive perpetrator focus, gender blindness, and widespread misinformation.

As a joint, multi-sectoral operation involving 17 Ministries Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), including the National Orientation Agency, Federal Ministries of Humanitarian Affairs, Justice, and Women Affairs, and the North East Development Commission (NEDC), among others, addressing bulwarks on public buy-in fall well within the operational scope of these MDAs. However, gaps in communication and public sensitisation intersect with poor justice system and a near-absence of acknowledgement of victims to limit public support for the programme, necessitating a reflection on pathways for improving public support.

This piece argues that improved victim mainstreaming provides a panacea for the bulwarks on public buy-in that confronts OSC. It proceeds to show how the programme is implemented, gaps in community involvement and the legitimacy costs, and policy and implementation pathways for improving community involvement.

Identifying and Explaining Who Passes Through the ‘Corridor’

A corridor typically serves as a passage for people. It is, for the majority of Nigerian homes, a narrow pathway that is difficult to see through from outside if not properly illuminated. It can be difficult to see through a dark corridor, identify persons passing through it, and even explain actions going on within it if one is not in it. Applying this thinking to Operation Safe Corridor informs an understanding that the programme requires the involvement of as many stakeholders as possible. To its credit, the Operation Safe Corridor involves collaboration between 17 ministries, departments, and agencies working together for sustainable peace.

By default, security issues that Operation Safe Corridor and other similar security initiatives address are sensitive and require some level of secrecy. This secrecy, like the dark corridor, leaves OSC open to fear and misinterpretation. For OSC, such fears have manifested in the widespread misinformation over issues like the recruitment of former Boko Haram/ISWAP fighters into the army, as well as concerns over the limits of a reintegration that overlooks victims. Since security imperatives make some level of secrecy necessary, the path to obliterating fears and concerns, and ensuring public buy-in rests with more community involvement – bringing more people into the corridor so their eyes can adjust to the limited light. 

The programme is inherently perpetrator-focused. It offers a corridor for the passage of repentant low-risk ex-fighters. In doing so, it operationalises deradicalisation, rehabilitation, and reintegration in ways that are almost entirely centred on the offender. Deradicalisation under OSC involves ideological and psychological disengagement, working with clerics and counsellors to steer ex-combatants away from extremist worldviews. Rehabilitation extends this logic further, offering vocational training, psychosocial support, and civic education to the ex-fighter. These interventions, delivered in the Mallam Sidi facility in Gombe State, exists in a ‘closed corridor’ with victims and the broader society acting as external spectators. Reintegration, the final and most publicly visible stage, is where the perpetrator-centred design becomes most consequential. Ex-fighters are returned to communities that have neither been consulted nor prepared. Victims who lost children, limbs, and livelihoods to these same individuals are expected to co-exist with them on the basis of a process they barely participated in. The reintegration component of the programme involves community sensitisation, in collaboration with other relevant stakeholders, but this does not replace the place of victims involvement and reconciliation. 

The Necessity for Reconciliation

Reconciliation is widely considered as necessary for effective peacebuilding, or for the purpose of this piece, reintegration initiative. At the theoretical level, peace and conflict scholars like Lederach, Lambourne, and Paris, among others, have noted the import of social repair for sustainable peace. Lederach equates genuine peace as the presence of conditions that make violence unnecessary. Such conditions are built on acknowledgement, restored dignity, and the painstaking repair of damaged relationships. Lambourne adds that stability programmes that ignore deeper social repair produce suppressed grievance and “thin peace” – a surface calm that holds until it does not. 

Reconciliation, especially in the context of transitional justice, is the connective tissue between a perpetrator's return and a community's willingness to receive them. Without it, reintegration risks being reduced to a logistical exercise dressed in the language of peace. For OSC, the neglect of reconciliation is why public buy-in is a challenge. It not only justifies public apprehension about the programme and its reintegration component but also sustain conditions that could make gains fleeting and evanescent. 

Communities most affected by Boko Haram and ISWAP violence in the Lake Chad Basin have lived through abductions, forced marriages, sexual violence, and the killing of religious and community leaders, among other forms of violence. The psychological weight of that experience does not dissolve because an ex-fighter has completed a six to twelve-month rehabilitation programme. Victims need acknowledgement, access to redress, and meaningful participation in any process that determines the fate of those who harmed them or their communities. These are not adequately accounted for in Operation Safe Corridor at present. Victims are excluded from the corridor, peering into the dark from outside, open to speculation, and holding grievances that could ultimately evolve into aggression and continue the circle of violence.

This gap leaves room for misinformation to thrive. When communities do not understand OSC, do not trust it, and have no legitimate channel for expressing their concerns, rumour fills the space. The cliche that what people do not understand, they fear, becomes true and takes a concrete form in the widespread misinformation about the operation Safe Corridor. 

A Pathways for Reconciliation

The analysis thus far establishes that reconciliation is necessary for securing public buy-in and sustaining gains of the Operation Safe Corridor. However, pushing reconciliation too hard, too soon, in fragile post-conflict settings can itself reignite tensions. Impliedly, some semblance of security needs to come first. Yet, reconciliation permanently deferred is reconciliation permanently denied, and that societies built on unaddressed harm quietly carry that harm into their future. Applying this line of thinking to the OSC informs a position that reconciliation should be phased, not rushed, but ultimately, present.  This section, thus, proceeds to offer a step-by-step pathway for reconciliation

The first and, perhaps, most necessary step is through a formalised and widely publicised coordination between OSC and the Northeast Development Commission (NEDC). While OSC is mainly perpetrator focused, NEDC is victim-focused. Its mandate as provided for in Section 8(1)(d) of the Establishment Act is essentially to rehabilitate, resettle and and reintegrate victims of insurgency while simultaneously reconstructing damaged infrastructure.  The NEDC exists precisely because of what Boko Haram did to the Northeast. Its mandate for community rehabilitation and victim support is a natural fit with OSC’s reintegration work. Linking NEDC community reconstruction investments explicitly to OSC reintegration efforts would allow receiving communities to understand that the programme does not completely overlook them. Also, the NEDC could collaborate with other relevant OSC stakeholders to organise mediated reconciliatory programmes to allow wounds heal faster. 

A second pathway for reconciliation and reintegration is mandatory community consultation before any placement decision is made. At present, the Operation Safe Corridor's reintegration component involves sensitization of communities, with the involvement of community and religious leaders. However, real reintegration should transcend beyond community sensitization to real consultation and involvement. It must bring together traditional rulers, women’s associations, youth groups, and civil society voices from that locality. The point is not to hand communities a veto but to bring them into the process as partners rather than passive recipients who are taught to receive former fighters to be able to live peacefully. Effective reintegration requires that their concerns be heard early and addressed honestly to build the relational foundation for reintegration.

A penultimate is through platforms for dialogue between graduates/clients and community members to be moderated by experienced civil society and peacebuilding actors. These voluntary sessions would create structured space for graduates to acknowledge the harm caused by the insurgency and for community members to speak about what they have carried. This must not be exclusive to immediate communities that suffered direct impacts but should also involve broader, indirect victims, who may not have suffered direct physical harm but shared in the psychological impact of violence. Impliedly, reconciliation must involve community and thought leaders from other parts of the country beyond the North East and Lake Chad region. 

A final pathway is through a formal victim acknowledgement pathway anchored in existing institutions. Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has both the mandate and the credibility to host a structured process through which survivors of Boko Haram violence can place their experiences on record. It need not be a full truth commission. A documented, publicly reported acknowledgement process, formally linked to OSC’s programme cycle, would begin to address the dignity deficit at the programme’s core.

Conclusion

Operation Safe Corridor represents a genuine and necessary attempt to create a non-violent pathway out of insurgency in Nigeria's northeast. The programme signals a break from the oft-criticised militaristic approach to insecurity and conflict in Nigeria and it has made massive gains. OSC is, however, limited by a dearth of public buy-in outside security and governance quarters, concerns over gender-blindness, and misinformation. This piece proposes reconciliation as a potent tool for addressing many identified challenges. Reconciliation offers an option for involving victims, including women, and bringing more people into the corridor.

Divine Otumbere Weldone is a political scientist with a background in research and academic writing. He writes on governance, conflict, and development issues. His research interests span development, electoral governance, climate change, and conflict management. Divine has held various research-focused roles, including as a Research Officer for the Local Government Accountability Lab, Nigeria.