Reconciliation Is Not Deradicalisation: Rethinking the Role of Faith Community Leaders in Operation Safe Corridor
There is a scene that has played out in communities across Nigeria’s Northeast with quiet regularity since 2016. A former Boko Haram associate, screened, processed, and graduated from the Mallam Sidi facility in Gombe, returns to his community of origin. Ahead of his arrival, religious and traditional leaders are briefed, town hall meetings are held, and sensitisation materials are distributed. On paper, the community appears prepared. Yet the returnee is often met with suspicion, social boycott, and, in some cases, open hostility. This is the story of Operation Safe Corridor (OSC), a genuinely ambitious attempt to carve a non-kinetic pathway out of one of the most intractable insurgencies in African history.
The deradicalisation process has largely been successful. Ex-combatants have spoken of genuinely transformed understandings of Islam, democracy, and Nigerian identity. The Programme Coordinator, Brigadier General Yusuf Ali, has stated that OSC records a recidivism rate of less than 2%. The major challenge is reintegration. That challenge lies in OSC’s failure to distinguish between deradicalisation and reconciliation, and in the way religious and traditional leaders are engaged, and at what stage.
The Deradicalisation Framework of Operation Safe Corridor
OSC is a multi-agency programme involving 17 government ministries and agencies. The Nigeria Correctional Service leads in-camp deradicalisation, and the National Orientation Agency handles public sensitisation and reintegration outreach. Religious and community leaders are not formally part of the programme’s design. They are absent from both the advisory committee and the national steering committee, which are predominantly government-led structures.
However, religious and community leaders are brought to the camp on a consultative basis to deliver counter-narrative messaging. Islamic scholars deliver counter-narratives drawn from the Quran. Sulh, the Islamic tradition of reconciliation and peaceful dispute resolution, is actively employed as a culturally appropriate framework for reorienting former combatants away from Boko Haram’s theological distortions.
OSC also engages faith and community leaders at the reintegration stage. Traditional rulers and religious leaders in receiving communities are consulted before graduates return. Sensitisation sessions are held and family visits to the camp are facilitated. The programme is not indifferent to community dynamics. The question is not whether faith and community actors are present in OSC. They are. The question is what kind of presence is being asked of them, and whether that presence can do what the programme needs it to do.
The Category Error
Religious leaders are brought in at the midpoint to validate a government process they had no part in designing, engaged only in an ad hoc manner during implementation. This amounts to using them to enforce community compliance rather than facilitate genuine reconciliation. This is instrumentalisation, and communities can feel it. As one Islamic scholar from Borno articulated in CDD’s transitional justice research, the problem is not reintegration in principle. It is that the government is attempting to outsource the victims’ prerogative of forgiveness.
In Islamic jurisprudence, forgiveness is not a general disposition that can be socially engineered. It operates on specific terms: sulhu for life, sulhu for property, sulhu for dignity. It belongs to the victim, not to the state or to the programme coordinating the perpetrator’s return. When faith leaders appear as agents of state sensitisation rather than as custodians of this moral process, they do not bring their authority with them. They leave it at the door.
The consequences are visible in the data. Despite community sensitisation efforts, CDD’s own research found that community openness to reintegration across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states remains contested. Returnees face social boycott, low patronage of their businesses, and in some cases violence. The religious framing inside the facility has done its work. The social infrastructure for receiving graduates on the outside has not been built.
CDD’s Sulhu Alheri Ne programme demonstrates that reintegration works better when communities, religious leaders, and victims drive the process themselves. The programme engaged Ulamas and community leaders not as validators but as independent agents of a process they understood and owned. The manual was written in neutral Islamic language. Dialogue sessions were driven by the committee members’ own authority, in local languages, on terms communities recognised as theologically legitimate. The result, across 65 communities and more than 9,000 participants, was a measurable shift in community attitudes toward accepting returnees.
When community dialogue is held, the role of religious and traditional leaders is not to convince communities to accept returnees, but to open an honest discussion on the complex nature of the crisis. Victims should then be given space to articulate what justice means to them. The community should collectively decide whether they are willing to accept OSC graduates, and that answer, whatever it is, should be communicated by religious and community leaders to the government. This means the programme must also prepare for situations where communities say no.
What Needs to Change
First, community reconciliation processes must precede, not accompany, reintegration. The current model deploys sensitisation at the moment of return, when communities are least receptive and most defensive. Independent faith-led reconciliation, modelled on the Sulhu Alheri Ne approach, must begin well before graduates are ready to exit the camp, creating the social conditions into which returnees can actually be received.
Second, OSC must distinguish between what it can legitimately ask of religious actors and what it cannot. It can ask Ulamas to participate in counter-narrative work inside the facility. It can ask religious leaders to be informed about returnees coming to their communities. It cannot ask them to secure community consent on the programme’s behalf. The moment that line is crossed, their authority is spent.
Third, the North East Development Commission, mandated to coordinate humanitarian support for victims and conflict-affected communities, must be structurally synchronised with OSC’s reintegration calendar. For every community scheduled to receive OSC graduates, NEDC’s victim support activities should be visible and communicated to that community ahead of the returnee’s arrival. The perception that the government rewards perpetrators while ignoring victims corrodes every reintegration effort. Addressing that asymmetry is not optional.
Fourth, the apex faith bodies, specifically the Christian Association of Nigeria, the Jama’atu Nasrul Islam, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, should be given structured consultation rights in OSC’s policy design, not embedded operational roles. A formal advisory relationship, with clearly defined boundaries between policy input and programme delivery, would give these bodies a legitimate voice without compromising the independence that makes their community authority real.
Conclusion
Operation Safe Corridor is doing something genuinely difficult and genuinely necessary. Nigeria cannot imprison or kill its way out of the Boko Haram insurgency’s human residue. Non-kinetic pathways matter. The programme’s survival is in the interest of peace.
But a programme that mistakes religious instruction for reconciliation, and faith leaders for government spokespersons, will continue to produce graduates that communities cannot receive. The communities of Nigeria’s Northeast do not need to be sensitised. They need to be heard, compensated, and given back the moral agency that the conflict, and sometimes the response to it, has taken from them. Faith communities, operating on their own terms, are among the few institutions capable of holding that space. The question is whether OSC is willing to let them.
About the Author
Ikponmwosa Omoigiade is the Regional Resilience and Conflict Advisor for Tearfund West Africa, overseeing peacebuilding and crisis response programming across 16 countries. He has over a decade of experience in conflict-sensitive programming, transitional justice, and interfaith peacebuilding across the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, with prior roles at Creative Associates International, Search for Common Ground, and the Centre for Democracy and Development. He holds a Master’s degree in Theology, Politics and Faith-Based Organisations from King’s College London, and a Master’s degree in Transitional Justice from the University of Maiduguri. His work sits at the intersection of faith, security, and community resilience in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.