Who Gets Screened and Who Decides? Fixing the Opacity at the Heart of Nigeria’s Deradicalisation Process

Nigeria’s Operation Safe Corridor (OSC) has processed hundreds of Boko Haram-associated individuals since 2016, yet one of the most consequential facts about the programme remains poorly understood: not everyone who surrenders or is captured ends up in the Gombe rehabilitation camp. Before a single person passes through those gates, a decision of enormous consequence must be made about who qualifies for rehabilitation, who faces prosecution, and who is released. That decision belongs not to OSC itself, but to the Joint Investigation Centre (JIC), a multi-agency screening hub in Maiduguri, Borno State, operating under the oversight of the Ministry of Justice and staffed by law enforcement, intelligence, and military officers.

This distinction is not a bureaucratic technicality. It is the foundation on which OSC’s legitimacy either stands or collapses. As long as the JIC’s process remains opaque, invisible to affected communities, ungoverned by published standards, and insulated from civilian oversight, no amount of successful programming inside Gombe will be enough to earn public trust. This piece explains who the people entering this system are, what is going wrong with how they are screened, and what a better process should look like.

Understanding Who Enters the System

Not every person who emerges from Boko Haram-controlled territory is the same, and Nigeria’s policy framework, grounded in the National Framework for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE), formally distinguishes between three categories with very different legal consequences. At one end are low-risk associates, individuals who were largely coerced or abducted into support roles as cooks, porters, or messengers, with no direct involvement in violence. OSC’s coordinator, Brigadier General Yusuf Ali, acknowledged in April 2026 that some of these individuals “have not even seen somebody killed in their life.” These are the people the JIC refers to OSC’s rehabilitation pathway. At the other end sit high-risk individuals core combatants and commanders who must face prosecution under terrorism statutes. OSC neither replaces nor should replace criminal accountability for this group. Between them lies a greyer zone of medium-risk individuals whose peripheral involvement in violence requires careful legal and psychological assessment before a determination is reached.

These categories also intersect with gender and age in ways that demand specific handling. Women and children associated with Boko Haram, many of them abducted and subjected to sexual violence, cannot be processed through the same lens as adult male combatants. Children associated with armed groups carry no meaningful criminal culpability; child rights standards must govern their handling from the moment of capture, not as a procedural afterthought. However, delegating the responsibility of handling women and children to state governments and development partners is a missed opportunity in the OSC framework.

A Process Hidden from View

Understanding the categories is the easier part of this conversation. The harder question and the one communities in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa ask most urgently is how those categories are applied in practice, and whether the process is fair. The JIC is, in principle, a multi-agency body where the Ministry of Justice determines criminal culpability. In practice, the International Crisis Group found that inductees commonly pass through a circuit of military detention sites, including the notorious Giwa Barracks in Maiduguri, before reaching the JIC for formal screening. Early processing is frequently conducted by Civilian Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) or military personnel without legal training, in conditions former internees have described as involving threats, beatings, and torture. Screening outcomes produced under coercion are morally and legally compromised, regardless of how structured the formal JIC process may appear on paper. The deeper problem is the complete absence of publicly available criteria. Decisions that determine a person’s entire future rehabilitation or prosecution are made without transparent benchmarks. The UNODC, which has supported the JIC since 2012, reviewed over 2,900 case files and secured the release of nearly 2,700 detainees while referring 230 for trial. But the methodology behind those decisions remains invisible. The result is a void that rumour eagerly fills. Allegations that individuals bribe their way into OSC, or that categorisation tracks ethnic rather than evidentiary lines, are not merely cynical, they are the predictable consequence of a closed system making high-stakes decisions with no accountability to the communities who live with the outcomes.

What Good Screening Looks Like Elsewhere

Nigeria does not need to invent a new model. The regional experience offers concrete, applicable lessons. Niger’s Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration and Reconciliation process uses a structured multi-actor approach involving prosecutors, psychologists, and community representatives, with screening criteria codified in national legislation demonstrating that linking judicial actors to screening, even under active insecurity, improves accountability and the quality of prosecution referrals. The Bonn International Center for Conversion has recommended Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) tools for DDR contexts: a criminal justice method that moves risk assessment away from officer discretion toward evidence, and that also informs what rehabilitation programming each individual actually requires.  On gender, Somalia’s IOM-supported screening model since 2019 places women’s civil society advocates in the room during interviews, conducts assessments in low-profile settings to reduce stigma, and has supported over 1,327 women formerly associated with al-Shabaab. These are not aspirational standards; they are documented, proven, and directly applicable to Nigeria.

Towards a Better Process

Reforming the JIC does not require dismantling it. It requires opening it to published standards, rights-compliant procedures, and civilian accountability. The Ministry of Justice should publish the criteria used to categorise surrenderers across the three risk tiers. This is not a demand to disclose classified intelligence; it is a demand for standards that legal actors can verify and communities can interrogate, and the UNODC’s Technical Assistance Handbook on Criminal Justice Responses to Terrorism already provides a template. All personnel handling detainees before formal JIC screening, including CJTFs and military actors, must operate under human rights-compliant investigative interviewing standards; the UNODC has been building this capacity since 2012, and that work must be made mandatory, not optional. The JIC should also pilot SPJ-based risk assessment instruments with BICC and UNODC support, making categorisation more consistent, more defensible in court, and more useful for designing rehabilitation pathways. Civil society organisations representing conflict-affected communities from Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa should constitute a Screening Oversight Panel that reviews aggregate JIC outcomes quarterly and reports publicly not as decision-makers, but as accountability-holders. This will ensure that communities and policymakers are better informed.

Conclusion

The legitimacy of Operation Safe Corridor does not begin inside the Gombe rehabilitation camp. It begins at the screening gate with the JIC, the Ministry of Justice, and the silent, consequential process of sorting human beings into futures. Until that process is transparent, rights-compliant, and visibly accountable, OSC’s credibility will remain hostage to rumour, and the trust it most needs from the communities of Nigeria’s Northeast will remain out of reach. The categories of people exist, international tools exist, and the legal obligation enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 2396 (2017) exists. What has been missing is an open and transparent vetting process that the public can understand and trust.

About the author

Kareem Abdulrasaq is a Peace Promotion Fellow with Equal Access International, an Agora Policy Writing Fellow, and a PhD candidate in Political Economy and Development Studies at Nasarawa State University.