Reassessing the Endgame in Nigeria’s Bandit Amnesty Programmes
Editor’s note: In this piece, Lekan Olayiwola examines Katsina’s amnesty plan to release 70 suspected bandits. The peace and conflict expert shows how short-term calm hides bigger problems for communities.
Nigeria’s recurring resort to bandit amnesty, most recently in Katsina state, is usually debated at the level of morality and legality. Supporters frame it as pragmatism in the face of a brutal security crisis; critics see it as appeasement, injustice and surrender. Both sides are partly right and largely incomplete.
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To grasp what is at stake, bandit amnesty must be seen as a governing practice, not a moral gesture. Examining its evolution reveals how it redistributes power, reshapes incentives and redefines the state’s relationship with violence. The real question is not its virtue, but the political order it constructs.
A panoramic view of bandit amnesty in Nigeria
Bandit amnesty in Nigeria emerged not as a deliberate policy but as an improvisation shaped by state retreat. As banditry evolved in the early 2010s from cattle rustling into organised armed violence across Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and parts of Sokoto, responses were ad hoc and locally negotiated. Traditional rulers and community intermediaries brokered fragile truces with armed groups in exchange for temporary restraint, filling gaps left by weakened state authority.
These arrangements produced brief declines in violence, only for attacks to resume when trust eroded, leadership changed, or rival factions felt excluded. The calm was real but shallow, anchored in personal guarantees rather than institutions, exposing the limits of informal governance against organised violence.
Zamfara’s 2019 amnesty formalised this approach, offering incentives and immunity for disarmament. Initial reductions in attacks gave way to familiar failures: incomplete arms surrender, exclusion-driven escalation and intensified competition within bandit networks. Insecurity returned in more fragmented forms.
Subsequent efforts, including in Katsina, became quieter and less transparent. Victims receded from view, political noise diminished, but underlying risks deepened, as apparent stability increasingly masked a reorganisation of violence rather than its end.
Amnesty as intelligence extraction
Contemporary bandit amnesty functions less as reconciliation and more as information gathering. Negotiation provides access that military operations have struggled to achieve: insight into command hierarchies, internal rivalries, arms routes and territorial control. This intelligence value explains why negotiations persist even when evidence of reoffending is clear.
The release of suspects is not the endgame; it is part of an extraction process. What remains largely unspoken is the cost of this strategy. Communities become testing grounds in which intelligence is gathered, assessed and sometimes abandoned. When follow-through fails, it is civilians who absorb the risk, not the architects of the policy.
Re-ordering violence, not ending it.
Amnesty does not neutralise violent power; it reorganises it. By deciding which bandit leaders are negotiable and which are not, the state redistributes legitimacy within armed networks. Those brought into dialogue gain leverage and protection, while excluded factions intensify violence to assert relevance. This is why insecurity often shifts location rather than disappears.
The effect is not peace but management. Violence becomes concentrated, channelled and rendered legible, rather than dismantled. The state is not buying peace; it is managing competition among violent actors.
Selective weakness and the rise of proto-political bandits
Contrary to public perception, the Nigerian state is not signalling total weakness through amnesty. It is signalling selective incapacity. The message conveyed is not that the state cannot govern, but that it cannot defeat all armed actors simultaneously and will therefore choose who survives politically.
Bandit leaders understand this clearly. They increasingly behave not as fugitives but as proto-political actors, negotiating terms, demanding guarantees and calculating visibility. Violence becomes a route to recognition. Criminality acquires political meaning, not through ideology, but through negotiation.
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The fiscal logic no one names
There is an unspoken economic logic beneath bandit amnesty. Sustained military operations in the North-West are costly. They disrupt agriculture, inflate food prices, strain state budgets and deepen humanitarian crises that erode legitimacy. Amnesty offers a cheaper short-term alternative.
This does not make it irrational. It makes it dangerous. Amnesty becomes a budgetary decision disguised as reconciliation, with long-term institutional costs deferred beyond the political present.
Victim exclusion as policy design
The absence of victims from amnesty processes is not accidental. Meaningful inclusion would require truth-telling, restitution, documentation of crimes and an honest reckoning with state failure. It would also expose networks of facilitation that extend beyond bandits themselves. Exclusion keeps the process fast, quiet and politically manageable.
Peace is prioritised over justice, not because morality is misunderstood, but because justice is administratively disruptive. Once banditry becomes negotiable, armed skill becomes transferable. Former bandits drift into vigilante groups, informal security outfits or political enforcement networks. Violence is not eradicated; it is repurposed. Amnesty, in effect, sustains a labour market for coercion rather than closing it.
The most corrosive consequence of amnesty is not recidivism but the lesson it teaches. Violence attracts negotiation and concessions; law-abiding poverty attracts none. That lesson travels faster than any civic education campaign and reshapes youth incentives across entire regions.
Why Katsina is a template, not an exception
Katsina is not an outlier. It is a test case. Other states are watching the level of backlash, federal silence, donor response and electoral impact. If the political cost remains manageable, the model will spread, not because it resolves insecurity, but because it contains it at a tolerable political cost.
Compared with successful international experiences, Nigeria’s approach is marked by the absence of credible disarmament, the marginalisation of victims, the reduction of reintegration to stipends rather than structural economic change, and the fragmentation of authority through ad hoc state-level bargains. These failures are not accidental. They reflect a preference for short-term quiet over long-term order.
What has worked elsewhere and why
Where amnesty has succeeded globally, it has been embedded in broader settlements. Colombia’s demobilisation of armed groups combined negotiation with verified disarmament, victim-centred truth processes and conditional political reintegration. Sierra Leone’s post-war recovery tied reintegration to national reconstruction while publicly documenting atrocities. Even Nigeria’s Niger Delta Amnesty, despite its flaws, reduced violence because it addressed economic grievances within a centrally coordinated framework. In each case, amnesty was not an isolated gesture but part of a wider redefinition of authority.
If Nigeria insists on pursuing amnesty, it must do so within a national framework that restores coherence to state authority. Disarmament must be verifiable, not symbolic. Victims must be recognised as central stakeholders rather than inconvenient reminders. Reintegration must be tied to real economic transformation, not temporary appeasement. Without these conditions, amnesty will remain a strategic pause, not a solution.
The real endgame
Nigeria’s bandit amnesty is less about ending violence than about managing an unwinnable conflict at tolerable political cost. It is strategic rather than naïve, calculated rather than compassionate, stabilising in the short term and corrosive in the long term. Reassessing the endgame requires asking a harder question than whether bandits deserve forgiveness.
It requires confronting what kind of state Nigeria is quietly becoming when violence becomes a bargaining chip, and peace becomes a budget line. Until that reckoning occurs, amnesty will continue to buy silence, not peace.
Lekan Olayiwola is a public-facing peace & conflict researcher/policy analyst focused on leadership, ethics, governance, and political legitimacy in fragile states.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.
Source: Legit.ng
