Opinion
The architecture of looking away
By Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo
NIGERNAIJAONPOINT often say the state is soft on crime.
The phrase is repeated so often that it risks becoming a cliché, but the discomfort behind it is real.
The deeper problem is not simply that punishment is sometimes too light.
It is that justice is too often hidden, delayed, or performed without enough public visibility to command trust.
That is the burden this series carries.
It is not about one institution alone, and it is not about a single failing.
It is about a repeated pattern across different settings: serious wrongdoing is handled through processes the public cannot properly see, question, or follow.
In such a system, the issue is not merely leniency. It is opacity.
And opacity is where accountability begins to die.
The phrase “soft on crime” itself is not Nigerian.
It entered political language elsewhere, especially in American law-and-order debates, before travelling into wider public use.
That history matters because slogans often arrive before understanding or evidence does.
Decades of experience have shown that punishment alone does not secure justice.
Consequence must also be certain, visible, and fair.
Harshness without credibility is not strength.
It is noise. It is brutality.
The Pattern Behind The Cases
The cases in this series look different on the surface: a rehabilitation programme for former insurgents, a plea bargain in a corruption case, a police detention death, a delayed trial, and an election dispute.
Yet the same weakness runs through them all.
Decisions are made in places the public cannot easily inspect, by institutions that are not always required to explain themselves, on timelines that often stretch beyond reason.
That is why this series does not begin with the comfortable complaint that the system is too lenient.
It begins with the harder truth that the system is too often unreadable.
A state that cannot show its work cannot expect lasting confidence.
A law that is not visible in action becomes vulnerable to suspicion, cynicism, and abuse.
The core defect is not the absence of law, but the concealment of law’s working from the public it is meant to protect.
What Each Part Covers
Part One examines Operation Safe Corridor’s handling of repentant Boko Haram and ISWAP fighters, placing it beside Rwanda’s community-labour sentencing and Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
The question is whether rehabilitation can be made more credible by restoring victim voice and visible restitution.
Part Two turns to the EFCC’s plea bargain practice, especially through the long Murtala Nyako case, and compares it with the UK’s Deferred Prosecution Agreement model.
It asks whether secrecy in such settlements weakens deterrence and invites doubt.
Part Three looks at the unresolved death of Japhet Njoku at Tiger Base and the repeated failure to complete a court-ordered autopsy.
It is a test case for whether police accountability is real or merely rhetorical.
Part Four shows how delay itself becomes a shield for the powerful, using the Dasuki trial and other corruption matters as examples.
It also examines, without fear or favour, the claim that prosecutions fade when the accused switch political allegiance.
Part Five turns to election law and its troubling contradiction: the law imposes a strict deadline for declaring a winner, but no equal urgency for deciding whether that win was bought. Deciding electoral crimes
The lesson is plain.
Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of laws. It suffers from a shortage of visible, credible enforcement.
Until institutions are required to act in the open, explain themselves clearly, and close the loop on their decisions, the country will keep hearing the same complaint in different accents.
Soft On Crime (1)
The Forgiveness Economy: How Nigeria Pays Its Terrorists to Stop
By Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo
At present, many Nigerians watching the same graduation ceremonies cannot tell whether the state is administering justice, purchasing peace, or simply transferring cash; that uncertainty is the problem this article addresses.
Three hundred thousand — the figure Borno State governor Babagana Zulum has repeated for three years as the total of “repentant” Boko Haram fighters and their families received since 2021 — sits uneasily beside Defence Headquarters’ graduation counts in the low thousands, and no independent audit reconciles them.
The mismatch matters because it leaves the public unsure what is being forgiven, by whom, and at what price.
Operation Safe Corridor, the military’s flagship deradicalisation programme, processes “low-risk, repentant” defectors through six to twelve months of counselling, religious reorientation and vocational training, after which graduates receive cash, equipment and community re-entry.
Some even join security services.
Officials describe this as a tactical, not judicial, intervention.
Yet in practice confessions rarely face independent judicial testing, victims are seldom consulted about restitution, and the only visible cost a defector pays is time.
To viewers of another televised graduation, the formal distinction between amnesty and tactical reintegration is largely invisible.
The programme’s indigenous design and mid-conflict timeliness are real strengths: it attempts, in principle, to separate coerced foot soldiers from commanders who belong in court, and it equips many graduates with trades rather than merely releasing them.
But the public sees a different set of facts: a patchwork legal architecture across military, custodial and community tracks; few consequences calibrated to the harm done.
And victims structurally excluded from decisions that affect their safety and reparations.
The 2022 Kuje Correctional Centre breach, which freed more than 800 inmates including high-risk affiliates in a single night, dramatizes how quickly gains can be reversed, and Borno’s reported N3.45 billion DDR expenditure in nine months of 2024 suggests an opaque redistribution pipeline in need of transparent accounting.
Other countries offer instructive, if imperfect, models.
Rwanda made confession the procedural gate: those who confess serve part of their sentence in prison and do the rest as hard community labour — rebuilding roads, schools and survivor housing often alongside those they harmed — while refusing confession leaves the full term intact.
Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace ties reduced, restorative sentences to full, verifiable truth-telling, and elevates victim participation by negotiating reparative projects directly with affected communities; dishonesty carries escalated penalties.
Both examples show that restorative justice can be politically vulnerable unless truth, victim voice and real jeopardy for lying are Incorporated.
Practical reforms can preserve reintegration’s gains while restoring public consent: require independently tested confessions with prosecutorial referrals for proven dishonesty; shift much of the curriculum toward restitution labour in the communities harmed; give victims an actual, decision-making seat in restitution design; unify legal frameworks so contradictory headcounts are structurally impossible; and treat custodial security as integral to reintegration rather than separate from it.
These steps read less as punishment and more as institutional design: a ledger closed properly, a bridge rebuilt between state and survivor, and visible work that repays the public for the expense of mercy
A.I
July 21, 2026
Tags: Ifeanyi Igwebike Mbanefo
