On February 20, the Senate began deliberation on a bill seeking to establish an agency for the rehabilitation of ‘repentant’ Boko Haram members. The bill was sponsored by a former governor of Bauchi state, Senator Ahmed Geidam, who now represents Bauchi East Senatorial District in the Senate.
To Senator Geidam, “The agency when established will help rehabilitate and reintegrate the defectors, repentant and forcefully conscripted members of the insurgent group Boko Haram to make them useful members of the society and provide an avenue for reconciliation and promote national security”.
As far as the Senator is concerned, the commission, if approved, will encourage other members of the group still engaged in insurgency to abandon terrorism. They will also provide security agencies with useful information on the operations of the group.
The agency “will enable government to use the defectors to fight the unrepentant insurgents. It will help disintegrate the violent and poisonous ideology that the group spreads as the programme will allow some repentant defectors or suspect terrorists to express remorse over their actions repent and recant their violent doctrine and in the long run, re-enter mainstream politics, religion and society.
“The agency would also help to combat future recruitments into the insurgents group. If defectors told their stories and were made more public, their experiences would play a key role in countering Terrorist propaganda, which in turn would lessen the appeal of joining the group.
IMPACT NEWS strongly hopes that the bill will not survive the second reading in the Senate. In fact, we commended Senator Geidam’s colleagues who opposed the bill in the Senate. We cannot afford to give legitimacy to crimes. Establishing such agency would encourage violence by giving concessions to perpetrators of acts condemned with straight deterrence in our criminal laws.
We agree with the immediate past Governor of Borno state, Senator Ibrahim Shetima who summarily opposed such bill and other serving and past Senators who disagree with such agency.
Establishing that agency is nothing but opium for a protracted pain. It will only give temporary relieve while the pain would return even with severe excruciation. The agency is a long term licence for related violence in the future.
Establishing an agency of that nature would no doubt add to overburdened Nigeria’s revenue, especially when it would not in anyway generate revenue for the country. There is also the issue of how would the government determine the identity of the repentant insurgents to ascertain their true nationality? What level of attention and care has states and Federal government given to Internally Displaced Persons scattered across the country?
We are seriously concerned with policies of some political leaders in the country especially in Northern parts of Nigeria that give premium on violence, banditry and insurgency and their perpetrators. Recall that we opposed the move of some governors in North-West that granted amnesty to bandits in their desperate move to secure their states.
Attention should rather focus on victims of such criminal acts and correct fundamental flaws in our society that give breathe to such criminal acts.
We challenged Senator Geidam and his colleagues to focus on proposing laws that will alleviate tax burden, give legal backing to Executive order on ease of doing business, and other proactive initiated that would stimulate productivity in the country.
