Abandoned by Nigeria, twice

The academic and policy literature on Boko Haram is organised, broadly, around a before and after. Before: the insurgency, the territorial conquest, the abductions, the years of violence that killed more than thirty-five thousand people and forced two million from their homes. After: the displacement camps, the resettlement programs, the long, slow, incomplete work of reconstruction. The division reflects a real chronological boundary, but organising the analysis around that boundary obscures that the second period was not a resolution of the first but its continuation by other means.

The Nigerian state withdrew, physically and institutionally, from the northeastern territories that Boko Haram then occupied, leaving millions of civilians to navigate governance by an armed movement. The second abandonment is still ongoing: in the forced closure of displacement camps housing people who have nowhere safe to go, the resettlement of those people to communities where security remains fundamentally unresolved, the deliberate restriction of NGO support to returnees because =humanitarian aid produces dependency, and in the documented failure to provide specialist support to the girls and women who survived captivity and came back to find that the state had no coherent plan for them.

Fatima Mohamed returned to Nguro Soye in 2022 carrying what her family could gather from Dalori II camp. The military detachment stationed a few kilometres away had implied, by its presence if not its promises, that the threat was residual, manageable, defeated in all but name. Within months of her arrival, she and other residents reported the constant harassment they faced from Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal Jihad (JAS) fighters at night, despite the nearby military detachment. "Most of us have regretted coming," she said. "In Maiduguri, we stayed peacefully, but here there is no security." Of the nights themselves, she put it plainly: you lie in bed listening, wondering what will happen.

Next door in Burari, Ya Musaram described what those nights cost in practice. Dar al Gazuwa gunmen (a JAS faction, not the rival Islamic State West Africa Province, though the two are easily and often confused) entered her hamlet almost weekly, and when they came, they took everything: cooking pots, plastic mats, whatever could be carried. A show of refusal meant a gun to the head; on one occasion, an elderly man's protest over confiscated luggage ended with his throat cut. Across the resettled towns of Borno, in village after village, reporters were told: "We can rely only on God." The phrase was not piety; it was a forensic summary of a political condition. The people of northeastern Nigeria survived Boko Haram. Then the Nigerian government told them the crisis was over and left them to survive that, too.

The first abandonment

By 2014, when Boko Haram declared its caliphate and seized territory across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states, the Nigerian police had been so thoroughly targeted by the insurgency and so thoroughly displaced by the military's effective takeover of civilian security functions that communities in the conflict zone found themselves without either reliable state governance or reliable state protection. The areas around the Sambisa Forest, roughly 60,000 square kilometers, close to three times the size of Israel, existed in a condition that was less under insurgent control than beyond anyone's control, the original no-man's-land of the first abandonment.

The institutional withdrawal was itself undergirded by two deeper catastrophes. The first was ecological, and it is impossible to overstate its material precision. Lake Chad's surface area shrank by 90% between 1963 and today, from some 26,000 square kilometres to less than 1,500, a slow-motion catastrophe that decimated the region's hydrological arteries. For the Kanuri fishermen of the Mobbar and Kukawa districts, the collapse meant the extinction of a millennia-old livelihood; for the pastoralist Fulani, it meant a terminal competition over ever-shrinking grazing corridors, pushing them into deadly conflict with sedentary farmers over scrubland that neither could sustainably use. Smuggling, particularly of fuel, pharmaceuticals, and small arms across the porous borders with Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, became the region’s de facto economic base. This underground trade, which the state intermittently raided but never replaced with formal employment, generated a parallel fiscal ecology that Boko Haram would later tax and weaponise.

The second catastrophe was fiscal and logistical, where funds for troop rations, ammunition, and forward-operating base maintenance were systematically diverted. The army did not merely choose to withdraw; it found itself functionally unable to sustain a presence, having corroded its own capacity from within. By the time Boko Haram declared its caliphate, the state had already lost the administrative and material means to govern the northeast, even before it lost the will.

The state’s failure to provide alternative livelihoods was not merely a policy choice; it was a refusal to confront an environmental collapse that no resettlement programme could possibly fix, because the formal economy had already ceased to exist long before the first AK-47 was fired.

Scholarly literature on civilian experience under Boko Haram has, in the years since the movement's territorial peak, produced findings that complicate the straightforward narrative of violent occupation. The most rigorous recent work, based on 11 months of fieldwork in affected communities between 2018 and 2020, establishes a distinction that is essential to understanding what the first abandonment actually meant for the people who lived through it. In peripheral territories, Boko Haram's governance was largely a matter of neglect. The armed movement was present enough to tax and to punish, but not present enough to militarise everyday life. In core territories, the picture was entirely different. There, Boko Haram imposed a governance system that regulated markets, enforced religious observance, resolved disputes, and punished deviation with violence.

A vigilante network, the Civilian Joint Task Force, emerged in Maiduguri in 2013 and was subsequently integrated, informally, into the Nigerian military's counter-insurgency operations. The CJTF was, at its core, an organisation of community self-protection in the absence of reliable state protection, drawing on the local knowledge and social networks that formal military forces lacked. The CJTF's effectiveness in identifying insurgents gave it a crucial role in the military's eventual territorial recapture. In a more uncomfortable sense, its emergence was also evidence of how completely the state had failed: the army's campaign worked to an extent because ordinary civilians took on the roles of intelligence officers and frontline identifiers at significant personal risk. Communities that contributed CJTF members simultaneously exercised agency and absorbed danger; hence, Boko Haram classified CJTF participants as combatants. Military counter-insurgency operations sometimes misidentified community members as insurgents. What the literature often misses, however, is the feedback loop that the first abandonment created between state brutality and insurgent recruitment. Boko Haram's early success was not purely ideological; it was built on a rudimentary but effective offer of justice and economic survival in regions where the state had long provided neither. Young men who had been arbitrarily arrested, tortured, or extorted by military checkpoints found in the insurgency a perverse form of redress. The state's counter-insurgency tactics did not merely fail to defeat Boko Haram; they actively replenished its ranks. The first abandonment, in this sense, was not a single withdrawal but a self-perpetuating cycle: state violence produced grievance → grievance produced recruits → recruits produced insecurity → insecurity justified further state violence. The civilians of the northeast were abandoned not once, but continuously, by a state that could not distinguish between protecting them and targeting them.

The second abandonment

In 2021, Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum announced that the displacement camps housing more than half a million people in Maiduguri would be closed by 2026. The announcement came with the language of recovery: the insurgents had been overcome, the displaced would return to their communities, and the humanitarian crisis of the Boko Haram era would be resolved through the ambitious resettlement programme that officials called the Borno Model. The Borno Model was, in its articulation, a coherent vision. Restore the displaced to their homes. Rebuild rural livelihoods. Demonstrate that the insurgency had failed to alter the geography of human settlement in the northeast permanently. International donors expressed support. Nigerian federal authorities approved it. What happened in practice was something different. To speak of "the state" in this context, however, is to elide a crucial institutional polyphony that the policy literature typically flattens. Governor Zulum, operating from the Borno State Government House, pursued the Borno Model with a governor's urgency, publicly and repeatedly appealing to Abuja for troops, equipment, and sustained operations, and at times confronting security personnel directly over conduct he judged to be failing the population under his charge. Meanwhile, the military high command operated with its own internal logic: after losing a series of remote outposts, it consolidated into fortified "super camps" in key towns, a strategy that prioritised force preservation over the dispersed civilian protection the Borno Model's resettlement plan required. The result was not a single, coherent plan of abandonment, but a cacophony of uncoordinated institutional survival strategies: Zulum's political urgency, the military's operational caution, each answering to its own imperatives, converging, without ever being designed to, on the same outcome: the dispossession of the civilian population.

Before the Borno Model could be implemented as a resettlement programme, it needed to be justified as a necessity. The justification that emerged was moral, not primarily logistical or security-based. The displacement camps were characterized as havens of drug abuse, sexual exploitation, and, above all, dependency, where people had learned to subsist on aid rather than to work, and where continued residence was itself a form of damage that the state had a responsibility to interrupt. The characterization profiled people who had been failed by the state as people who were failing themselves. The camps were overcrowded and under-resourced, but this was a consequence of the state's failure to adequately resource them, not evidence of the displaced population's moral inadequacy. The reframing transferred responsibility from the institution to the individual, from the policy to the person, in a move that made the state's withdrawal of support legible as an act of tough-minded care rather than institutional abandonment.

The practical consequences of the Borno Model's implementation were documented by Human Rights Watch in 2022, by the International Crisis Group in 2023, and by field reporters whose accounts are consistent to the point of being corroborating. Places where IDPs were being resettled lacked rudimentary health care, education, and basic services. One-off payments that the state offered relocation participants were not always disbursed in full. Governor Zulum constrained NGOs from providing support to newly relocated IDPs, on the grounds that outside aid fostered the dependency that the model was designed to cure. The result was a population told it was returning home to safety but finding itself in communities that lacked the security, services, and economic foundation necessary to sustain life.

Nor can the closure calculus be disentangled from regional geopolitical pressures. The Lake Chad Basin is a fluid, transnational space, and the Borno Model's timeline was shaped not only by domestic political expediency but by the impatience of neighbouring states — Niger, Chad, and Cameroon — who had long resisted hosting a permanent, static displaced population on their borders. The evidence here is specific and confirmed. In December 2019, as the Multi-National Joint Task Force's mandate lapsed, Chadian President Idriss Déby—whose military had been the force's most committed ground component, withdrew 1,200 troops from Nigeria, redeploying them to shore up Chad's own stretch of the Lake Chad border. Four months later, after Boko Haram killed at least 92 Chadian soldiers at Bohoma in the single deadliest attack in the country's military history, Déby went further still, suspending all Chadian participation in operations beyond its own borders: "our troops have died for Lake Chad and the Sahel," he told the nation. "From today, no Chadian soldier will take part in a military mission outside Chad." The MNJTF, already fractured by funding shortfalls and divergent national priorities before Chad's exit, never recovered its operational coherence afterward. When the Borno Model declared the crisis over, it did so against a regional backdrop that made that declaration difficult to credit, a coalition whose most capable member had, in effect, gone home.

In November 2022, ISWAP; the Islamic State West Africa Province, a faction that split from Boko Haram in 2016 and has since become the dominant armed force in the Lake Chad Basin, overran Mallam Fatori village near the border with Niger, forcing the garrison to flee, killing civilians, and driving approximately six thousand internally displaced people across the border into Niger. This was a demonstration of the ongoing reality that the military's ”super camp” strategy, introduced in 2019 and concentrating forces in fortified positions in key towns, had effectively ceded the wider rural terrain to jihadist control. The residents of Nguro Soye, resettled in 2022, told journalists about constant harassment from armed groups at night despite the presence of a military detachment a few kilometres away. “We can rely only on God,” was recurring phrase across interviews with returnees conducted by The New Humanitarian.

The second abandonment's most acute and most thoroughly documented failure concerns the survivors of Boko Haram captivity: the abducted girls, forced wives, children born in captivity, and the young women who spent years in the Sambisa Forest and eventually found their way back.

The Nigerian state's reintegration apparatus was designed primarily around a security problem: how to prevent former fighters from returning to insurgency. The Deradicalisation, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration programme processes ex-combatants, not victims. The populations whose reintegration was most urgent, by any measure of human welfare, were the populations whose needs the programme was least equipped to address.

Amnesty International's 2024 report documented the scale of the failure through the testimonies of 76 girls and young women it interviewed among 126 total sources (p. 13): not a single one who passed through the standard exit channels—military detention, transit camps—was offered counselling, vocational training, or any other reintegration service (p. 9); only those who happened to pass through one specific facility received care, and even there, access was inconsistent (p. 11). Survivors described a screening process that asked almost nothing about what had been done to them—only one interviewee could recall being asked even her age at the time of her abduction (pp. 10–11), before they were released into communities that met them with suspicion rather than support. The expectations of specialist government support that these survivors had been led to believe existed were not met; their returns were followed by community ostracism, accusations of having been willing participants in what had been done to them (p. 11), and a pervasive fear that they were sources of moral, physical, and ideological contamination.

If the abduction of girls represents the most visible face of captivity, the forcible conscription and subsequent social exclusion of young men constitutes its shadow twin, equally destructive and systematically under-examined. Male survivors returning from Boko Haram face a triple bind: they are primary targets of military "sweeps," frequently arrested or killed on suspicion of having collaborated; they are forcibly recruited by insurgents upon release, as Boko Haram views them as combatants by association; and they are systematically excluded from humanitarian aid, which overwhelmingly targets female-headed households. Upon return to their communities, they are stigmatised not as victims but as potential sleepers, the men who ate with the enemy. The result is a population of young, traumatised, unemployed men with few economic prospects and no social standing, abandoned by the state and excluded by the aid system. In a region where insurgent recruiters operate continuously, this demographic is not merely neglected; it is actively pushed toward the only organisation still willing to accept it. The state's reintegration framework, fixated on ex-combatants, has no coherent category for the young man who was neither fighter nor victim in the state's binary imagination, and who therefore falls through every institutional gap.

The institutional logic that produced this failure is the same logic that produced the forced camp closures and the under-resourced resettlements: a state that conceives of the northeast's civilian population as a security and administrative problem to be resolved rather than as citizens whose welfare and rights generate obligations. Within that logic, getting former fighters off the battlefield is a security priority because it reduces the immediate threat. Getting abducted girls the specialist psychological, educational, and economic support they need to rebuild their lives is a welfare priority, which is to say, a secondary concern. The state does not ask what these young women need because asking would require treating them as interlocutors rather than case files.

Two abandonments, one structure

What connects the experience of living under Boko Haram's occupation to the experience of living through the Nigerian government's stabilisation programme is not simply that both were difficult tasks. Difficulty is not the point. The point is that both experiences share a common structural feature: the Nigerian state's refusal, across both periods, to treat the people of the northeast as citizens with rights rather than as subjects to be managed. To grasp the continuity, consider the trajectory of a single hamlet: Kukawa, on the shores of what remains of Lake Chad. On the night of July 1, 2015, Boko Haram gunmen stormed the town's mosques, killing more than 140 men, women, and children while more than a thousand Nigerian soldiers stationed eleven kilometres away never came to the town's aid—not the state's violence this time, but its absence, and no less devastating for it. In 2018, the Borno state government first tried to resettle displaced residents there, declaring the area recovered; ISWAP fighters overran the site within months, uprooting the returnees a second time. In 2020, the army attempted to plant a permanent garrison in Kukawa itself; ISWAP drove the soldiers out, and the military fell back twelve kilometres to Cross Kauwa, leaving the town without a security presence. Between 2020 and 2022, under Governor Zulum's resettlement drive, Kukawa was repopulated once more—this time into a vacuum, a largely self-governing community visited only by infrequent patrols, its residents receiving a fraction of the resettlement package promised them, most collecting only twenty thousand naira, and traveling twelve kilometres or more for medical care the town itself could not provide. The state had not merely abandoned Kukawa twice; it had passed through Kukawa like a succession of storms, each with its own bureaucratic and military logic, each passage leaving the inhabitants more exposed, more impoverished, and more sceptical of official promises than the last.

In the insurgency period, the manifestations of this refusal were military: counter-insurgency operations that inflicted civilian casualties without reliable accountability, the effective territorial abandonment of communities to insurgent governance, and the conscription of civilian vigilantes into a war that the state was unable to fight on its own. In the stabilisation period, the manifestations are administrative: camp closures that prioritise political narrative over population safety, resettlement programmes that relocate people to insecure areas with inadequate support, reintegration frameworks that address security management rather than human welfare, and the systematic withdrawal of humanitarian NGO access to people the state is not adequately serving. Critically, the Borno Model's resettlement programme operates in a political vacuum where the traditional emirate structures and Kanuri Islamic clerical networks that once mediated between state and citizen have not been restored. Before the insurgency, local chiefs and religious scholars provided a parallel system of dispute resolution, welfare distribution, and moral authority. Boko Haram systematically targeted and killed many of these traditional leaders. In the post-insurgency period, the state has made little effort to reconstitute them, preferring direct administrative control over the messier work of rebuilding legitimate local authority. The result is a governance void: the Nigerian state is present in the form of military detachments, but absent in the form of legitimate, trusted local institutions. The people of Nguro Soye are not only insecure because of ISWAP's night-time harassment; they are insecure because there is no recognised local authority to petition, no chief to mediate, no cleric to appeal to. The state has resettled them into an administrative ghost town, and called it recovery.

The anthropologist James Scott introduced the concept of the moral economy of the peasant to describe the normative framework that structures relations between a population and the authorities that govern it. Moral economy violations are not simply disappointments. They are betrayals: failures of an implicit contract whose terms the governed believed the governors had accepted. The civilians of northeastern Nigeria entered the Boko Haram era with a moral economy shaped by decades of Northern Nigerian state relations: expectations, inconsistently met but persistently held, of protection, provision, and recognition. The insurgency violated those expectations with catastrophic force. The post-insurgency period was experienced through the same moral economy: as the moment when the state was supposed to make good on what it had failed to provide, to acknowledge the scale of what had been endured, and to demonstrate, through the quality of its response, that it understood the obligations those endurances created.

When the camps were closed, and the resettlements were insecure, and the returnees were stigmatised, and the abducted girls were told there was no specialist support available, the violation was not experienced primarily as a policy failure. It was experienced as a moral failure: a second breaking of a contract that the state had already broken once.

What recovery would actually require

Research conducted across eight IDP camps in northeastern Nigeria by Adekola et al. found only a very weak statistical relationship between the restoration of social infrastructure and the willingness of displaced people to return to their home communities. The finding is counterintuitive if you assume that people are reluctant to return primarily because of physical conditions. It makes complete sense if you understand that they are reluctant to return primarily because of a deep, experience-grounded distrust of the state's willingness to maintain whatever it rebuilds. The distrust is the rational response of a population that has watched, across decades of experience, as institutions that promised protection failed to deliver it. Road repair and school reconstruction do not resolve a trust deficit of that depth. They can contribute to its resolution, over time, if they are accompanied by a sustained demonstration that the state means what it says when it claims to be returning to serve rather than to manage. That demonstration, as of this writing, has not been made.

Recovery, measured through the displaced people's own testimonies, would require something more radical than infrastructure: the right to articulate what form that infrastructure should take. The ethnographic record from the camps reveals aspirations that the Borno Model does not accommodate. Many displaced farmers do not want to return to their ancestral villages if returning means sleeping without a military presence; they want consolidation in secure peri-urban centres with viable markets. Many women do not want simply to be resettled; they want specialist trauma care and educational pathways for the children born in captivity. Many young men do not want handouts; they want vocational training tied to actual employment, not symbolic one-off payments. The state has not asked them what they want, because asking would require treating them as political agents rather than administrative objects. A genuine recovery programme would begin with that question, and would design its responses around the answers it received.

The Borno Model, in its current form, is a management programme: one designed to resolve the visible, embarrassing, politically inconvenient fact of half a million displaced people in Maiduguri without addressing the underlying conditions that produced their displacement or the underlying structural relationship between the state and its citizens that the displacement made visible.

A programme for genuine recovery

What would a different approach look like? The elements are not speculative; they are drawn from the testimonies of the displaced themselves, from the documented failures of the current model, and from the rare instances where local initiatives have succeeded against the odds. A genuine recovery programme would be built around five pillars, each corresponding to a dimension of the abandonment discussed in the essay:

1. Security before return: The Borno Model inverted the proper sequence: it declared areas safe and resettled populations, then expected security to follow. The result, as the residents of Nguro Soye discovered, was a population delivered into harm's way. A genuine programme would guarantee that areas designated for resettlement are not merely claimed to be secure, but are demonstrably so, meaning the military maintains a permanent, responsive presence, not a distant detachment, and that communities have a direct line to security forces with accountable command structures. This requires reversing the super-camp strategy that has ceded rural terrain to insurgent control. It requires the Nigerian military to accept that force preservation cannot be the primary objective in a counter-insurgency where civilian protection is the mission's justification. This is not merely a military adjustment; it is a political commitment to treat rural populations as worth defending.
2. Participatory resettlement: The displaced people of the northeast have been treated as objects of policy rather than subjects of their own recovery. Yet the ethnographic record reveals clear preferences: displaced farmers do not want to return to ancestral villages if returning means sleeping without a military presence; they want consolidation in secure peri-urban centres with viable markets. Women do not want simply to be resettled; they want specialist trauma care and educational pathways for children born in captivity. Young men do not want handouts; they want vocational training tied to actual employment. A genuine programme would begin by asking these questions, not because consultation is good practice, but because recovery requires the consent and participation of the recovered. This means establishing community councils in each resettlement site, with elected representatives who have the authority to negotiate with state officials, not as supplicants, but as citizens whose agreement is required for any programme to proceed.
3. Specialist reintegration for survivors of captivity: The Amnesty International report is not an indictment of a single programme; it is an indictment of a state that has abandoned the women and girls it failed to protect. A genuine programme would provide, as a matter of right, the counselling, vocational training, educational support, and community reintegration services that survivors have explicitly requested. It would screen survivors not for security risk but for trauma and need. It would recognise that children born in captivity have distinct needs that require educational and psychological support. It would fund community sensitisation programmes to counter the stigmatisation that survivors face upon return, because survivors are not contaminants to be managed, but citizens whose welfare generates state obligations. The cost of such a programme is not prohibitive; the cost of its absence, measured in human suffering and long-term instability, is incalculable.
4. Economic reconstruction that addresses the ecological catastrophe: The Borno Model's one-off payments and symbolic resettlement packages are theatre, not recovery. The formal economy of the northeast collapsed long before Boko Haram fired its first shot, not because of the insurgency, but because Lake Chad's ecological collapse destroyed the livelihoods of fishermen and pastoralists, and because the state failed to replace what the environment had taken. A genuine programme would recognise that resettlement without economic viability is merely displacement by another name. It would fund alternative livelihoods appropriate to the region's changed ecology: drought-resistant agriculture, small-scale trade, cross-border commerce regulated rather than criminalised. It would invest in the infrastructure that the state has neglected for decades: roads, markets, storage facilities, electricity. It would treat economic reconstruction not as a supplement to security, but as its foundation.
5. Reconstitution of legitimate local authority: The state's administrative ghost towns, communities resettled without the traditional emirate and clerical networks that once mediated between state and citizens, are not merely incomplete; they are unstable. The absence of legitimate local authority means that disputes go unresolved, grievances find no outlet, and the state's presence is experienced as distant and arbitrary. A genuine programme would invest in rebuilding the institutions that Boko Haram destroyed: traditional councils, dispute resolution mechanisms, religious networks that can exercise moral authority without coercion. This is not a nostalgic return to pre-insurgency structures; it is a pragmatic recognition that governance requires legitimacy, and legitimacy in the northeast has historically been built through institutions that the state has neglected or bypassed.

These five pillars are not a comprehensive blueprint. They are a framework, a direction, a set of principles that would begin to address the abandonment the essay has traced. They are also, in their refusal to treat the northeast's population as a problem to be managed, a recognition that recovery is not a technical project but a political and moral one.

Conclusion

What the forty-year history of the northeastern Nigerian state's relationship with its population demonstrates is the consequences of that recognition having never been fully made. The state has failed physically, by withdrawing its military and administrative presence. It has failed institutionally, by hollowing out its own logistical capacity through corruption. It has failed ecologically, by refusing to confront the climate collapse that underlies the region's economic unraveling. It has failed regionally, by pursuing a unilateral closure policy in a transnational conflict zone. And it has failed morally, by refusing to ask the displaced what they need, and refusing to treat the young men and women of the northeast as anything other than security problems to be managed.

The people of northeastern Nigeria have been governed, not made citizens. The distinction is the structure that underlies both abandonments, and that no technical stabilisation programme has yet begun to address. Until that distinction is confronted, not in policy papers, but in the material reality of protection, provision, and recognition, the northeast will remain not recovered, but merely re-abandoned.

The people of Nguro Soye, Burari, and Kukawa are not waiting for a rescue that will never come. They are surviving, as they have always survived, on a resource that the state cannot provide and cannot take away: each other. But survival is not recovery. And until the Nigerian state treats its northeastern citizens as citizens, not as subjects, not as security problems, not as administrative burdens, recovery will remain a word without a referent.

"We can rely only on God," went the refrain in Nguro Soye. The state has given its people no reason to revise that assessment.