Nigeria

Sokoto, Nigeria – Each time her curious seven-year-old child returned home from school with homework, 28-year-old Habiba Abubakar knew it was time to take him to her neighbour, whom the child called “aunt”, even though they were not related by blood, who had been his saviour every time he wanted to stand in front of his class and receive a standing ovation.

But that changed in 2021, when Abubakar enrolled herself in the Women Centre for Continuing Education (WCCE) in Sokoto State, northwest Nigeria.

“I’ve always felt ashamed when Muhammad told me that they’ve been given another assignment,” she told Al Jazeera.

This frustration, coupled with her enthusiasm for learning English, pushed her to return to the classroom 13 years after she left.

Now, the mother of four said she helps all the children with their assignments.

The interruption in Abibaker’s studies is not uncommon across northern Nigeria, especially in rural communities, where girls are more likely to drop out of school due to cultural practices, such as early marriage, or poverty, which forces parents to make gender-biased decisions by enrolling male children over females.

UNICEF reported that more than half of the girls in the region are not attending school.

Jennifer Agbaji, a social accountability professional and the executive director at Basileia Vulnerable Persons Rights Initiative (BVPRI), a Nigerian nonprofit dedicated to advancing the rights of women, girls, and other vulnerable populations through education and leadership development, viewed the initiative as a positive and necessary intervention.

Nonetheless, she said second-chance education should not be limited to classroom-based learning alone.

“If access to education depends solely on physical attendance, many women who face mobility, childcare, economic, health, or security challenges may still be excluded.”

How the system works

WCCE, commissioned by the then-military governor of Sokoto State, Navy Captain Abdul Rasheed Adisa Raji, was founded in 1997 to provide adult education and vocational skills to women in the state.

Since then, Nuraddeen Ladan Dogon Daji, a physics teacher, told Al Jazeera that the centre has trained many students, some of whom now practise professions, such as teaching and nursing, helping to address the country’s shortage of skilled professionals.

Unlike other public schools, where pupils spend six years, the centre designed a three-year curriculum for its primary section, from adult one to three.

In the secondary sections, students spend three years each in the junior and senior levels.

In their final years, they also sit for the mandatory Junior Leaving School Certificate of Education (JLSCE) and Senior School Certificate of Education (SSCE) examinations.

To help these students realise their dreams, the centre also offers free education, benefitting from the state government’s effort to reduce the number of out-of-school children.

This has helped students like Abubakar, who, following her divorce, relied heavily on her father’s support to stay in school.

“We used to pay 5,000 naira ($3.5) per term, but were later told to stop because the state government has given us a chance to study for free,” Abubakar told Al Jazeera from her home in the Kofar Atiku neighbourhood.

But free tuition does not eliminate all costs. Students still have to pay for transport, books, and other daily expenses.

The challenges

According to Agbaji, beyond poverty and early marriage, there are several structural barriers, including restrictive gender norms that prioritise domestic responsibilities over education.

She said many women lose confidence after years away from formal education, and in some communities, education is still viewed as an investment for boys rather than a lifelong right for women.

In her opinion, these norms often combine to make re-entry into education difficult, even when opportunities exist. In her journey to becoming a nurse, Fatima Attahir, who left school after primary school 12 years ago, found it necessary to go back to the classroom and start afresh.

To support herself while studying, she helps with her family’s trading activities when she is not in class.

She said that although some of her friends already saw the decision as time-consuming, she is not satisfied with the system’s duration.

“I wish the primary section was also up to six years,” she said.

“Because to become a nurse, I need to have a solid background in the core subjects.” Some of the students Al Jazeera spoke to said their greatest challenge is juggling academic activities with household responsibilities.

Before her divorce, Abubakar said she would wake up earlier than usual to prepare breakfast, clean the house, and get herself and her children ready for school.

“When I finally set my foot in class, I was already tired, and as the lectures went on, I would start slumbering because I hadn’t had enough sleep.” She said the pressure became worse when her youngest child frequently fell ill, sometimes forcing her to leave class before lectures ended.

After her divorce, transport costs became another obstacle. “Since I was no longer married, my parents were the ones paying for the transport fares, but when they couldn’t, I would not go to school because I couldn’t afford it myself,” she said.

Later, her father gave her 10,000 naira to start making and selling local snacks and small chops.

The small business now helps her cover transport costs and other school-related expenses. Abubakar still credits the neighbour who used to help her son with homework before she returned to school.

When transport costs became difficult to afford after her divorce, her parents stepped in when they could, while her father later provided the capital that helped her start a small business and continue her studies.

Her experience is not unique.

Another student, Hafsat Aliyu, said she leaves her two-year-old child with her in-laws whenever she attends classes to avoid disrupting lessons.

Her husband pays for books and other occasional school needs, while she sells local pastries during break time at the centre to earn money for daily transport and personal expenses.

During examination periods, she studies late into the night after completing household chores and putting her children to bed.

“My husband does his best, but I thought it was time for me to get a source of income, too,” she said.

“Now, I pay for my transport and a few other daily needs.”

However, the physics teacher, Dogon Daji, said that in his seven years of teaching at the centre, a recurring challenge among students is the pace of learning.

“I’ve taught young people, and the level of their understanding is quite different,” he said.

But he added that there are still outstanding students among them; one recently won this year’s Usmanu Danfodio Week, an annual quiz competition organised for secondary school students in the state.

On the other hand, the vocational section of the centre, which was designed to equip students with practical skills such as tailoring and soap-making, now offers only tailoring.

Students are required to provide tools, such as scissors, including those whose interests may lie in other trades.

The way forward

Agbaji acknowledged that for Nigeria to bridge the gender disparity in education, the country must adopt a lifelong learning framework that recognises education as a continuous right and opportunity.

This requires increased investment in adult education, digital and remote learning platforms, community-based education, and flexible pathways for women who missed formal schooling, because the long-term consequences are significant.

She added that many women pursuing second-chance education continue to balance childcare, household responsibilities, and income-generating activities, often relying on family and community support networks to remain in school.

“Educational exclusion perpetuates poverty, limits economic opportunities, increases vulnerability to abuse and exploitation, and restricts women’s participation in governance and public service. It also affects future generations because children of educated mothers are generally more likely to enrol in and complete school,” Agbaji clarified.

Hours after residents went to bed on the morning of Wednesday, June 3, sounds of gunshots pierced through the air as terrorists circled an off-campus hostel housing some students of the Federal Polytechnic Kaura Namoda in Zamfara State, northwestern Nigeria. The hostel, located in the Low-cost area, is meters away from a military checkpoint, according to residents. 

Students at the polytechnic had increasingly been moving into off-campus housing to avoid being abducted from their school.

As fear of what might happen enveloped people, the terrorists compromised the gate of the hostel and took away eight students of the polytechnic. Even as they fled with the students, they continued to fire shots in the air.

“Two of the students, Favour and Joshua Sunday, escaped while being taken away by the terrorists,” a resident who simply gave his name as Musa told HumAngle. “My house is not far from Oga Bulu’s house, which shares a wall with the house the students live in. I heard the gunshots and heard when they were leaving with the students.”

Since 2015, terrorists have terrorised the sub-region. Their activities have led to the death of thousands of people and the displacement of over a million. Attacks on schools and students have been on the increase since 2020, when terrorists stormed Government Science Secondary, Kankara and abducted 300 pupils.

Zamfara, which is considered the hotbed of the crisis, has recorded several school abductions in Jangebe, where over 300 schoolgirls were abducted, in Federal University, Gusau, where 24 students were abducted, and at the College of Agriculture and Animal Sciences, Bakura, where 15 students were abducted. 

Musa, the source, says Joshua Sunday told them six students (three men and three women) have been taken.

HumAngle reports that the Kaura Namoda area and other communities in Maradun and Bungudu fall under areas where the notorious terrorist leader, Bello Dan Sadiya, controls. 

An administrative staff member of the Polytechnic, who asked not to be named, told HumAngle over the phone that several staff members of the institution have relocated to Gusau, the state capital, for fear of being attacked. “Even me, I’ve relocated my family to Gusau. We have two staff, all senior lecturers, who are still with the bandits after they were abducted two months ago,” he said.

He said a ransom has been paid for the release of the lecturers, but the terrorists have continued to hold them.

Federal Polytechnic Kaura is located on the road to Shinkafi and Zurmi LGA, two areas in the northern part of Zamfara State that have witnessed repeated terrorist attacks.

The police public relations officer in the state, DSP Yazid Abubakar, confirmed the abduction and promised to release a statement, but has yet to do so.

Local authorities blame informants for the escalation of attacks in the town centre. The Chairman of the area, Mannir Haidara Kaura, told DW Hausa that the state government has taken measures to tackle the terrorists, but informants are sabotaging the efforts.

Teachers in north-eastern Nigeria held protests, demanding stronger protection for learning institutions.
The outcry comes after the abduction of dozens of school children in Borno State last month. Al Jazeera’s Felix Niwara explains.

Let us begin with what has been forgotten. 

There is a field, roughly 22 kilometres southwest of Sokoto, between the Dange Shuni and Bodinga local government areas in North West Nigeria, that carries no particular weight to the eye. Grass grows there. Wind moves through trees at predictable intervals. The surrounding bush is in full silence, neither mourning nor celebrating. Nothing marks what happened here, and that, of course, is precisely the point.

The place is called Satiru. Or was called Satiru. The grammar is slippery, because the British, when they finished with it in the spring of 1906, did not simply defeat it. They made sure to erase it – razing buildings, enslaving survivors, most of whom were women and children, and stripping the site with the cleansing method of an administration that understood that a crushed rebellion, left with a location, becomes a shrine. And shrines become consciousness and arguments. Better to leave nothing. Better to leave nowhere.

And then the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Attahiru II, the Muslim ruler (Sarkin Musulmi) whose fighters helped carry out the slaughter, reportedly pronounced a curse on anyone who would rebuild or farm on the ground. As the British Resident Burdon telegraphed proudly to High Commissioner Frederick Lugard: “All Sokoto went out yesterday to inspect [the] battlefield and raze Satiru to the ground. No wall or tree left standing.” The scholars Paul Lovejoy and J.S. Hogendorn, writing in the Journal of African History, note that “the deserted site of Satiru is on the edge of a forest reserve. It has not been inhabited since its destruction and the official curse.” More than a century later, that is still true.

This is what erasure looks like when it succeeds. For 120 years, the ruins of Satiru have remained untouched, a vanished town erased by British colonial forces after a 1906 uprising led by poor clerics, fugitive slaves, and peasants challenging both imperial taxation and the aristocratic order of the Sokoto Caliphate. 

But this story is not only about a massacre buried in colonial archives. It is about how modern Nigeria inherited the use of overwhelming force to suppress communities marked as threats. 

The thing Satiru was

Before it became a problem requiring artillery, Satiru was an answer to a different problem. To understand it, you need to understand the particular moral atmosphere of the Sokoto Caliphate in its late decline – the spiritual hangover, you might call it, of a revolution that had once been genuine.

Usman Dan Fodio launched his jihad in 1804 with an argument that was partly political and partly theological, but entirely serious: that the Hausa rulers of the time had corrupted Islam, that the ordinary people – the talakawa, the poor commoners – were being ground down by a system that dressed itself in religious language while behaving in wholly irreligious ways. Dan Fodio and his followers built the caliphate on the promise that this would change. That Islamic governance would be just. That scholars who held power would be answerable to something beyond their own appetites.

By the end of the nineteenth century, that promise had curdled into something its founders would not have recognised. The Fulani aristocracy that administered the caliphate had made a comfortable accommodation with power. Tribute collectors arrived in the villages. The talakawa paid. Palace scholars – the senior ulama (religious scholars), with their elaborate networks of family and commerce – found, in the more elastic corners of Islamic jurisprudence, reasons why this was all acceptable. The poor continued to be poor. The aristocracy continued to wear piety as a garment while extracting what they could.

The scholars of Satiru – humble men, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn describe them, “poor Muslim scholars engaged in farming and teaching,” with origins far outside the Fulani elite – found different reasons. Malam Siba, who founded the Satiru settlement in approximately 1894, was of Nupe origin. A second key figure, Maikaho, came from Gobir, the country that Uthman Dan Fodio himself had subjugated. A third, Malam Bawa, was from Zamfara, which had revolted against Sokoto on several occasions across the nineteenth century. What distinguished these men from the mainstream was not their learning – they were, by caliphate standards, minor figures – but their refusal to make the peace that more successful scholars had made with power. As Lovejoy and Hogendorn paraphrase the alleged statement of Malam Siba himself: he “was fed up with the exactions of the ruling class and was not going to obey the instructions of anyone anymore… [but instead] was going to set up a new great regime.”

What grew at Satiru, on the frontier of four fiefdoms – Danchadi, Dange, Shuni, and Bodinga – was something the caliphate’s administration regarded as an irritant and then, gradually, as something worse. The community refused to pay taxes. It refused to provide unpaid labour. It attracted, in growing numbers, fugitive slaves fleeing from the plantations and estates of the aristocracy. This last detail matters enormously. By 1906, British Resident Burdon would report that the adherents of the Satiru cause were “nearly all run away slaves.” Local tradition in Satiru itself held, as recorded by A.S. Mohammad in his foundational social history of the revolt, that “the leaders of Satiru abolished slavery and as a consequence… slaves flocked to them. The freedom of these fugitives was effectively and strenuously guarded.”

This was, in other words, not an uprising of the godless. It was an uprising of the structurally abandoned — poor clerics, dispossessed peasants, and fugitive slaves –   against the two interlocking systems that were destroying them simultaneously: the late-caliphate aristocracy that extracted their labour, and the British colonial administration that had, since 1903, added new demands of jizya (poll tax) and jangali (livestock tax) to communities that had never before paid such taxes to Sokoto. As a Sokoto citizen wrote bitterly at the time, and as quoted in Lovejoy and Hogendorn’s account: “We have been conquered. We have been asked to pay poll tax and cattle tax. We have been made to do various things, and now they want us to fight their wars for them.”

The movement Satiru had built was, in the framework laid out by Lovejoy and Hogendorn, a form of revolutionary Mahdism – distinct from all the other currents of Mahdist thought that ran through the caliphate at the time. It drew its support from peasants, fugitive slaves, and subject populations. It had no aristocratic supporters, no wealthy merchants, and no members of the established ulama. It was ethnically diverse in a way that the aristocracy was not: Hausa from various origins, Zamfarawa, Gobirawa, Gimbanawa, Kabawa, and Azbinawa – but, strikingly, no Fulani. The battle lines, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn note, mapped onto class so precisely that “the ethnic dimension… reflected the class division.” On the day of the final battle, “all the faces on the battlefield had Gobir, Kebbi, Zanfara, Katsina and other such tribal marks. Not a single Fulani talaka [commoner] joined them.”

What Satiru wanted, ultimately, was the recovery of the original promise – the caliphate that Dan Fodio had said was coming, and that had not arrived. You can call this politics, or you can call it theology. At Satiru, they did not distinguish between the two.

The spark and the suppression

The movement had been building for years, connected by threads of correspondence and travelling clerics to similar currents of dissatisfaction across both the British and French colonial zones in are now Nigeria and Niger Republic. On the French side of the boundary, a blind Zarma cleric named Saybu Dan Makafo had been the central animating figure – charismatic, mystically inclined, and reportedly possessing gifts of ventriloquism that contributed to his reputation as a waliyyi, a saint. 

In December 1905, violence broke out at Kobkitanda, 150 kilometres south of Niamey, in French territory in today’s Niger Republic. Saybu and his followers killed two gardes-cercles (colonial police) from Dosso. The French responded, the Mahdists absorbed losses, and Saybu fled east – eventually arriving at Satiru, where the local community had already been living in a state of armed readiness and messianic expectation.

The revolt was supposed to begin on the Eid El-Kabir (Babbar Sallah), February 5, 1906. It was postponed – there was an internal dispute about the recognition of Isa, the village head of Satiru, as the messianic successor figure who would accompany the Mahdi. The Satirawa (people of Satiru) resolved the question on February 13, when they attacked the neighbouring village of Tsomau. Fourteen people died.

The British response was swift and catastrophically misjudged. Acting Resident H.R. Preston-Hillary moved immediately with a column of about seventy mounted infantry under Major Francis Blackwood, armed with a single Maxim gun. He appears to have been entirely unaware that the rising at Satiru was connected to the weeks of violence that had already convulsed French territory. He rode toward the village with the assumption of a man who believed the gap between his weapons and his opponents’ was so vast that the details of the situation hardly mattered.

He was wrong. 

The Mahdists attacked the British column. Hillary and Blackwood were killed, along with three other white officers and 25 African soldiers. The West African Frontier Force (WAFF) suffered such heavy losses that it was “forced to retreat in disarray.” It was, as Lugard would later acknowledge, “the first serious reverse suffered by the West African Frontier Force since it was raised in 1898.”

The Satiru Mahdists were also severely wounded — their leader, Malam Isa, was struck during the initial encounter and would die two days later, on the morning he was supposed to unfurl the green flag and declare the jihad formally. He did not live to see what his movement had achieved: a genuine military victory over the empire. For a brief, burning moment, the talakawa had won.

The British did not pause to understand what had happened. They regrouped.

The reckoning

On March 10, 1906, a combined force of the British-run West African Frontier Force (WAFF) troops and Sokoto fighters approached Satiru. The Satirawa had dug trenches. But they did not stay behind them. They charged, repeatedly, in massed formation, against troops equipped with Maxim guns firing destructive volleys. Historian Richard Dusgate would later call what followed “the most bloodthirsty expedition in the history of British military operations in Northern Nigeria.” Margery Perham, in her biography of Lugard, noted that subsequent reports – kept secret at the time – found that the “killing was very free, not to say slaughter,” that the soldiers “killed every living thing before them,” and that “the fields were running with blood.”

At least 2,000 Satirawa were killed. An estimated 3,000 women and children were herded to Sokoto, many distributed among the aristocracy as effective slaves – a thinly disguised reassertion of the master-slave relationship that the very people of Satiru had staked their lives on dismantling.

Saybu Dan Makafo, blind and wounded, survived. He was captured and brought to Sokoto, where he was tried. His boy guide, according to a story collected by H.A.F. Johnston, reportedly shouted at the trial that if Saybu was given water, he would vanish into thin air – an indication of the extraordinary tension surrounding the proceedings. The public executioner decapitated him on March 22. His head was mounted on a stake in the market. Four subordinates suffered the same fate.

The political accounting that followed the massacre revealed what the British understood the suppression to mean and to communicate. The Colonial Office initially received dispatches that accurately attributed the uprising partly to the fugitive slave crisis –  Lugard’s own initial cable described the rebels as “outlaw fugitive slaves.” A marginal note in the Colonial Office files, as documented by Lovejoy and Hogendorn, captures the official response with bracing economy: “Better say nothing of slaves.” By May 9, Lugard had incorporated a sanitised version of events into his official reports. The slave dimension was quietly removed from the record. The most dangerous thing about Satiru – that it had articulated a class argument, that it had offered sanctuary to the enslaved, that it had made the connection between colonial taxation and pre-colonial extraction explicit – was the thing the British were most determined to forget.

The Sokoto aristocracy was rewarded for its loyalty. Marafa Muhammadu Maiturare, the Sokoto official who had commanded the local levies and whose authority was partly credited with preventing a general rising, eventually became Sarkin Musulmi in 1915. Hassan, the sarki of Dange, the fief nearest to Satiru, who had greeted Burdon warmly in the hours after the Mahdist victory, would become Sarkin Musulmi in 1931. The collaboration was not forgotten. It was promoted.

What the grammar inherited

Nearly a century and two decades later, an eight-year-old boy named Sa’id watched through a crack in the wall of his grandmother’s hut as the men of his family were dragged outside and shot.

His village, Kajen Shuwa, sat in Marte Local Government Area of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, a Shuwa Arab community of cattle herders and storytellers, ethnically and linguistically distinct from the dominant groups of the region. Between 2014 and 2015, at the height of the military’s campaign against Boko Haram, soldiers arrived looking for a Boko Haram cell in a village called Kajen Kanuri. The names were similar enough. No interpreter had been brought. No local guide accompanied the unit.

More than 40 men died.

“They had the wrong village,” Imam Abdulkarim, now living with displaced survivors at the Garin Shuwa IDP camp in Bauchi, told HumAngle. “It was later we realised they were sent to Kajen Kanuri.”

One of the survivors told HumAngle in 2026 how the events unfolded as he watched from where he had hidden himself in a tree. He said he was watching when the men were gathered and ordered to produce Boko Haram members. The people apparently did not even understand what was being said to them, so the soldiers simply lined all the men up in a place resembling a ditch and shot every single one of them. Just like that. No trial. No evidence. Nothing. Everyone was killed.

Sa’id is nineteen now. He teaches Quran to children at the displacement camp — children who have their own mornings they cannot stop replaying. He speaks slowly. He flinches at loud sounds. When he told his story to HumAngle, tears came before words, and other residents of the camp stepped in to complete the parts his voice could not carry. They knew the story. They had assembled it over the years, in the way that displaced communities assemble the things they are not allowed to say publicly – from fragments, from the accounts of those who were in different parts of the village when it happened, from the silence of those who were not there to tell anything.

“The families of the killed couldn’t even raise their voices,” Abdulkarim said. “Everyone was afraid that he might be targeted too.”

No soldier was prosecuted. No investigation was publicly announced. No family received notification, compensation, or the minimum of official acknowledgement that their men had been killed by mistake.

What happened to Kajen Shuwa is not exceptional in the region’s chronicle of the last decade. Amnesty International’s 2015 report documented execution-style killings, torture in detention, and mass graves of individuals who had never been charged, tried, or formally arrested — people killed not for what they did, but for who they resembled, where they lived, what language they spoke when soldiers arrived. The Nigerian military’s response to that report was not to open investigations. It was to call Amnesty International a liar.

And then the world moved on, as it always does – to the next atrocity, the next set of statistics that briefly animated international concern before fading into the background noise of a continent the world has learned to observe without fully attending to.

Zaria massacre 

If Kajen Shuwa happened in the shadows – a remote village, an Arabic-speaking minority, a story reaching the press years after the fact — then what occurred in Zaria, Kaduna State, in the country’s North West, in December 2015 happened in full view, and still went unanswered.

The Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), led by Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, was a Shia organisation with roots deep in Zaria’s social fabric. It ran schools and clinics. It was also an organisation that had long attracted the suspicion of the Nigerian state – not because it was violent, but because it was organised, independent, and loyal to a leadership structure that fell outside the state’s system of control.

On Dec. 12, 2015, an IMN procession blocked a road, delaying a military convoy carrying the then Chief of Army Staff. What followed, as documented in meticulous detail by both Amnesty International and the Kaduna State Government’s own commission of inquiry, was a massacre. Soldiers attacked IMN members across multiple locations. The Hussainiyya Islamic Centre was demolished. El-Zakzaky’s residence was destroyed. Three of his sons were killed. El-Zakzaky himself, elderly and partially blind – the parallel to the blind Saybu Dan Makafo feels almost too pointed – was arrested. He and his wife would remain in detention for years, their release ordered repeatedly by courts and resisted repeatedly by the government.

The Kaduna State commission produced a report of unusual honesty. It confirmed that at least 347 IMN members had been buried in a mass grave at Mando. It found the military’s response disproportionate. It recommended the prosecution of specific officers, and it named the mass grave by location. But not one recommendation was implemented.

The IMN was formally proscribed in 2019, an organisation that had existed for four decades and operated schools and hospitals, banned by the government that had killed hundreds of its members, as though the banning were the logical conclusion of the killing rather than an additional punishment for surviving it.

The grammar of impunity

There is a grammar to this. Lovejoy and Hogendorn identified it in the colonial records of 1906 in three steps: a community marked as dangerous, the deployment of force that is “excessive by design,” and the systematic management of the record. 

At Satiru, the British made the decision consciously – the marginal note that said “better say nothing of slaves” was an administrative instruction to suppress an inconvenient truth. The communities targeted after them have had to live inside the silence that administrative instruction created.

But this never worked permanently. What the scholars Godwin Odeh and Williams Efe argue, in their analysis of the Satiru uprising’s historiography, is that the episode was not merely a military or religious event but a demonstration of “the impossibility of subjugating a group permanently without facing a crisis of cultural relevance.” They invoke Amilcar Cabral’s formulation: that culture “is a means by which people assert their opposition to domination… one of the fundamental tools of struggle for emancipation.” The argument is that Satiru never fully ended – that its logic persisted, became available, got taken up again in different forms by different communities facing different versions of the same problem.

The circumstances were different, the enemies differently named, and the legal justifications modernised, but the underlying grammar remained recognisable.

This is not a metaphor. What the British established in 1906 and what successive Nigerian governments have absorbed so completely is a particular relationship between the state and the communities it finds inconvenient. The relationship has a fixed sequence: a community is marked; disproportionate force arrives; the record is managed; and then, reliably, comes the silence. The silence is not passive. It is constructed and maintained by the same institutions that produced the violence –  maintained through the denial of accountability, the obstruction of independent investigation, and the prosecution of those who speak too loudly about what they witnessed.

The families of Kajen Shuwa could not grieve publicly because grief, in that context, was dangerous. The IMN, after Zaria, could not even gather to mourn without risk of further confrontation with the same security forces that had killed their members.

But the cycle continues. 

Muhammed Kaumi had just stepped out of the mosque when his phone rang on the evening of Friday, May 29. He had recently returned from Dikwa, a town in Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, and assumed the call was from a relative checking on his journey home. Instead, the voice on the other end delivered news that left him numb.

“Bulama has been killed,” the caller said. “They have killed Bulama.” Muhammed felt his chest tighten. “I instantly felt a sharp pain in my heart,” he recalled.

Bulama Ali was his cousin, a farmer, a father of five, and one of thousands, like him, who have been displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency that has scarred the region for more than a decade.

Within minutes, Muhammed was on his way to the Custom House Internally Displaced Persons’ Camp in Muna, on the outskirts of Maiduguri, where Bulama had lived with his family for nearly a decade.

As he rushed there, questions flooded his mind: “What had happened? Who had killed him? Why?”

When he arrived, residents told him that Bulama had allegedly been beaten by men they identified as “repentant Boko Haram fighters”, locally known as “Hybrids”.

For many residents of Maiduguri, the allegation struck a painful nerve.

For years, former insurgents who surrendered to authorities have passed through government rehabilitation and reintegration programmes such as Operation Safe Corridor and the Borno Model, before returning to civilian communities. However, some have bypassed both interventions completely. 

The Nigerian authorities have involved some of these deserters in security operations, where they help troops with intelligence gathering, their knowledge of terrorist-held terrain, and even operational activities. The arrangement has remained controversial among many survivors of the conflict and among security analysts. 

Now, residents in these communities say their fears have been justified. 

They brought him back dead

Bulama’s final hours began shortly before the Friday Muslim congregational prayers.

Muhammed was told by relatives and eyewitnesses that “[Bulama] was on his way to the mosque on his bicycle when he received a phone call. He stopped by the roadside [close to Muna, on the Maiduguri-Gamboru highway] to answer it.” Behind him was a vehicle carrying armed men dressed in black uniforms. “They honked at him to move,” Muhammed said. “But he was speaking on the phone and did not hear them.”

Abbas Shettima, who witnessed the incident, said the confrontation, which occurred between 1:15 p.m. and 1:30 p.m., quickly escalated. 

“We were all heading to the mosque when we saw them beating him,” Abbas recounted. According to him, the group consisted of about ten men carrying guns and sticks. “They said he was blocking their way,” he said.

Bulama tried to explain. He apologised repeatedly, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. 

“He kept begging them to spare him,” Abbas said. “He crouched down and covered his head with his hands while they beat him.” When bystanders attempted to intervene, the armed men threatened them. Residents watched helplessly. Eventually, the men forced Bulama into their vehicle and drove away.

No one knew where he had been taken.

At the time, witnesses said they believed the group were members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) because of their uniforms.

Hours later, shortly after 3 p.m., the vehicle returned. “They brought him back severely wounded,” Abbas recounted. “He could barely move.”

Residents rushed toward him to help, but within ten minutes, he died.

The incident was immediately reported to the soldiers stationed at the camp’s entrance. According to Muhammed, the soldiers said they had seen the vehicle dropping Bulama but did not know what had transpired. “They were the ones who told us the men were Hybrids and that they had come from the Maiwa axis,” he said.

Residents later learned that Bulama had allegedly been taken to Maiwa Kura, a remote village in Mafa Local Government Area, Borno State, where the group was reportedly stationed. 

Although “Hybrids” are often perceived as operating independently, they are typically attached to military formations and work alongside security forces, according to a member of a local volunteer security outfit involved in counterterrorism operations who spoke to HumAngle.

“The commanding officer of the military base gives instructions to the ‘Hybrid’ commander attached to that formation, who then relays orders to his men,” the source explained. “During broader operations involving multiple locations, they also have a state commander from whom they receive directives.”

However, this does not necessarily imply military involvement in the attack that claimed Bulama’s life, as Hybrid patrols sometimes operate independently.

Bulama’s family subsequently reported the matter to the police. 

Muhammed said that soldiers, police officers, and members of the CJTF later travelled to Maiwa, where they arrested three suspects, including a commander. “They told us the others had travelled to Mafa for an operation,” he said.

The suspects were taken into custody and transferred to the Borno State Criminal Investigation Department for further investigation.

According to family members, the suspects claimed Bulama died after jumping from the back of a moving Hilux vehicle. But the relatives remain unconvinced. “The doctors told us he had been severely beaten,” Muhammed said. “His hands were tied, and he had internal bleeding.”

The family retrieved the body on Saturday morning and buried him later that afternoon. When the body was prepared for burial, he said, blood continued to seep from his eyes, ears, and nose. “It stained the white shroud.”

When HumAngle contacted the Borno State Police Public Relations Officer, Nahum Kenneth Daso, he said he was not aware of the case and would make inquiries. As of publication, no official update had been provided.

The men known as ‘Hybrids’

In many communities across Borno State, the word “Hybrid” carries different meanings depending on who defines it. 

To security officials, they are a practical asset in a war that has stretched for more than 15 years. For many residents, they are former terrorists trying to rebuild their lives. To others, especially those who lost relatives, homes, farms, and livelihoods during the conflict, they are a constant reminder of wounds that have never fully healed.

The term is commonly used to describe some former Boko Haram members who surrendered and passed through official rehabilitation and deradicalisation programmes, and later became attached to security operations in various capacities.

Since they possess intimate knowledge of terrorist operations and hierarchy, security agencies have increasingly relied on some of them to help in identifying former colleagues, navigating difficult terrain, and providing information that security forces may otherwise struggle to obtain.

For authorities, the arrangement is often viewed as a necessary component of the counterterrorism campaign. However, many civilians find it deeply unsettling.

That is why, for some residents, the sight of former terrorists carrying weapons or working alongside security forces can be difficult to accept.

Bulama’s death has reopened those anxieties. Yet, the resentment many residents express today did not begin with his killing. It has been building for years.

In August 2021, as thousands of terrorist deserters began surrendering from the Sambisa Forest and the Lake Chad region, the Borno State Government convened a high-level stakeholders’ meeting at the Government House in Maiduguri. Government officials, security agencies, traditional rulers, religious leaders, civil society organisations, journalists, and community representatives gathered to discuss the reintegration of former insurgents into society.

At the end of the meeting, participants agreed in principle to forgive and accept these deserters back into their communities. Their acceptance, however, was not unconditional. The stakeholders insisted that surrendered terrorists must be thoroughly screened before reintegration. They also warned against the release of hardened extremists into the communities. They further called for meaningful reconciliation between victims and former terrorists.

The gathering was widely presented as a collective endorsement of reconciliation.

But beyond the conference hall, acceptance has proved far more complicated.

Many residents who had survived the violence felt they had not been part of that conversation. Some had lost parents, spouses, siblings, and/or children. Others had spent years moving between displacement camps, uncertain whether they would ever return home. For them, forgiveness was not a policy decision that could be reached through consensus among stakeholders. It was an intensely personal choice shaped by trauma, memory, and loss.

“The people making these decisions are not always the people who suffered directly,” Abba Gana told HumAngle.

Over the years, some residents have complained of harassment and intimidation by former terrorists and their families. Others say they simply feel the reintegration process has moved faster than community healing.

The debate became even more sensitive as some former terrorists began assisting security operations. To many survivors, the transformation can be difficult to reconcile: people who once arrived as attackers returning as neighbours and protectors, and in some cases, as men carrying authority.

Some government officials have repeatedly defended the reintegration policy. Recently, General Olufemi Oluyede, the Chief of Defence Staff and chairperson of the Operation Safe Corridor National Steering Committee, likened terrorist deserters to the biblical Prodigal Son, arguing that they deserve rehabilitation because they remain Nigerian citizens. 

Those concerns were further amplified by reports that not all former terrorists were passing through official rehabilitation channels. In 2025, a HumAngle investigation documented allegations that some defectors were quietly leaving the forest and reintegrating into communities without participating in formal deradicalisation programmes, raising questions about screening, accountability, and oversight.

Over the years, several incidents involving terrorist deserters have also contributed to public unease. In April, a former Boko Haram member allegedly shot and killed a CJTF member during an argument in the Mafa LGA. According to reports, the victim was rushed to the hospital but was confirmed dead on arrival, while the suspect was later arrested and handed over to the police.

Two years earlier, some deserters reportedly stormed a police station in Maiduguri in an attempt to secure the release of their colleagues arrested over alleged drug-related offences. In another case that generated public outrage in 2023, a deserter was accused of killing his wife at the outskirts of Maiduguri.

Concerns about the reintegration programme are not new. As far back as 2020, Ali Ndume, the senator representing Borno South Senatorial District, publicly criticised aspects of the government’s amnesty efforts, recounting the case of a deserter whom he alleged killed his father and later absconded with his property. The senator argued that the victims and survivors’ concerns were not receiving the same level of attention as the rehabilitation of the deserters.

Taken individually, the circumstances surrounding these incidents differ significantly from Bulama’s case. Collectively, however, they have helped shape public perceptions of the reintegration programmes and deepened anxieties among some residents about the monitoring, supervision, and accountability of deserters, particularly those involved in security-related activities.

For many survivors of the conflict, such incidents reinforce a lingering fear that rehabilitation alone may not be enough. Bulama’s death has now brought those long-simmering concerns into sharper focus. 

“The community is deciding on an action,” Abbas said.

Residents gathered after Bulama’s burial to discuss possible legal steps. Some suggested pooling money to hire a lawyer. Others proposed approaching human rights organisations.

“We are thinking of contributing money and hiring a lawyer,” Abbas said.

Justice and unfinished wounds

For Muhammed, grief and anger now coexist. His cousin survived displacement and years of uncertainty. He, however, did not survive a short journey to the mosque.

When asked what justice would look like for his family and the displaced community, Muhammed replied, “The law does not play by sentiments; it follows laid-down rules. I hope they will do what is right. If it is by my sentiments, I would not want them to be free. I would want them imprisoned for life.”

He paused.

“I don’t care about compensation. I don’t care about apologies. Justice for me is their imprisonment.”

A family left devastated 

Bulama was only 30 years old. He left behind two wives and five children.

He earned a living as a farmer. And before displacement forced the family from Boboshe in 2016, his father was killed. His elderly mother remains alive and still lives with them at the displacement camp.

The survival of his family, which was Bulama’s responsibility as the breadwinner, hangs uncertainly over relatives, who are also struggling to survive. “We are not rich people,” Muhammed said. “Caring for five children in addition to our own children will be difficult.”

Around the camp where he lived for over a decade, residents gather beneath makeshift shelters to rest, but the conversations about Bulama’s death remain on their lips. 

What remains immediate is his nuclear family, and the space left by a man who left home for Friday prayers and never returned.

The death of Abakar Minuki, one of the most influential leaders of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), in a joint United States and Nigerian military operation, marks one of the most consequential blows to the insurgent group in recent years. Yet, analysts and insiders familiar with the terror group warn that history offers little reason to assume the killing will significantly diminish the long-term threat posed by the group.

Multiple sources familiar with ISWAP’s internal structure told HumAngle that Minuki’s most likely successor was Baba Shuwa, commonly known as Ba Shuwa. However, indications emerging from the aftermath of the operation suggest he may also have been killed. If confirmed, the simultaneous removal of both men would trigger the most significant leadership transition in the organisation since its emergence from Boko Haram’s internal schism nearly a decade ago.

For the first time, leadership could pass not to the insurgency’s founding generation, but to a second generation of fighters raised entirely within the movement’s war ecosystem. Two names have emerged as the strongest contenders: Abu Salem and Bana Chingori.

“This would represent a generational shift unlike anything the movement has experienced before,” a source familiar with ISWAP’s internal dynamics told HumAngle.

From village barber to insurgent leader

Known variously as Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Ali al Mainoki, Abor Mainoki, Abubakar Mainoki, and Abakar Minuki, the slain commander was himself a product of the insurgency’s evolution.

Born in 1982 in the village of Mainok, a settlement along the Maiduguri-Benisheikh corridor in Borno State, he adopted his nom de guerre from his hometown. Long before becoming one of the most feared figures in the Lake Chad Basin insurgency, Minuki was known as a young barber operating a modest salon in the village.

Those who encountered him during the rise of Mohammed Yusuf’s movement recall a quiet young man who blended into daily life. That anonymity would eventually disappear. By the time Boko Haram transformed from a fringe religious movement into a powerful insurgent force, Minuki had become part of its military structure.

Abu Mus’ab, Abu Fatima, and other Boko Haram leaders had to secure Minuki’s approval before finalising their escape from Abubakar Shekau in the Sambisa forest to the islands of the Lake Chad Basin, shortly before ISWAP split from Boko Haram. Minuki not only provided refuge for members of the newly formed ISWAP fleeing Shekau’s crackdown, but also protected them and facilitated their settlement in his territory, where he ruled as one of Shekau’s most formidable Amirul Fiya.

He belonged to the first generation of fighters who entered the organisation before the 2009 uprising that transformed the movement forever.

The last men of Yusuf’s generation

To understand what Minuki represented, one must return to Boko Haram’s earliest years. According to sources familiar with the group’s formative history, Mohammed Yusuf’s original armed contingent consisted of fewer than 100 members. These men were responsible not only for security but also for recruitment.

As the organisation expanded, Yusuf reorganised fighters into military formations named after prominent figures from Islamic history. Among them were the Zubair Ibn Awwam Battalion, Umar Farouk Battalion, Salmanu Farisu Battalion, Khalid Ibn Walid Battalion, and Salaudeen Ayubi Battalion.

Several battalions survived years of expansion, state crackdowns, factional disputes, and battlefield losses. Over time, however, only two retained their original lineage and remain operational: the Timbuktu formation, associated with Faruk, and the Buhairiya structure, which absorbed the remnants of several earlier battalions.

Minuki was already a Naqeeb, a junior commander, during the pre-2009 period. Ba Shuwa, by contrast, was merely a foot soldier. While Abu Salem, who is now touted as the likely successor of ISWAP, was still a child. That generational distinction highlights that few survivors remain from the movement’s founding era.

The rise of the second generation

If Minuki and Ba Shuwa are both dead, the succession process could elevate men who never knew the insurgency before it became a regional war. Among them, Abu Salem stands out. Sources describe him as both a military commander and a religious authority within the insurgency. He currently serves as Amirul Fiya, based in Krinua, a battlefield commander with influence extending beyond purely military affairs.

His biography mirrors the insurgency’s own evolution. The son of a respected first-generation Boko Haram member, Abu Salem benefited from mentorship by senior leaders from an early age. His pedigree gave him access to influential networks that many younger fighters lacked.

He also carries the scars of combat. During one battle with members of Nigeria’s armed forces, he sustained serious gunshot wounds to the lower abdomen. The injuries required long-term medical management involving a Foley catheter. According to sources familiar with his condition, he continued participating in military operations despite the injury for years.

Within ISWAP, Abu Salem has cultivated a reputation for bravery, clerical authority, and charisma. Several sources compared his influence to that once exercised by Abu Musab al-Barnawi and Minuki himself.

Another contender is Bana Chingori, regarded as Ba Shuwa’s closest deputy. Unlike Abu Salem, however, Bana faces a structural challenge: He does not originate from the Faruk battalion network, which sources estimate supplies approximately 70 per cent of ISWAP’s current fighters and leadership, including Minuki.

In an organisation where battlefield alliances and battalion loyalties remain deeply influential, that may prove decisive.

The ethnic question behind ISWAP leadership

Leadership succession inside ISWAP is not determined solely by military competence. HumAngle understands that ethnicity, lineage, dialect, and social hierarchy continue to shape power within the organisation.

Public portrayals often reduce Boko Haram and ISWAP to ideological movements driven exclusively by extremist interpretations of Islam. The reality is considerably more complex. The overwhelming majority of ISWAP’s estimated fighting force originates from the Kanuri ethnic nationality, which has historically been dominant across the Lake Chad Basin. Yet, the Kanuris are far from homogeneous.

They are divided into numerous dialect communities, clan networks, and social categories that carry significant political weight, all of which the insurgents take very seriously. These divisions influence recruitment, promotions, alliances, and leadership legitimacy.

Mohammed Yusuf, for example, belonged to the Manga dialect group, one of the most prestigious Kanuri communities. His lineage strengthened his standing within the movement’s formative years. Abubakar Shekau came from the Kaama-speaking Ngala’a community, often viewed as socially marginal within traditional Kanuri hierarchies.

Several researchers and former members argue that Shekau’s relationship with the broader movement was shaped partly by this outsider status. Minuki himself emerged from Borno Central, where multiple Kanuri dialect groups intersect. Ba Shuwa’s ancestry has also been the subject of internal scrutiny.

Sources say rivals occasionally questioned the purity of his Kanuri lineage, reflecting how deeply social stratification continues to influence perceptions of authority within insurgency networks in the Lake Chad basin.

For this reason, sources told HumAngle, the emergence of a non-Kanuri leader remains highly unlikely. Even if such a figure were elevated, sustaining authority would be extraordinarily difficult. “The movement talks about Islam and the caliphate,” one source familiar with internal deliberations said, “But when leadership questions arise, ethnicity still matters.”

The foreign fighters effect

The leadership transition unfolding inside ISWAP is taking place within an organisation that has undergone profound internal transformation in recent years. Sources familiar with the group’s operations told HumAngle that the growing presence of foreign fighters from across the Sahel and beyond has reshaped not only the movement’s military tactics but also its internal security culture.

As foreign fighters increasingly settled in the Lake Chad region, ISWAP imposed some of its strictest operational security measures to date. Members were ordered to delete existing photographs and cease documenting activities through images. The use of smartphones was largely prohibited, reflecting mounting concerns about surveillance, geolocation tracking, and intelligence penetration. 

The restrictions marked a sharp departure from earlier years when both Boko Haram and ISWAP routinely photographed preaching sessions, training exercises, weapon displays, and daily life in territories under their control. Such imagery formed a central component of the group’s propaganda and recruitment machinery.

According to sources, the new rules were enforced ruthlessly. Several fighters accused of taking photographs or retaining images on their devices were reportedly executed. The killings served as both punishment and deterrence, reinforcing a culture of secrecy that now permeates much of the organisation. 

“The message was simple,” one source familiar with the group’s internal directives said. “Any digital trace that could expose fighters, commanders, or locations became a security threat.” The arrival of experienced foreign fighters appears to have accelerated this shift. Many brought with them lessons learned from conflicts across the Sahel, where drone surveillance, signals intelligence, and electronic tracking have increasingly shaped the battlefield.

The influence of foreign fighters introduced a greater emphasis on counter-intelligence, operational discipline, compartmentalisation, and the elimination of digital footprints that could expose personnel, camps, supply routes, or command structures. The result is an insurgent organisation that has become considerably more cautious than its predecessors. While leadership losses continue to disrupt, ISWAP’s evolving security architecture suggests a movement increasingly focused on institutional survival rather than on dependence on individual commanders.

Fractured, not defeated

The killing of Minuki undoubtedly represents a serious disruption, and the elimination of Ba Shuwa, if confirmed, would considerably deepen that disruption. Yet, military and intelligence officials caution against interpreting the development as a strategic defeat for ISWAP.

“The organisation has experienced similar moments before with the deaths of Mohammed Yusuf, Mamman Nur, Abu Musab al Barnawi, Ba Idrissa, and several other senior commanders, each of which generated predictions of organisational collapse,” said Kyari Mustafa, a conflict researcher in Maiduguri.

Those predictions never materialised. Instead, the group adapted. The pattern has become familiar across the Lake Chad Basin.

HumAngle has documented a pattern where successful military campaigns weaken the insurgency. Communities experience a period of relative calm. The group regroups, reassesses, and eventually resumes attacks. This cycle has repeated itself for more than 15 years. What makes the current moment significant is the possibility that an entire generation of commanders may be disappearing simultaneously. If Minuki and Ba Shuwa are indeed gone, the future of ISWAP may soon be shaped by men who were toddlers when Mohammed Yusuf built the movement.

Whether that transition produces fragmentation, renewal, or further violence remains uncertain. What is clear is that the Lake Chad Basin has witnessed enough leadership decapitations to know that the death of a commander, however important, does not automatically mean the end of the war.

Two years ago, Bashir Muhammad received an invitation to attend a journalism summit in Niamey but declined. That decision, and the argument it provoked, told him everything he needed to know.

He runs one of the growing number of Hausa-language digital news platforms that have emerged across northern Nigeria in the past decade, serving local audiences that legacy English-language media have largely ignored. That profile made him a target. In 2024, Bashir was approached by Mariam Laouali – a woman known across West African Hausa media circles as Sarkin Abzin. She is a prominent Nigerien broadcaster and, as he would come to understand, a committed supporter of the military regime that had seized power in Niamey the previous year.

In July 2023, the military junta, led by General Abdurrahman Tchiani, overthrew the democratically elected President Muhammad Bazoum. The coup met with strong resistance from the international community, particularly the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), under the leadership of Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu. This led to severe diplomatic tensions between ECOWAS and the new military regime in Niger, culminating in threats of invasion from Nigerian leaders and ultimately the division of ECOWAS and the formation of the Alliance of the Sahel States (AES). While some diplomatic efforts have been restored, tensions remain, and the Niger Republic, supported by Russia and its AES allies, has been engaged in information efforts to attack ECOWAS countries, particularly Nigeria and Benin Republic. Bashir felt this approach could be part of the recruitment efforts. 

The pitch sounded professional. Sarkin Abzin told him of a pan-African summit of Hausa-language journalists to be convened in Niamey. It was the first of its kind, according to her. She described it as an exercise in cross-border media cooperation and a chance for journalists from across the continent’s Hausa-speaking belt to build something together. 

Bashir had questions, but he did not like the answers, so he declined.

Sarkin Abzin pushed back, insisting that he should consider it, but he became more suspicious. The conversation escalated. By the end, she was visibly frustrated. It ended there. 

“She didn’t take it well,” Bashir told HumAngle, sitting in his home office while casually scrolling on his computer, searching for her Facebook page. “The way she reacted told you this wasn’t just about journalism.”

He was right. It was not all about journalism. The summit in Niamey was just bait. What Sarkin Abzin and her sponsors in the Niger Republic seemed to want was access to northern Nigeria’s forty million Hausa speakers and to exploit their grievances and distrust of Nigerian leaders.

Many Nigerians were consumed by anxiety and bitterness over the country’s dire economic pressures. Many also harboured deep anger toward their leaders – particularly President Bola Tinubu, against whom protests erupted in August 2024, during which some demonstrators raised Russian flags and called for a coup. For that reason, this was a country where recruiting the discontented would come easily, because the grievances were already there, waiting.

Pro-junta actors and AES-aligned influence networks have been weaponising TikTok’s virality to erode confidence in Nigerian democratic leadership, particularly targeting President Tinubu and the broader ECOWAS establishment.

Online influencers and sympathetic media outlets, including some based within Nigeria itself, have circulated claims accusing Nigerian politicians of backing insurgent networks and conspiring with foreign powers to destabilise the AES states.

The recruitment drive

Sarkin Abzin’s tour of northern Nigerian newsrooms and radio stations in 2024 was, in retrospect, the visible edge of something much larger. She moved through Kano, through the northwest, knocking on the doors of editors and station managers, carrying the same pitch: come to Niamey, meet your counterparts, and build solidarity. Several journalists, like Bashir, declined quietly. A general manager at a prominent radio station in Kano, who pleaded anonymity, told HumAngle that Sarkin Abzin had reached him, but that he had turned her down.

“Looking at the timing when there was a diplomatic rift between Nigeria and Niger, and the suspicion of foreign influence, I felt it was unwise to join,” he said.

However, not everyone had the luxury of that suspicion, or the will to act on it. Musa Abba (not real name), a journalist at a private radio station in Kebbi State, saw a conference invitation and a chance to connect with Hausa journalists beyond Nigeria’s borders. His station was invited and the managers nominated him. Accommodation and food were covered by the organisers. The journey, according to him, was arranged through the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), in a vehicle shared with other attendees and, notably, with some politicians and government officials who had also been invited.

What he found in Niamey, however, upended the premise of the invitation entirely.

He concluded that “it was a sophisticated plan to form Hausa journalists who will be promoting the Nigerien junta and anti-West sentiment across Hausa-speaking countries.”

On her TikTok page, Sarkin Abzin does not hide her bias. She promotes Sahel juntas and specifically asks her followers to promote Tchiani. 

In a social media exchange with Fati Niger, a Kannywood musician originally from the Niger Republic who had called for a return to democratic rule, Sarkin Abzin’s response betrayed her sentiments. “We don’t care about entertainment,” she mentioned in a TikTok video. What mattered, she said, was building their country and confronting those she described as “hypocrites and oppressors within the West,” as well as “hypocrites among us here, those in exile in every country in the world, including Nigeria, and those Nigerians who support the old system [of democracy] and do not stand behind these soldiers under Abdourahamane Tchiani.”

The summit Sarkin Abzin organised had state backing, institutional cover, and a well-hosted programme. It had everything, in other words, that a genuine journalism conference would have – except genuine journalism at its centre.

The irony is that the junta in Niger has been repressing and arresting journalists in the country. Moussa Ngom, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s Francophone Africa representative, explained that “arrest and detention have become tools of choice for Nigerien authorities to try to control information they find undesirable.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that in October 2025 six journalists were arrested in Niamey – Moussa Kaka and Abdoul Aziz of Saraounia TV; Ibro Chaibou and Souleymane Brah from the online publication Voice of the People; Youssouf Seriba of Les Échos du Niger; and Oumarou Kané, founder of the magazine Le Hérisson – over their alleged role in circulating a government press briefing invitation on social media, criticising the introduction of the mandatory payment for “Solidarity Fund for the Safeguarding of the Homeland”, a form of security levy in Niger. 

The conference that wasn’t

The organisation behind the summit, Kungiyar Yan Jarida Na Afrika Masu Magana Da Harshen Hausa or, in French, Résegu Africain des journalistes en langue Haoussa (Association of Hausa-speaking Journalists in Africa), was founded by Sarkin Abzin herself. She held a senior position at RTN, the Nigerien state broadcaster. Her organisation, she told prospective attendees, had the backing of the Nigerien government institutions. 

Inside the hall at the Centre International de Conférences Mahatma Gandhi in Niamey, when the summit was opened on Aug. 24, 2024, the keynote speakers were not press freedom advocates, editors or media economists. They were politicians. Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine appeared as Tchiani’s representative, delivering a speech whose original French had been translated into Hausa. He spoke about Niger’s exit from ECOWAS as a show of sovereignty.

The junta had, by this point, accused ECOWAS countries, particularly Nigeria and Benin, of colluding with France to destabilise Niger and sabotage its economy- allegations that, according to independent fact-checkers, had no credible evidentiary basis but which had proven effective at consolidating domestic support by replacing accountability with external threat. The Niamey summit was the moment that the narrative was offered to Nigerian voices who could carry it home.

Among those who spoke was Hamza Almustafa, a Nigerian retired general and a politician who used the platform to denounce the West. Najaatu Muhammad, a prominent northern Nigerian political figure, delivered what several attendees described as the most incendiary address of the proceedings. She told her audience that the Nigerian federal government was conspiring to sever Niger from Nigeria – to cut through bonds of religion and culture that no colonial border had ever truly divided. Abuja, she suggested, served Paris and Washington before it served Kano or Sokoto.

“It was not really a journalists’ meeting,” Musa told HumAngle, “By the time the politicians started speaking, those of us who understood what was happening knew we had made a mistake.”

Sarkin Abzin’s organisation had achieved, in a single day, what overt propaganda rarely manages: it had placed legitimate reporters in a room and given the junta’s narratives the texture of a press conference. The journalists went to Niamey to cover something. They came back as part of it. 

HumAngle reached out to Sarkin Abzin for comment. She did not respond. 

The Hausa messages 

The Niamey summit was not the opening move in this campaign. 

On Christmas Day of 2024, General Tchiani sat before the cameras of Radio-Télévision du Niger and delivered what a casual viewer might have mistaken for a holiday address. Although French had been Niger’s official language, he spoke in Hausa – a lingua franca in both Niger and most of northern Nigeria, spoken by millions across West Africa. 

His choice of language was deliberate. The message was not addressed to Niamey alone. It was addressed to Kano and other Hausa-speaking states, particularly in Northern Nigeria, where there is an already visible pro-Russian and anti-West sentiment, as reflected in 2024 when Russian flags were raised during a nationwide protest against insecurity and economic hardship.

The claims Tchiani made were engineered to sound verified. He alleged that France had paid Nigerian authorities to establish a military base in Borno State with the sole aim of destabilising Niger and its Sahel Alliance partners. He also accused France of supplying Boko Haram fighters in the Lake Chad basin with anti-aircraft weapons. He claimed that France and ISWAP had struck an agreement to establish a Lakurawa training camp in the Gaba forest near Sokoto, and that Nigerian leaders were aware. He named Nigerian security officials by name. He cited dates and operational specifics to express the grammar of verified intelligence, though deployed in the service of disinformation.

The hook embedded in the allegations was not entirely invented, which is precisely what made it effective. Nigeria’s Defence Headquarters had classified Lakurawa as a terrorist organisation with jihadist affiliations just weeks earlier, in November 2024. HumAngle’s own investigations had revealed the group had operated in the northwest for around six years, with local security authorities having previously and dangerously dismissed it as a harmless faction of herders from across the border. The name was already known. The fear was already settled. Tchiani simply attached a culprit to both.

In Sokoto and Zamafara, where communities had been facing terrorist violence for years, the allegation did not sound outlandish.

“People said, ‘We always knew France was behind this,’” a civil society worker in Kano who monitors social media, Muhammad Hamza, told HumAngle. “Tchiani just confirmed what they already believed.”

When BBC Hausa published testimonies refuting Tchiani’s claims, the reaction was contemptuous. “We know you won’t agree because you’re all on the same side,” one commenter wrote. “But we believe what he said. We have seen the signs.”

A survey conducted by HumAngle in Kano State found that 50 per cent of the respondents believed Tchiani’s claims, 30 per cent were undecided, and only 20 per cent rejected them outright. Many pointed to President Tinubu’s perceived closeness to France as a reason for suspicion. 

One respondent, Abubakar Saidu, explained his reasoning, “President Tinubu has been close to France since he assumed power, and we all know that France can create terrorists to attack Niger due to their diplomatic fallout.”

Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s National Security Advisor, had attempted to refute the claim, but it was unsuccessful. According to him, “Nigeria has never given its land to any foreign troops—not even Britain. When the [United States] requested a military base, we denied them, but Niger gave them.”

In a country with an audience that receives official rebuttals as confirmation of the original charge, its psyche could easily be captured. Nigerians didn’t believe Ribadu. 

“This is the new reality of information warfare. It is no longer just about truth versus falsehood. It is about who controls the language in which truth is told. It is about who defines the enemy—and, ultimately, who is believed,” Kano-based security analyst Balarabe Ismail told HumAngle in April 2025.

Tchiani returned to the theme in June 2025, this time in a three-hour televised address delivered in Hausa, Zarma, and French, in which he again accused Nigeria of conspiring with France and the United States to sponsor terrorism, alleging a covert meeting in Abuja in December 2024 attended by CIA agents and Nigerian security officials who discussed arming groups targeting Niger. 

The headquarters of disinformation 

Analysts had already identified increased activity from disinformation networks affiliated with Russia in Niger following the coup in Niger. 

According to a report by Al Jazeera, since the July 2023 coup, Niger had become the latest hotbed of disinformation in the Sahel, with social media inundated by false rumours, misleading videos, and manipulated audio clips. The template, according to the report, was borrowed from Mali and Burkina Faso, where Wagner-linked networks had deployed online assets, locally cultivated contacts, and Russian state media to produce a sustained information environment that preceded, accelerated, and then legitimised military takeovers. In Niger, the same playbook ran faster because the infrastructure was already warm.

Following the death of Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, these operations were absorbed into two successor structures: the Russian Africa Corps, which provides military presence on the ground, and the Africa Initiative news agency, connected to Russian intelligence services and overseen from Moscow. Africa Initiative is an upgrade and institutional legitimacy that Wagner never possessed. With press credentials, cultural programming, and regional language capacity, it successfully dressed influence as media development.

The three Alliance of Sahel States junta leaders — in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso — have converged around a shared political project. They launched a joint television channel to promote a unified narrative across their territories, a regional media infrastructure whose audience mandate extends explicitly beyond their borders — into the Hausa-speaking communities of northern Nigeria, who share language, faith, and enough legitimate frustration to make the narratives land without the need for fabrication in every detail. 

Sarkin Abzin’s journalist recruitment initiative sits within this structure. The goal may not have been to turn Nigerian journalists into salaried agents but to create a class of northern Nigerian media voices who feel a degree of solidarity with the junta’s framing. 

A security analyst who works on influence operations in West Africa and spoke to HumAngle on condition of anonymity offered some insight. “What Niger and Russia are doing is not complicated,” he said. “They are creating the conditions under which Nigerian citizens begin to see their own government as the enemy.”

The operation has not yet achieved its full objective. Bashir Muhammad’s refusal was one of the resistance points among others. Some journalists who attended the Niamey summit have since spoken, cautiously, about the gap between what they were promised and what they found. The WhatsApp group formed after the summit, according to Musa Abba, the journalist who attended, had almost collapsed. 

“They promised to continue communicating via WhatsApp and to organise more summits in other countries, but more than a year later they said nothing and group members didn’t say anything either,” he said. Even Sarkin Abzin’s Facebook page is no longer active.  

This article was produced by HumAngle with support from the African Academy for Open Source Investigations (AAOSI) and the African Digital Democracy Observatory (ADDO) as part of an initiative by Code for Africa (CfA). Visit https://disinfo.africa/ for more information.

There are moments when nations move dangerously close to collapse before the public fully realises it. It begins with carefully framed messages that conceal or even deny a storm, then the country is described as dangerous, lawless, and extremist-tolerant. By the time formal consequences arrive, the political judgment has often already been made. By late 2025, Nigeria was approaching that threshold in Washington DC, the United States’ capital. 

Donald Trump was accusing the Nigerian state of failing Christians, and Republican lawmakers were describing the country as one of the world’s deadliest countries for Christians. Evangelical organisations in the United States were also mobilising around massacre narratives from Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, and parts of the North Central region. These led to congressional pressure, visa restrictions, and discussions of sanctions. Later, Trump threatened military action and warned that the United States could move into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the killings continued.

Inside sections of conservative American politics, Nigeria was no longer merely a troubled African country but was becoming a pariah state, a symbol of global Christian persecution, failed governance, Islamist expansion, and state weakness.

Then, the trajectory shifted. Within months, the same Trump administration that had threatened consequences against Nigeria began working with Abuja on counterterrorism cooperation. American intelligence support deepened, and US military involvement expanded, leading to widely criticised (for their lack of any real impact) airstrikes targeting Islamic State-linked and Lakurawa positions in northwestern Nigeria in December 2025. However, in May 2026, Trump publicly celebrated a successful joint Nigerian and American operation that killed Abu Bilal al-Minuki, described in both countries’ security circles as one of the most important Islamic State figures operating across Africa.

Nigeria had moved from an accused state to an operational partner, even though many have wondered what the cost might have been or continues to be. Behind that dramatic transition was one of the most consequential diplomatic-security campaigns mounted by Abuja in recent years. It involved diplomats, intelligence officials, military officers, embassy staff, policy advisers, lobbyists, diaspora actors, civil society networks, and security partners.

At the centre of this coordination stood National Security Adviser (NSA) Nuhu Ribadu, the coordinating figure who pulled the necessary elements together: the presidency’s political authority, the security establishment’s operational credibility, the embassy’s diplomatic access, the military’s counterterror capacity, policy networks in Washington, and a message that American officials could not easily dismiss.

Working with figures including a senior Nigerian career diplomat in DC, an influential woman at the NSA’s secretariat, senior defence and intelligence officials, foreign affairs officials, and other intermediaries, Ribadu helped steer Nigeria away from a potentially disastrous confrontation with Washington, DC.

The crisis Abuja could not treat as routine

Nigeria has faced criticism from the United States before on corruption, election disputes, human rights abuses, military excesses, and oil theft — all governance failures. None of those carried the same immediate danger as the late-2025 escalation. This crisis was different because it had moved beyond policy disagreement into moral accusation. The phrase “Christian genocide” changed the stakes.

Inside conservative American evangelical circles, Nigeria had already become symbolic before Trump’s escalation. Reports from groups such as Open Doors, International Christian Concern, Aid to the Church in Need, and Nigerian Christian advocacy organisations had repeatedly described Nigeria as one of the world’s deadliest places for Christians. Killings in Adamawa, Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, parts of Niger State, and other flashpoints circulated widely through American church networks. 

Nigeria’s First Lady, Pastor Remi Tinubu, also operated far beyond the ceremonial margins. Using her deep evangelical and clerical networks, she became a decisive force in breaking resistance, opening doors that formal diplomacy and security channels could not. Her interventions softened hardened positions, clearing the path for diplomatic and security engagement to gain some traction.

“Nigeria is facing a complex security crisis that has sustained for over two decades and has currently metastasised into several violent crimes, including active insurgencies, farmer-herder violence, armed groups, gang violence, ethnic militias, and vigilantism, among several others,” Managing Director of Beacon Intelligence Consulting, Dr Kabiru Adamu, told HumAngle.

“While the triggers of the violence sometimes include identity such as ethnicity and religion, other factors, including socio-economic, political and environmental causes, are behind the violence.”

Amara Nwankpa, Director General, Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Foundation, argued that acknowledging complexity should not become a shield against responsibility.

“Nigeria is facing a complex security collapse,” he agreed. “But saying the crisis is ‘complex’ should not become a way to avoid the harder question of why some communities consistently suffer more than others.”

“The Nigerian state is weak. In many places, it genuinely struggles to protect people because of overstretched security forces, corruption, political fragmentation, and poor state capacity. That matters. A state that cannot protect is different from a state that deliberately chooses not to. But that distinction does not remove responsibility,” he told HumAngle.

“The mistake of the ‘Christian genocide’ framing is that it treats all the violence as one coordinated religious project,” he said. “The mistake of the ‘it’s complicated’ response is that it sometimes uses complexity as an excuse for inaction.”

Johnstone Kpilaakaa, an award-winning journalist who has closely followed the Middle Belt crisis, submits that the violence cannot be separated from the collapse of state protection across rural Nigeria. “Overall, the crisis reflects the broader failure of the Nigerian state to provide protection for its citizens,” he said. “Rural communities in the Middle Belt, many of which already experience a near-total absence of state presence, even in basic social services, have become especially vulnerable to terror attacks and organised violence.”

According to Kpilaakaa, the genocide narrative gained traction in the Middle Belt partly because many of the most devastated communities were Christian. “Historical memory also plays a role. The legacy of the 19th-century Sokoto Jihad, which faced resistance in parts of the region, continues to shape perceptions and fears today.” Children, he added, are raised with those stories, and those inherited fears continue to shape how violence is interpreted.

James Barnett, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, framed the crisis more as systemic collapse than coordinated extermination. “Nigeria is experiencing something more like a nationwide security crisis than a specific campaign targeted at one group,” Barnett said. “This is a collapse of state capacity that is felt in all corners of the country to different degrees, and it’s allowed militant and criminal groups of various stripes to kill, loot, and take over communities with significant impunity.”

He acknowledged that some armed actors operate with religious motivations. But much of the violence, he argued, is driven by opportunism, local disputes, criminal economies, and governance breakdown. That complexity became Abuja’s central diplomatic argument later in Washington.

The conservative machinery turns against Nigeria

Several American political actors helped turn the issue into a Washington crisis. Senator Ted Cruz became one of the strongest congressional voices accusing Nigeria of systemic anti-Christian violence. He introduced the Nigeria Religious Freedom Accountability Act of 2025 and repeatedly cited casualty figures involving Christians killed, churches destroyed, and communities displaced.

Congressman Riley Moore also became a central figure in the pressure campaign. He pushed the White House towards stronger action and publicly accused the Nigerian state of failing to protect persecuted Christians. But the deeper force came from evangelical networks. American evangelical activism is not simply moral advocacy but also an organised political ecosystem. It has media platforms, donor structures, church mobilisation capacity, congressional access, lobbying relationships, legal advocacy groups, and influence inside Republican politics.

Pastors, televangelists, diaspora activists, advocacy groups, conservative influencers, and social media personalities amplified reports from Nigeria, often portraying the country as the global epicentre of anti-Christian violence. Prayer campaigns followed. At the same time, misinformation and disinformation flooded digital spaces, blurring the line between verified atrocities and fabricated claims. Across Telegram channels, Facebook pages, WhatsApp broadcasts, podcasts, YouTube ministries, and conservative media networks, emotionally charged narratives circulated with little scrutiny, shaping international perceptions of Nigeria’s security crisis.

Yet even some analysts sympathetic to Christian suffering warned that the narrative was becoming distorted. “In attempting to draw global attention to the suffering of communities in the Middle Belt, some evangelical advocacy networks and social media actors have also oversimplified the crisis,” Kpilaakaa said.

“In certain cases, this has involved the circulation of half-truths, selective reporting, or sensationalised accounts that do not fully capture the complexity of the situation.” He stressed that multiple forms of violence were being collapsed into a single frame. “Beyond terrorist violence, the Middle Belt also faces attacks carried out by local militia groups and criminal networks, particularly in states such as Benue,” he said.

“Unfortunately, many of these distinct forms of violence are often merged into a single narrative of religious persecution, which can make the crisis more difficult to properly understand, analyse, and address.”

Nwankpa reached a similar conclusion, though he warned against dismissing the suffering that fuels those narratives.

“Some evangelical networks and social media platforms have distorted global understanding of the violence, but not by inventing suffering,” he said. “The suffering is real. Many Christian communities, especially in parts of the North and Middle Belt, have experienced terrible violence.”

According to him, the distortion emerges when an entire national security collapse is reduced to a single religious explanation.

“Incentives also drive that simplification. In the US, persecution narratives mobilise donors and audiences very effectively. Clear stories raise more money than messy realities.”

He added that diaspora activism had amplified simplified narratives globally, often detached from the wider context of Nigeria’s security breakdown.

Kabiru Adamu was direct. “Yes,” he said when asked whether evangelical networks and social media had distorted international understanding of Nigeria’s violence. “Their narrative of Christian genocide and the bandying of falsified figures contributed to the Trump administration’s earlier stance.”

Still, he warned against swinging to denial. “This is not to say Christians are not being killed. They are. But so too are Muslims.”

Christians had been killed, churches attacked, villages emptied, and priests abducted. But Muslims are also dying in larger numbers as Nigeria’s conflicts defy simple religious labels. Islamic State affiliates targeted Muslim communities, soldiers, traders, aid workers, schools, and transport routes. Armed groups kidnapped indiscriminately. Farmer-herder conflict, jihadist expansion, criminal economies, land pressure, governance failure, and communal grievances all overlapped. The genocide frame compressed those realities into one dangerous explanation. 

Trump turns pressure into a state crisis

In late 2025, Trump’s administration escalated pressure against Nigeria under international religious freedom frameworks, including the Country of Particular Concern designation. He accused Nigeria of allowing Christians to be killed by “Radical Islamists” and threatened possible military action. 

For Abuja, the implications were dire. They could bring about diplomatic isolation, damage to intelligence and security cooperation, and investor panic in an already fragile economy. This was where Ribadu’s office became central. The National Security Adviser understood that Nigeria could not defeat the pressure campaign through blunt denial.

So, Abuja adopted a more difficult strategy that involved acknowledging the insecurity while rejecting the genocide label and repositioning the crisis as part of a broader counterterror and state fragility problem.

Kpilaakaa argued that, “The absence of proactive state action, credible investigations, and timely justice creates space for speculation and mistrust, while trauma inevitably shapes the perceptions and judgment of survivors.” 

The Nigerian response, therefore, focused less on arguing morality and more on changing strategic calculations in Washington. The message became simple: weakening Nigeria would strengthen the so-called Islamic State.

Nwankpa believes Ribadu’s intervention succeeded not because it resolved the crisis, but because it changed how Washington interpreted it.

“Ribadu did not solve the crisis,” he said. “What he did was change the diplomatic framing, and he did it very effectively. He shifted the conversation from ‘Nigeria is allowing Christians to be killed’ to ‘Nigeria and the US are facing a shared terrorism problem.’ That helped cool tensions with Washington and turned pressure into cooperation.”

But he warned that the strategic success came with consequences.

“Once the relationship became centred on counterterrorism, the space for human rights and accountability pressure became smaller,” Nwankpa said. “The focus moved from protecting vulnerable communities to fighting shared threats. In that sense, the deeper issue of impunity remained unresolved. It was postponed.”

Ribadu’s reframing strategy

Ribadu’s role with coordination happened because many parts needed to move in specific directions. For example, the presidency had to provide political authority, the military had to provide operational credibility, diplomats had to reopen channels in Washington, intelligence officials had to frame the regional threat, lobbyists and intermediaries had to reach spaces formal diplomacy could not easily penetrate, and the central message itself had to remain consistent.

Nigeria was a battered state confronting overlapping extremist, criminal, communal, and regional threats, and if the state weakened further, Boko Haram and a confluence of other terror groups across the country would benefit.

Kabiru Adamu believes Ribadu deserves significant credit for the diplomatic de-escalation. “The NSA Nuhu Ribadu can be credited for de-escalating the earlier US stance when the Trump Administration, after designating Nigeria a country of particular concern due to perceived religious persecution and Trump’s threat to come ‘guns a blazing,’” he said. “Ribadu led a high-level delegation to the US and followed through with engagements that led to the creation of a joint working group between the two countries as well as deeper defence engagement.”

Barnett reached a similar conclusion. “The Nigerian government has responded pretty effectively on the diplomatic front so far,” he said. “After initially being caught unprepared for the Country of Particular Concern designation, it realised that it wouldn’t get very far by publicly protesting Trump’s narrative and instead sought to leverage Washington’s focus on Nigeria to secure new security cooperation.”

That recalibration reshaped the relationship because even though the United States still publicly raised concerns about religious freedom, Nigeria became increasingly valuable as a regional counterterror partner. Barnett noted that the new working relationship also elevated Ribadu internationally. “The US-Nigeria working group has boosted Ribadu’s profile internationally,” he said.

Kpilaakaa observed that Abuja’s strategy prevented a deeper rupture. “Despite recent joint military operations in Metele, Borno State, which reportedly led to the death of a senior ISWAP leader, some influential American politicians continue to frame US involvement as part of an effort to stop what they describe as a genocide against Christians in Nigeria only,” he said.

“That suggests the National Security Adviser has not fully succeeded in reshaping the narrative.” Even so, he argued that the cooperation itself remained strategically necessary. “Beyond the competing narratives, effective counterterrorism operations remain in Nigeria’s national interest,” he said. “If military cooperation is conducted professionally, ethically, and strategically, the outcome should contribute to greater security and stability for all Nigerians, regardless of religion or ethnicity.”

Why Trump changed course

Trump’s shift appeared dramatic from Abuja. One moment, he was threatening Nigeria. Months later, he was celebrating joint counterterror operations with Nigerian forces. But analysts say this logic was less ideological than transactional. “The change in stance by the Trump administration from declared hostility to now engagement is mainly because of the diplomatic engagements by Nigeria, including Ribadu’s engagements,” Adamu said.

“There is also the lobby group contracted by the Federal Government that may have played a role in supporting a de-escalation.” Barnett believes Nigeria itself was never central to Trump’s broader worldview. “Nigeria is not actually a foreign policy priority for Trump, despite how much it might feel to Nigerians like he is now a looming presence in their politics,” he said.

“The US government has dedicated much more time and resources to its Venezuela and Iran policies, for example, than it has to Africa. When Trump threatened to go into Nigeria ‘guns a blazing’ last year, he was essentially calling on the US national security bureaucracy to come up with ideas to ‘do something’ in Nigeria that would look impressive but not consume significant energy and resources or entail political risk.”

The solution Washington eventually settled on was a partnership rather than confrontation. “The US military, for its part, would always prefer to fight jihadists with the help of a capable local partner rather than opposition from the host government,” Barnett explained.

“So, when the Nigerian government signalled it was willing to work with the US military, that gave the Trump administration an opening to show its supporters that it was fighting terrorists, supposedly in defence of Christians overseas, without engaging in a messy humanitarian intervention or state-building exercise.”

Nwankpa argued that the political logic behind Trump’s shift reflected both American strategic interests and Nigerian sensitivity to external pressure.

“Trump changed position because the political framing changed,” he said. “Threatening Nigeria appealed to parts of his evangelical and religious freedom base. Working with Nigeria appealed to American security interests. Once Abuja accepted the counterterrorism framing, Trump no longer needed a public confrontation.”

But he also pointed to a deeper Nigerian calculation.

“Most Nigerians want stronger security responses, but very few want foreign powers taking over the process,” Nwankpa said. “There is a strong sovereignty instinct in Nigeria. External pressure that appears paternalistic often collapses domestic coalition support, even among people who agree with the underlying criticism… Ribadu’s approach worked partly because it allowed Nigeria to engage America as a partner, not as a country being lectured or managed from outside.”

Kpilaakaa argued that Trump never completely abandoned the persecution narrative. “I do not believe there has been a complete shift in position,” he said. “Even recently, Trump shared material on Truth Social that reinforced the same narrative that frames every attack as religious persecution targeting Christians alone.”

He added that religious framing remains deeply embedded in Trump-era politics. “The use of religion, in this case Christianity, as a framework for discussing political and security issues is synonymous with the Trump administration,” he said.

Yet, Abuja avoided turning the disagreement into a public confrontation.

“It is also significant that Nigerian authorities have largely avoided engaging in public confrontation with Trump or his allies,” Kpilaakaa said. “Instead, they have focused on maintaining cooperation around the shared objective of combating terrorism and protecting lives, irrespective of religion or ethnicity.”

The Sahel and Nigeria’s strategic value

Regional realities strengthened Abuja’s hand. The Sahel was deteriorating rapidly; Mali had drifted away from Western influence, Burkina Faso remained unstable, Niger’s political upheaval disrupted Western security architecture, and Russian-linked actors expanded across the region.

Washington needed a capable African partner, and Nigeria’s geography, population, intelligence infrastructure, military size, and position between multiple conflict systems made it indispensable. Ribadu’s team aggressively leveraged that reality.

Weakening Nigeria, they argued, would not save Christians. It would strengthen the very extremist groups killing Christians and Muslims alike. That logic resonated strongly inside American security circles because it aligned humanitarian concern with strategic necessity.

The limits of the recovery

None of this erased the suffering that produced the controversy. Benue, Plateau, and Southern Kaduna still bleed. Communities across Niger State, Borno, Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Yobe, and Adamawa continue to experience displacement, extortion, killings, and fear.

The average Nigerian, irrespective of their faith and ethnicity, genuinely believes the Nigerian state has failed them and the state must do more, not only to save lives, but to regain their trust in governance. The deeper question now is whether security cooperation alone can sustain the diplomatic recovery if the violence continues unresolved.

Kpilaakaa warned that “military cooperation alone will not resolve the deeper structural issues driving instability in the Middle Belt.” “Addressing land disputes, prolonged displacement, impunity, and the absence of justice remains critical,” he said.

He pointed to one grievance. “One of the most persistent grievances among affected communities is that many victims have spent more than a decade in displacement, with little accountability for the violence they endured. Without credible justice, reconstruction, and long-term conflict resolution, security cooperation may contain the violence temporarily, but it will not produce lasting peace or stability.”

“No,” Adamu said when asked whether security cooperation could survive if killings and impunity continue. “Evangelical groups will continue to mount domestic pressure on the Trump administration should the killings continue.”

Barnett also cautioned that Abuja should not assume permanent stability in the relationship. “You can’t be too certain where things go from here as Trump is notoriously unpredictable,” he said.

“He might be satisfied with periodic strikes against the Islamic State that make for good Fox News content while the militaries engage in more routine behind-the-scenes coordination and training.”

But the pressure networks inside American politics remain active. “There is also a vocal American constituency on this issue,” Barnett warned. “Those folks can be highly critical of the Tinubu government, and they are likely to perceive any continued violence, particularly in the Middle Belt, as justification for sanctions or even more radical forms of intervention.”

His conclusion was stark. “Tinubu can’t be certain he’s out of the woods just yet.” That is the reality beneath Nigeria’s diplomatic recovery. Abuja escaped one dangerous moment in Washington, but it has not solved the crisis that created it.

Back in Abuja, Ribadu remains trapped in a far more complicated war. His growing influence has unsettled opposition figures, threatened entrenched interests within the ruling party, and fuelled quiet anxieties about his long-term political ambition, multiple sources within Abuja policy networks implied. “If Ribadu misreads that terrain, his ambition could become his greatest vulnerability.”

Before sunrise, Kellu Habila had risen from her mat in Mussa, northeastern Nigeria, and stepped into the kitchen, moving carefully in the dim light while the rest of the house slept. Outside, the dry-season dust had disappeared, replaced by the heavy stillness that precedes the rains in southern Borno. She prepared breakfast, then woke her four children one after the other: three boys and the youngest, a girl named Rifkatu.

It was early in the third term of the 2025/2026 academic session.

Unlike her brothers, who had resumed nearly a month earlier, Rifkatu was returning to school that morning for the first time because her old uniform was too worn to use. It was only the previous day that her parents had managed to buy another one.

“She was very happy,” Kellu recalled.

Four-year-old Rifkatu Habila and her friend, Alheri Olu, were both in Nursery One at Central Primary School, Mussa, a remote farming community in Lassa town, Askira Uba Local Government Area, Borno State. “The two girls were inseparable,” Kellu said. They played together, walked together, and often sat beside each other in class.

After the children left for school that Friday morning on May 15, Kellu headed to her farm on the outskirts of town. The farming season had begun, and like many residents of Mussa, she was trying to make use of the early morning before the sun hit hard.

Then the gunshots started.

“I hid inside a nearby stream when I heard them,” she told HumAngle. “It was a few minutes past 8 a.m.”

For a while, she remained there, crouched and listening. When the shooting eased, she ran back home.

By then, panic had already spread across Mussa. Parents were rushing toward the school. Some shouted their children’s names, while others disappeared into nearby bushes, searching for them. The gunshots, residents realised, had come from Central Primary School.

“We were told the children had been taken,” Kellu said. “So we started searching.”

She found her three sons hiding inside a nearby bush. But Rifkatu was nowhere to be found. Her voice broke when she spoke about what happened next.

“We kept searching. Later, her father and some men found children’s footwear outside town where the attackers had passed. He recognised hers.”

That was how they knew. Rifkatu and Alheri had been abducted together. That day, Friday, May 15, terrorists attacked Central Primary School, Mussa, abducting dozens of pupils. The exact number remains unclear. “Community leaders told us 43 children were taken,” Kellu recounted. But she believes the number may be higher. An official register recorded 40 confirmed names.

A pattern of attacks

Residents say the terrorists entered Mussa on motorcycles.

“Farmers running from the direction they came from said they also saw two Hilux vehicles parked outside town,” Emmanuel Hyarawa, Rifkatu’s uncle, said. “That was what they used to take the children away.”

No group has claimed responsibility, and no ransom demand had been made at the time this report was filed. But residents say the terrorists may be fighters from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), a group that has repeatedly attacked communities along the southern Borno axis in recent years.

“They are the same people who attack soldiers here and abduct farmers,” Kellu said. “We recognised the way they dressed and moved.”

This was the fourth attack on Mussa within two months, according to residents. 

“Occasionally, they would attack the town, often focusing on the military. They would burn buildings, loot shops, and cart away military vehicles and equipment,” Emmanuel said. “They had come in early April and attacked the military. They killed four soldiers and a civilian.” A week before the Friday abduction, “They had attacked, looted shops, and carted away six cattle,” Kellu added.  In November 2025, Nigerian troops rescued 12 teenage girls abducted while working on farmlands in the area. 

But no school had been attacked before. “This is the first time,” Emmanuel said.

The gunshots from Friday’s attack were heard as far away as Lassa, a town nearly 20 kilometres from Mussa. “We heard them around 8:30 that morning,” Andrew Adamu, a resident of Lassa, said.

The two communities are separated only by a smaller village called Kelle. According to Kellu, the attackers arrived through the Damboa axis on nearly 40 motorcycles, each carrying at least two armed men.

There is a military presence in Mussa, but residents say the soldiers are few.

“They are not up to 30,” Emmanuel said. “And usually, they are outnumbered.” “When the terrorists entered, they used the pupils as shields. So, the military could not engage them,” he added.

Kellu said part of the school itself now serves as a military armoury. “The soldiers stay there during the day,” she said. “They have been using part of the school for years.”

Residents believe the timing of the attack was deliberate.

After the April assault that killed soldiers, reinforcements had arrived from Askira, the LGA headquarters, and remained in the community for more than two weeks. But on Friday morning, according to Emmanuel, the troops had only recently withdrawn.

“It was less than an hour after they left that the terrorists came,” he said.

When the shots were heard in Lassa, residents said security forces left the town immediately. “I didn’t see them leaving myself, but I saw their return in the evening,” Andrew said. “Often, when something like this occurs, reinforcement is sent from here, Lassa, or Dille, another village not far away, Askira, the local government headquarters, or Uba, another major town,” Andrew added.

However, as of the time this report was compiled, residents of Mussa said no reinforcements had returned to the community.

A police constable based in Askira, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak, said, “Although Mussa is a Borno community, it is not under our coverage because of proximity. They are closer to Adamawa and, therefore, Adamawa forces are often the ones responding to situations there. We received a red alert about the abduction moments after it happened. However, on our end, no reinforcement was issued because it is not under our protection. Maybe the military went.”

Over 40 pupils and teachers abducted in Oyo

On the same day as the Mussa school abduction, terrorists, also on motorcycles, stormed three schools and kidnapped schoolchildren and staff in the Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State, South West Nigeria. It was a coordinated attack across the three schools in Ahoro-Esinle, a community in the LGA. 

In the early hours of May 15, motorcycle-riding attackers invaded Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota, near Alawusa, as well as Community Grammar School and the L.A Primary School in Esiele, all in the Ogbomoso axis of the state.

No armed group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but the invaders operated in a coordinated manner that suggests they belong to a terrorist syndicate. There had been no such mass abduction in the area before now, as locals describe the remote area as peaceful until recently. Witnesses said the terrorists spoke Yoruba, Hausa, and Nigerian Pidgin as they invaded the schools, abducting over 40 pupils swiftly in a matter of minutes. 

The principal of the Community High School, Alamu Folawe, was also abducted alongside the pupils, while two teachers were killed during the early morning operation. Locals in Ogbomosho town told HumAngle that the area has recently been experiencing attacks, which have been largely unreported in the mainstream media.

The terrorists marched the abducted pupils and teachers towards the Old Oyo National Park, causing a hail of pandemonium and panic for residents. “The axis is actually underdeveloped and is quite far from town,” said Qosim Suleiman, a resident of Ogbomosho. “They have no electricity, and no paved  road networks.”

Alamu had only been redeployed to one of the schools recently, sources said. Most teachers are deployed to the community schools on a rotational basis from Ogbomosho town because “no one wants to stay permanently in the satellite villages with very poor government control.”

Following the attack, however, the Oyo State Universal Basic Education Board (OYOSUBEB) has ordered the shutdown of schools in Oriire LGA due to fears of a possible recurrence of such incidents. In a statement obtained by HumAngle, OYOSUBEB also directed all primary schools in neighbouring communities, including Surulere, Oyo East, and Olorunsogo LGAs, to vacate their premises until further notice.

“This is a dark and painful moment for our education family in Oyo State, and our hearts are with the affected parents, teachers and the entire community,” said Nureni Adenira, the OYOSUBEB chairperson.

“We understand the fear and anxiety this situation has caused, and we want to assure our parents and stakeholders that the safety of our children remains our utmost priority.”

The Oyo Global Forum, a group of professionals in the state, condemned the attack, charging the government to rescue the abducted pupils and teachers from the hands of the armed assailants. The group said in a statement sent to HumAngle that “every hour of slow response emboldens these armed criminal groups and increases the risk of further attacks across vulnerable communities and adjoining forest corridors linked to Kwara and Niger states.”

“This must not be treated as an isolated incident. It is a clear national security threat requiring sustained military, intelligence, and community-based security operations,” said Taiwo-Hassan Adebayo, the chairperson of the group. 

“Beyond the immediate rescue efforts, the government must urgently establish a preventive security framework across the affected axis, including strengthened rural policing, coordinated forest surveillance, and a functional early warning and rapid response system developed in partnership with local communities.”

The Oyo State Commissioner for Information and Civic Orientation, Dotun Oyelade, announced in a statement on May 16 that the government has taken security measures to prevent the attackers from moving beyond the national park before they are accosted. He said security operatives have commenced a rescue operation in the axis, stressing that suspects’ movements have been restricted.

“Patrol operations also commenced this morning after intelligence indicated the suspects remained within the National Park in Oyo State,” Dotun said. “Three separate patrol teams, comprising Amotekun operatives and hunters drawn from seven local government areas in Oke-Ogun, were deployed through Igbeti towards Oloka and adjoining communities,” he added.

Amid the ongoing search for the missing pupils and teachers, footage of some of the abductees has surfaced. In one of the clips, Racheal Alamu, the Community High School principal, is seen speaking from captivity, pleading with Nigerians and the government to rescue them.

“I’m doing this video to ask for help from everyone, starting from the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the Oyo State government, the Christian Association of Nigeria and all well-meaning Nigerians, that they should come to our aid and settle this thing peacefully so that our lives will not be lost,” she said.

Another abductee, a woman with a baby strapped to her back, weeps heavily while asking for the government’s intervention. “We need your help so that these people will release us. Please help us,” she wailed.

HumAngle has also exclusively obtained the names of the abductees, including seven teachers and 39 pupils.

Names of Schoolchildren and Teachers Abducted During the May 15 School Attacks in Oriire LGA, Oyo State, South West, Nigeria

From Borno to Oyo: Resurgence of School Abductions Sparks New Terror Wave in Nigeria by IT HumAngle

The lingering memories of school abductions

For many families in southern Borno and, now, in some parts of Oyo State, schooling has become entangled with fear. Any attack involving schoolchildren in Borno, particularly, inevitably revives memories of the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, where 276 girls were abducted by Boko Haram from their dormitories in April 2014.

More than a decade later, some of the girls are still missing.

The abduction drew global attention to attacks on education in Nigeria, but it also marked the beginning of a broader wave of school-targeted kidnappings across the country.  

Even the Nigerian government’s multimillion-dollar Safe School Initiative, launched after the Chibok abduction to strengthen school security, has struggled to achieve its objectives and has been dogged by allegations of corruption, poor implementation, and inadequate protection for vulnerable communities.

In 2018, 110 girls were abducted in Dapchi, Yobe State. Two years later, hundreds of students were kidnapped in Kankara, Katsina State. Then came Jangebe in Zamfara, and later Kuriga in Kaduna State, where more than 200 pupils were abducted earlier in 2024. Subsequently, in November 2025, more than 300 schoolchildren and staff were abducted from St Mary’s School in Papiri, Niger State, in the North Central region. Some were later released in December, while others remain in captivity.

What began in the North East gradually spread into the North West and other regions, where armed groups increasingly adopted mass kidnappings for ransom and leverage. Over time, these attacks altered something less visible: the way families think about education itself.

In 2021, UNICEF warned that attacks on schools and kidnappings “discourage parents from sending their children to school and leave children traumatised and fearful of going to classrooms to learn.” That fear now shapes daily life in places like Mussa. “My boys will not return to school anytime soon,” Kellu said. “I don’t want to lose them, too.” The incident had left her devastated, Emmanuel said. “The three boys are in my house,” he added.

Mussa itself was once emptied under the weight of conflict. Residents fled in 2015 as insurgent violence intensified across southern Borno. Many only returned the following year. “When we first came back, we could farm far outside town,” Emmanuel said. “Now, we barely go beyond one kilometre.”

Even nearby communities remain tense. In Lassa, residents had already panicked before Friday’s attack fully became clear. The previous day, according to Andrew, gunmen had abducted a logger near the town, killed five others, and burned their vehicle.

Amid all this, schools still reopen every term. 

By the time the announcement that Abu Bilal Al-Minuki was killed reached the outside world, the strike itself was already hours old. In the early hours of Saturday, May 16, somewhere in Metele, in Borno State, northeastern Nigeria, a compound had been hit. 

First, US President Donald Trump posted a statement on Truth Social. Another came from Bayo Onanuga, Special Advisor to Nigeria’s president on Information and Strategy, on Facebook and X. Al-Minuki, described as one of the most senior figures inside Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), was dead, both statements claimed.

“Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield. Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally,” Trump said in the post.  

The Nigerian military said special forces were deployed to block escape routes while air components executed precision strikes against what was described as a “concealed and fortified terrorist enclave.” The mission was completed, the military added, “without casualties or equipment loss on the part of friendly forces.”

During a televised interview, the Director of Nigeria’s Defence Media Operations, Major Gen. Michael Onoja, explained that the US military provided intelligence and surveillance support, while Nigeria deployed boots on the ground for the operation. 

“There were no foreign boots on the ground during this operation. What we received were intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance support and other force enablers,” he said.

There was only one problem: according to the Nigerian military itself, Al-Minuki had already been killed once before – in 2024.

For nearly two years, Al-Minuki’s name – also known as Abubakar Mainok or simply Abu-Mainok – had existed in the strange afterlife of Nigeria’s counterterrorism war; a conflict where terrorist commanders are frequently declared dead only to reappear later through propaganda videos, from Abubakar Shekau to Abu Mus’ab Al-Barnawy. 

“Our determined Nigerian Armed Forces, working closely with the Armed Forces of the United States, conducted a daring joint operation that dealt a heavy blow to the ranks of the Islamic State,” President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said in a statement issued from Aso Villa on Saturday. “Early assessments confirm the elimination of the wanted IS senior leader, Abu-Bilal Al-Manuki, also known as Abu-Mainok, along with several of his lieutenants, during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin.”

However, in the counterinsurgency operations in northeastern Nigeria, where insurgency and information warfare have become deeply intertwined, certainty is always expensive.

Strategic realignment 

Saturday’s strike was the first major public success to emerge from the military partnership between Nigeria and the US. The operation, designated under Nigeria’s existing counterterrorism framework as falling under Operation Hadin Kai, commenced at 12:01 a.m. and ended at 4:00 a.m. on May 16, according to a statement from the Joint Task Force North-East spokesperson, Lt.-Col. Sani Uba.

The operation reflects a rebuilding of the partnership after it had been almost damaged after a single catastrophic night on Christmas Day 2025, when Donald Trump ordered missile strikes into Sokoto State. Trump framed the strikes as retaliation against militants killing “innocent Christians”—a language that resonated with parts of his domestic base but landed badly across northern Nigeria, where the conflict is far more complicated than the religious framing imposed on it from abroad.

Several of the missiles reportedly malfunctioned. One strike landed near a civilian settlement with no known militant presence. Nigerian officials found themselves balancing two competing realities: the military needed American intelligence and surveillance capabilities, but the Nigerian government could not afford to appear subordinate to the US narrative of the war.

The months that followed produced a quieter arrangement. American military personnel arrived in northeastern Nigeria – eventually around 200 troops – under a structure designed carefully around optics as much as operations. Nigerian authorities retained formal command. The Americans supported intelligence gathering, aerial coordination, and technical operations around the A-29 Super Tucano fleet already deployed against insurgent groups in the Lake Chad Basin.

The choreography surrounding the recent announcement of Al-Minuki’s death was as deliberate as the operation itself. Donald Trump spoke first. Tinubu issued his statement a few hours after Trump posted on Truth Social. Major Gen. Samaila Uba, Director of Defence Information, released a detailed press statement under the Armed Forces of Nigeria letterhead, complete with Al-Minuki’s full array of aliases — Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Ali al-Minuki, Abor Mainok, Abubakar Mainok, Abakar Mainok — and a comprehensive accounting of his alleged roles. 

Everyone involved in the recent communication appeared determined not to repeat the Sokoto embarrassment on  Christmas Day, when Washington’s messaging had almost completely overshadowed Abuja’s.

“Nigeria appreciates this partnership with the United States in advancing our shared security objectives,” Tinubu said. “I extend my sincere gratitude to President Trump for his leadership and unwavering support in this effort. I look forward to more decisive strikes against all terrorist enclaves across the nation.”

The statement was noted for its tone and content. Tinubu’s public gratitude to Trump marks a significant shift from the friction that defined the relationship only five months ago, when parts of Nigeria’s political and diplomatic establishment, along with some ordinary Nigerians, were quietly furious over both the Christmas strikes and the framing of responding to the claims of Christian genocide that accompanied them. 

So who exactly was Al-Minuki?

Trump described him as “the second in command of ISIS globally.” AFRICOM called him “the director of global operations for ISIS”. The Nigerian Defence Headquarters offered the most specific claim: that as recently as February 2026, Al-Minuki “may have been elevated to the position of Head of the General Directorate of States, placing him as the second most senior leader within the ISIS global hierarchy.”

The same statement linked him to the 2018 Dapchi kidnapping of more than 100 schoolgirls, to the facilitation of fighters into Libya between 2015 and 2016, to weapons manufacturing and drone development, and to “economic warfare” coordination across the Sahel.

“His death removes a critical node through which ISIS coordinated and directed operations across different regions of the world,” the Defence Headquarters’ (DHQ) statement said.

Al-Minuki was a product of the insurgency itself. Born in 1982 in Mainok, a town along the Benisheikh axis of Borno State, he took his nom de guerre (pseudonym) from his hometown. Those who knew him in his early years, during the rise of Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram, told HumAngle that he was a young man who ran a small barbing salon in Mainok village, about 58 kilometres west of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria. Long before his name became associated with violence and insurgency, he was known simply as a village barber.

Before pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015, he was a senior Boko Haram commander with a documented antagonism toward Abubakar Shekau. His split with Shekau was a result of competing visions of insurgency: Shekau operated through spectacle, brutality, and deliberate isolation from the Islamic State central command. The faction that became ISWAP sought structure, territorial governance, and integration with the IS international hierarchy. When IS reportedly requested fighters for Libya during the height of the Syrian conflict, Shekau refused. Al-Minuki, then commanding ISWAP’s Lake Chad division, complied — one reason, analysts say, he rose within IS’s provincial bureaucracy while Shekau remained suspect in its eyes.

The DHQ’s assertion that Al-Minuki served as “Nigeria-based al-Furqan GDP Office Emir” from 2023 onward is consistent with what analysts had been tracking for several years: his role as the connective tissue between ISWAP’s local operations and the IS’s transnational administrative architecture. His designation as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the US in June 2023 under Executive Order 13224, cited in Saturday’s military statement, reflected assessments that he had become central to ISWAP’s financial networks, weapons procurement, drone acquisition, and communications between the Lake Chad insurgency and IS-linked structures across West Africa and the Sahel. 

The “second in command of ISIS globally” framing is a political claim, pitched to an American domestic audience that requires a recognisable villain. Still, it doesn’t situate Al-Minuki well within ISIS’s formal hierarchy. 

Al-Minuki had long occupied a powerful position within the ranks of ISWAP, but his influence deepened after the deaths of Abu Musab al-Barnawi and, later, the death of Abu Rumaisa or Abba, both sons of Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf in 2023, as reported by HumAngle. Their deaths created a vacuum at the centre of the ISWAP leadership structure and how it interacts with the Islamic State global networks, thrusting Mainok into a more strategic role in coordinating operations of the terror group across the Lake Chad region.

Al-Minuki was the man most responsible for keeping ISWAP wired into the Islamic State’s international infrastructure. His death is a meaningful disruption, but not the decapitation of a global terrorist hierarchy. 

ISWAP has repeatedly demonstrated that it can regenerate leadership after losses. It replaced leaders and survived the loss of top commanders. Its resilience has never derived primarily from any single commander; rather, it has stemmed from the political and economic conditions within Borno and across the Lake Chad Basin that continue to enable recruitment, taxation, and territorial control. The DHQ acknowledged as much, noting that “Battle Damage Assessment is ongoing, while follow-up exploitation operations are being conducted to clear remaining terrorist elements in the area.”

“Mistaken identity” 

The official statement from the Army said it was common for numerous terrorists to use the same names or aliases, suggesting that both the individual killed in 2024 and the commander killed in this strike shared the same name. It did not acknowledge any mistakes. 

“This time around, this individual [we killed] is the original owner of that name,” the Director of the Defence Media Operation said. 

Meanwhile, Bayo Onanuga, President Tinubu’s spokesperson, in a Facebook post on Saturday, claimed the discrepancy between the person killed in 2024 and the one killed now was due to a case of mistaken identity. He also warned that sceptics had “rushed to question the authenticity of the Nigerian-American joint military operation” and said the criticism was “premature and not grounded in the realities of modern counterterrorism operations.” He noted that Nigeria’s Armed Forces were “operating in one of the world’s most complex insurgency environments where targets often move across borders and use multiple identities.”

Nigeria has lived through this before. Shekau was declared dead multiple times across more than a decade until soldiers grew to distrust the announcements and civilians in Borno learned to reserve judgment until they saw real change on the ground.

The Presidency’s warning that “premature dismissal of military claims can inadvertently undermine operational morale and strategic messaging” is a legitimate concern. But it is also an argument for public deference rather than public accountability. 

For now, Trump has another example to point to as evidence that American military engagement abroad delivers results. Tinubu also has a successful joint operation that projects competence and international partnership without appearing commanded from outside.

The Armed Forces of Nigeria, in Major Gen. Uba’s words, have demonstrated “unwavering resolve to confront terrorism and deny extremist groups the ability to threaten national, regional and international security.”

But in the displacement camps and farming communities scattered across Borno State, the significance of Saturday’s strike will be measured differently. 

The presidents of Nigeria and the United States have announced the killing of Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, described as the second-in-command of ISIL (ISIS).

Donald Trump first made the announcement in a social media post on Friday, without disclosing when or where the joint Nigerian-US military operation happened.

On Saturday, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said in a statement that al-Minuki, also known as Abu-Mainok, was killed “along with several of his lieutenants” during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin.

The Nigerian army described it as “a meticulously planned and highly complex precision air-land operation” carried out on Saturday between midnight and 4am (23:00 to 03:00 GMT) in Metele, in Borno state in northeast Nigeria.

Borno has been the epicentre of a long-running campaign by the Boko Haram armed group and its splinter faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), which is linked to ISIL.

Who was al-Minuki?

Little is publicly known about al-Minuki, who had been under US sanctions since 2023.

Before pledging allegiance to ISIL in 2015, al-Minuki was a prominent Boko Haram leader, according to the Nigerian army.

An army statement described him as a “key” operational and strategic figure who provided guidance to ISIL entities outside Nigeria on media operations, economic warfare and weapons manufacturing.

“His death removes a critical node through which ISIS coordinated and directed operations across different regions of the world,” the army said.

It added that al-Minuki oversaw ISIL-linked operations across the Sahel and West Africa, including attacks against “ethnic and religious minority communities”. In 2018, he was linked to the kidnapping of more than 100 schoolgirls in Dapchi, in northeastern Nigeria’s Yobe state.

Emerging power

Al-Minuki is believed to have risen through the ranks of ISWAP following the disappearance of veteran commander Mamman Nur in 2018.

His reported ability to operate discreetly and avoid public attention helped him maintain influence over operations, while evading detection by regional and international security forces.

Cheta Nwanze, chief executive of the Lagos-based advisory group, SBM Intelligence, said al-Minuki had previously been declared killed in 2024 after a military operation in Kaduna state.

“That earlier announcement did not produce a lasting degradation of ISWAP’s capabilities,” he told Al Jazeera, warning that eliminating a single commander may have a limited impact.

Nwanze said the group will be able to recover as long as a growing “ransom economy” in Nigeria – which raised some $1.66m between July 2024 and June 2025, according to an SBM intelligence report – “remains intact”.

“The ultimate tool for control is the man on the ground with a gun, and the ultimate backing for that man is a functional social contract, which sadly Nigeria does not have,” he said. “Until the economic logic that feeds these groups is disrupted, the cycle will continue.”

Experts say leaders such as al-Minuki have been central to coordination between local fighters and ISIL’s broader network, but are not irreplaceable due to the group’s decentralised command structure.

“The killing of al-Minuki will disrupt ISWAP operationally in the short term,” Alex Vines, the Africa programme director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Al Jazeera.

“ISWAP has proven resilient to leadership losses, suggesting this killing will not be strategically decisive on its own.”

‘Inclusive governance reforms’

ISWAP has recently intensified attacks along the Nigeria-Cameroon border, targeting military outposts and humanitarian convoys.

These operations are seen as part of a deliberate effort to consolidate territory and demonstrate the group’s continued relevance despite ongoing pressure, including after Trump accused Nigeria of not doing enough to protect Christians in the country’s north from attacks.

The Nigerian government has rejected the claim, insisting that Muslims are also being targeted by armed groups. In recent months, dozens of US troops have been deployed to Nigeria to help in the fight against armed groups by providing intelligence sharing and technical support.

Tinubu said Nigeria “appreciates” the partnership with the US “in advancing our shared security objectives,” adding that he looked forward “to more decisive strikes against all terrorist enclaves across the nation”.

Vines said al-Minuki’s killing was “a tactical win” for the Tinubu administration, but ISWAP remains a “serious security concern”.

As for the US, eliminating al-Minuki is likely to be framed as a victory against ISIL’s Africa network. It will also reinforce Nigeria’s importance “as a key security partner and a reminder that bilateral relations are much better than a year ago”, Vines told Al Jazeera.

Nwanze said the joint nature of the strike signalled a deepening of US‑Nigeria security cooperation, but the collaboration “will face limits”.

“Washington’s willingness to engage is likely contingent on narrow counter‑terrorism objectives, not on a wholesale commitment to rebuilding Nigeria’s fractured security architecture,” he added.

Mubarak Aliyu, a political and security risk analyst, called the elimination of al-Minuki “a remarkable operational success”. He stressed, however, that “broader, inclusive governance reforms remain fundamental to solving the long-term security challenges in the wider region”.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international humanitarian organisation, has released its 2025 activity report for Nigeria, and the findings are sobering. The medical emergency organisation, also known as Doctors Without Borders, unveiled the report during an event in Abuja, North Central Nigeria, on Wednesday, May 13, documenting the disturbing rise in malnutrition cases in the country’s northern region.

With more than 3,500 workers delivering essential healthcare services across ten states, MSF reported treating over 440,000 children for malnutrition, more than 300,000 individuals for malaria, and assisting with over 33,500 deliveries in 2025.

This surge, according to the humanitarian organisation, underscores the fragility of Nigeria’s health system and the growing vulnerability of women and children in conflict-affected regions.

The 2025 report shows that MSF recorded more than 600,000 outpatient consultations, 48,000 inpatient admissions, and treated 341,239 patients for malaria, 38,753 children for measles, 6,123 patients for diphtheria, and 985 others for meningitis across its facilities in the region.

These findings are specific to the ten Nigerian states where MSF has been operating since 1996, including Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Zamfara, and Cross River. The organisation says it has provided a wide range of essential medical services, including paediatric and maternal health care, treating children with malnutrition, responding to disease outbreaks, caring for survivors of sexual violence, offering mental health support, and performing life‑saving surgical interventions. 

The MSF country representative, Ahmed Aldikhari, revealed that in 2025, the organisation observed a pattern consistent with that of previous years, starting in 2022. Aldikhari stated that malnutrition is one of the year’s greatest challenges, linking it to the region’s fragile conditions, which are severely affected by insecurity that has worsened food security.

“We are seeing a vicious cycle where malnutrition is both a cause and a consequence of diseases such as measles, malaria, and diphtheria, among others, which continue to affect vulnerable communities, especially when healthcare is delayed or inaccessible,” he said, suggesting that Nigeria might soon experience the peak of the malnutrition crisis. 

“That is why we are consistently working side-by-side with the ministries of health, humanitarian affairs, budget and planning at the state and federal levels, and also, with our Nigerian colleagues to ensure that efficient services are provided, but they are not enough.”

HumAngle has previously reported on the broader impact of the crisis, stressing how displacements, insecurity, and climate change, among other natural and human-induced disasters, have compounded the problem. In July 2025, MSF, in collaboration with the Katsina State government, mobilised state and non-state actors to address the escalating malnutrition crisis in the northwestern region. 

During the 2024 MSF conference in Abuja, organised in collaboration with the North West Governors’ Forum and the Katsina State Government, stakeholders emphasised that malnutrition in the northwestern region is no longer a seasonal emergency but rather a structural crisis that requires urgent mobilisation. The governors acknowledged that insecurity and climate pressures were eroding food systems, but MSF urged greater investment in therapeutic feeding centres and preventive programmes.

Northern Nigeria continues to face a critical malnutrition crisis, with Katsina particularly affected, according to MSF’s 2025 activity report. Findings reveal that since 2021, MSF has been present in the state, with the organisation’s leadership revealing that they have witnessed a sharp rise in the number of malnourished children since responding to the growing crisis in recent years.

In 2025, MSF reported treating the highest number of malnourished children in Katsina. With the support of the state Ministry of Health, the organisation focused on preventing illness and malnutrition to reduce mortality and morbidity among children suffering from acute malnutrition.

“Katsina State has faced a chronic malnutrition crisis for over a decade, driven by insecurity, climate shocks, limited primary healthcare services, and high birth rates,” the report revealed. “Throughout 2025, MSF admitted 26,445 patients for inpatient care, provided treatment to 146,301 children through its outpatient centres, and conducted 15,387 outpatient consultations for malaria.”

In response to this, MSF established a new Ambulatory Therapeutic Feeding Centre (ATFC) in Mashi and a second inpatient therapeutic feeding centre at the Turai Yar’aduwa Hospital to handle the increased patient load during peak seasons.

Beyond nutrition in Kebbi, the report states that MSF responded to multiple infectious disease surges and outbreaks by tackling the increase in meningitis cases from February to May, while supporting the Ministry of Health facilities in Jega, Gwandu, and Aliero with logistics, medical supplies, staff training, and facility rehabilitation.

Following the escalating insecurity in neighbouring Zamfara and Niger that led to mass displacement to the Danko-Wasugu areas of Kebbi State as of June, the humanitarian organisation provided basic healthcare and distributed non-food relief kits to vulnerable households.

In Zamfara alone, MSF admitted 47,164 children to inpatient therapeutic feeding centres and provided 14,167 outpatient consultations in 2024, with numbers continuing to rise in 2025. According to Aldikhari, this increase in admissions is due to multiple overlapping crises, including conflict and insecurity in the northwestern and northeastern regions, which have displaced thousands of families, cutting them off from farmlands. 

While the 2025 activity report warns that malnutrition is no longer a seasonal emergency but a permanent feature of Nigeria’s humanitarian landscape, it also highlights the fact that the sheer scale of admissions suggests the crisis is outpacing the humanitarian response. 

Istanbul, Turkiye – When investigations by Al Jazeera and other media outlets in 2024 revealed that Israeli-linked artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Lavender and Gospel had helped generate thousands of military targets in Gaza, critics warned that warfare was entering a new era – one driven not only by soldiers and bombs, but by algorithms, data, and surveillance technology.

Then, in September 2024, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah exploded in coordinated attacks in Lebanon, widely attributed to Israeli intelligence operations that had turned ordinary communication devices into weapons.

And, last year, reporting by Al Jazeera also raised concerns about the use of cloud and data infrastructure linked to major US technology companies in Israeli surveillance operations involving Palestinians.

For a growing number of scholars, economists and political thinkers, such developments reflect more than just the changing nature of conflict. They show how power in the modern world is increasingly exercised not just through military force, but through technology, finance and control over information.

That argument has revived broader debates around decolonisation – a term historically associated with the dismantling of European empires after World War II, when countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East gained formal independence.

But many proponents of what is termed “decolonial theory” – a school of thought arguing that colonial-era systems of power and hierarchy still shape modern politics, economics and knowledge – argue that colonial power structures never fully disappeared. Instead, they evolved, embedding themselves in global financial systems, technology platforms, media networks and even the production of knowledge itself.

Dependence of Global South countries on Western technology, digital infrastructure and global markets can create new forms of political and economic vulnerability, particularly across the Global South.

“A generation may have grown up believing they had never experienced colonialism or exploitation,” Esra Albayrak, board chair of the NUN Foundation for Education and Culture and daughter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told Al Jazeera during the World Decolonization Forum in Istanbul on May 11-12.

“Yet, mentally, they may still be living under colonial influence.”

The war in Gaza marked a turning point, Albayrak says, shining a spotlight on how international principles are not applied equally. Global institutions have so far failed to stop what many countries and rights groups have described as genocide against Palestinians.

“The world is sounding an alarm, and we can no longer afford to remain indifferent to it,” she said.

A techno-feudal era

Albayrak argues that a handful of technology companies are emerging as new, invisible centres of power, shaping how information is produced, circulated and consumed in the digital age.

She describes the digital sphere as the realm of what she calls “future colonialism”, warning that AI systems trained largely on Western-centric data risk reinforcing existing global inequalities.

“When AI systems are run by those tech companies and trained on Western sources, they risk carrying the hierarchies of the past into tomorrow’s digital world, as they now have personalised data, suppressing identity,” Albayrak said.

By this, she means that most major AI models are still trained largely on English-language and Western-produced data – a pattern critics say risks sidelining non-Western languages, cultures and perspectives.

On social media platforms, algorithms tend to amplify some conflicts while rendering others nearly invisible, effectively shaping what billions of users see, discuss and remember online.

Walter D Mignolo, professor at Duke University, argues that while what we historically see as “formal colonialism” may have largely ended, systems of Western dominance continue through economics, culture, technology and knowledge production.

“Coloniality is not over. It is all over the world,” Mignolo said, arguing that modern ideas of development and progress often have the effect of pressuring societies to conform to Western norms.

Rather than simply resisting those systems, he said, societies must find a way to “re-exist” by rebuilding intellectual and cultural autonomy outside dominant global frameworks.

Colonisers in the financial age

The March 2026 Global Debt Report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that 44 countries face severe debt burdens, often aggravated by global conflicts, forcing some governments to spend more on interest payments than on health or education.

This is not a new phenomenon, as developing countries have been labouring under the weight of foreign debt for decades.

But British political economist and author Ann Pettifor told Al Jazeera that modern forms of domination are now increasingly embedded not in empires or nation-states, but in financial systems operating beyond democratic oversight.

Pettifor points to the growing influence of “shadow” banking networks – financial institutions operating largely outside traditional banking regulations – and giant asset managers such as BlackRock, which manages $13 trillion in assets.

Much of the global financial architecture now functions largely outside the regulatory control of governments, she says, including that of Western states themselves.

“This is not a state colonising other states,” Pettifor said. “This is the financial system colonising the whole world, including my country and the US.”

She argues that elected governments increasingly struggle to control key economic realities – from energy prices to commodity markets – because those systems are dictated by global financial actors operating far beyond public accountability.

In Nigeria, for example, Pettifor says, efforts to expand domestic refining capacity continue to face pressure from international financial institutions and global energy markets to keep fuel prices tied to global markets and maintain reliance on imported refined oil products, despite its vast oil reserves.

Coordinated cooperation between developing nations may be necessary to challenge the dominance of Western-centred financial systems, Pettifor says, pointing to growing efforts across parts of West Africa to expand regional refining capacity and reduce dependence on imported fuel. Yet such ambitions can also leave critical sectors dependent on the decisions and influence of a small number of powerful private actors.

Global financial markets, algorithm-driven platforms, and foreign-controlled digital infrastructure increasingly define everyday life – from fuel and food prices to the information people consume online and the technologies governments and societies depend on, observers say.

A ‘mastery complex’

As wars become increasingly influenced by AI, digital infrastructure and financial dependency, debates around colonisation are focusing less on territorial control and more on who influences energy prices, lending systems, access to technology and the flow of information across borders, observers say.

Albayrak draws a parallel between today’s debates around technology and global power and Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden”, published as the US took control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. The poem framed colonial expansion as a moral obligation to “civilise” other societies rather than an exercise of domination.

Albayrak said such traces of “mastery complex” still survive today, though in different forms – not necessarily through military occupation, but through technological, financial and informational influence.

But what the world really needs, she argues, is a global order built not on hierarchy, but on shared responsibility.

“The burden should belong to humanity collectively.”

After successfully launching Nigeria’s only operational oil refinery in 2024, billionaire businessman Aliko Dangote has set his sights on East Africa as the next location for another mega refinery project, according to recent reports.

It comes as African countries are actively seeking ways to make energy more secure, following huge global disruptions amid the US and Israel’s war on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas is shipped.

Dangote, Africa’s richest man, appeared to be one of the winners from this fallout when his newly operational refinery, located in Nigeria’s commercial Lagos State, began selling large volumes of crude oil across the continent as the war on Iran escalated in March and global oil prices soared.

At present, West, South and East Africa rely primarily on importing refined petroleum products from the Middle East, meaning they are highly vulnerable to disruptions there.

Neighbours of Nigeria – Cameroon, Togo, Ghana and even Tanzania, further to the east – are among the countries that have turned to Nigeria as supplies from the Middle East dry up.

By the end of March, the refinery, which has the capacity to produce 650,000 barrels per day (bpd), reported it was also receiving orders from beyond the continent, especially for severely scarce jet fuel as hundreds of flights were cancelled across regions.

Supply from Dangote’s refinery has cushioned the impact of the war in terms of fuel supply for Nigeria and neighbouring countries, analysts say.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, and the $19bn project in Lagos is currently the world’s largest single-train refinery, meaning it employs a single processing line rather than multiple units. But it hit full production capacity in February 2026, the same month the war with Iran started.

Nigeria has no functional state-owned refinery, so Dangote’s refinery is now positioning the country to be a net exporter of jet fuel and diesel.

Here’s why more refining capacity in Africa matters for the continent:

What is Dangote’s plan for an East Africa refinery?

In April, Kenya’s President William Ruto announced that East African countries were in talks to build a joint oil refinery at Tanzania’s Tanga port, which would have a similar capacity to Dangote’s Lagos operation.

“We do not want to be held hostage any more by the Strait of Hormuz,” Ruto said at a Nairobi business event in April, which Dangote was present at.

“We do not want to be held hostage by wars that are started by other people. We have our resources here, and we are saying we are going to use our African resources to industrialise our region.”

In an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday, however, Dangote said he would prefer to build the new operation in Kenya rather than Tanzania.

“I’m leaning more towards Mombasa because Mombasa has a much larger, deeper port,” the billionaire told the UK newspaper.

“Kenyans consume more. It’s a bigger economy,” he said, adding that “the ball is in the hands of President Ruto … Whatever President Ruto says is what I’ll do.”

He has projected construction costs of between $15bn and $17bn.

But venturing into East Africa, which has a very different commercial landscape from West Africa, could prove a challenge, analyst Dumebi Oluwole of Lagos-based intelligence firm Stears told Al Jazeera.

“Dangote has proven it [his operation] can build at scale,” she said. “The East African test will be whether it can also navigate the political and logistical landscape of a fragmented, multi-country market.”

Why aren’t African countries already producing more oil?

Despite having sizeable crude reserves, African countries only refine about 44 percent of the total oil consumed themselves, with imports making up the rest, according to a 2022 African Union report.

The top producers of refined oil are Algeria, Egypt and South Africa. There are about 21 refineries in North Africa.

Southern Africa has another seven, while West Africa has 14. However, most refineries in the two regions are either not operating or are producing below the capacity they are equipped to.

East Africa’s only existing refinery is in Mombasa, but it stopped operating in 2013 due to a combination of slow government policies and exiting investors, who deemed it commercially unviable as a result.

There is currently no refining capacity at all in East Africa, despite the region having about 4.7 billion barrels of crude reserves, according to the African Union, mainly in Uganda, South Sudan, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Kenya imported 40 million barrels of petroleum in 2025. It regularly buys oil from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, India and Oman, all of which have been hampered by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Nigeria itself is Africa’s biggest net crude producer with a 1.5 million to 1.6 million bpd capacity. The country has not refined meaningfully since 2019.

What difference will local refineries make for African countries?

Exporting most of its crude to then import refined products is expensive and puts Africa on the back foot, analyst Oluwole said.

More oil refined on the continent would mean lower petrol pump prices, lower transport costs, and more energy available for people and businesses, in theory. It would also mean greater access to by-products like fertilisers for farmers, for example, or petrochemicals for manufacturers.

“Dangote has demonstrated that a viable, scalable, intra-African energy supply option is possible – that proof of concept matters enormously,” said Oluwole.

“It reflects a growing continental conviction that Africa can provide for itself, and that this is no longer wishful thinking,” she added.

In Nigeria’s case, Dangote’s refinery is yet to ease pressures, though. Local airlines, for example, have complained about having to pay high prices for jet fuel even with improved local supplies. Analysts say that could be because Nigeria’s government removed fuel subsidies in 2023. Bureaucracy within the state oil company also forced Dangote’s refinery to import crude.

Still, the refinery is contributing to “a more transparent and competitive market”, Oluwole said, adding that results should eventually show.

Other countries are stepping up. Last week, Angola’s $470m Cabinda refinery began supplying domestic as well as foreign markets. The project is owned primarily by the United Kingdom’s Gemcorp Capital and has a capacity of 30,000bpd, with plans to double by the end of 2026.

Dangote’s planned refinery in Kenya, if completed, could also help to reduce East Africa’s reliance on the Middle East.

A separate, government-funded refinery project in Uganda’s Hoima region is also in the works. Authorities expect the project to be able to refine 60,000bpd when it starts operations in 2029. It will be fed by the joint Uganda-Tanzania East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), an ongoing project which will transport crude from Uganda’s Lake Albert to Tanzania’s Tanga Port.

Uganda also plans to produce diesel, jet fuel, kerosene and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).

With big plans in place, Oluwole says it’s now left to African governments to create enabling business environments for the private sector.

“Dangote has opened the door,” she said. “The question now is whether African institutions and governments will walk through it.”