By Emameh Gabriel
For generations, the lands of Nigeria’s northeast were defined by the rhythm of the seasons – the patient wait for the rains, the sowing of seeds in the red earth, the harvest that sustained families and fed a nation. But this rhythm was shattered by a storm of violence that gathered force for over a decade. What followed was a crisis rooted in a bitter mix of inequality, political failure, and a rigid extremist ideology. From this rose Boko Haram, a name that famously means “Western education is forbidden.” But their real mission was far broader. What they truly sought to forbid was peace. They set out to destroy community and to strip life itself of its sanctity.
For years, their campaign of terror was a creeping shadow across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states. Villages were raided in the dead of night. Schools, markets, and places of worship became targets. Young men were conscripted, young women abducted. The Nigerian military, initially caught off guard and plagued by its own challenges, seemed for a time to be fighting a ghost, unable to hold back the tide. The human consequence was a flood of desperation. Millions of people – farmers, traders, teachers, children – were ripped from their ancestral homes. They fled with little more than the clothes on their backs, becoming refugees in their own country, their lives packed into the crowded, liminal space of displacement camps. The land they left behind fell silent, a patient held in a coma of conflict.
In recent years, the government, with renewed resolve and crucial international support, has fought to reclaim this stolen territory. Military offensives have pushed insurgents from their strongholds. Towns once under the black flag have been liberated. The narrative, cautiously, began to shift from one of sheer survival to one of recovery. The promise was dangled before the displaced: you can go home. The storm, it seemed, was finally passing. For those languishing in camps, dreaming of their neem trees and the familiar view of the Mandara Mountains, this was the first chorus of a long awaited dawn. The path back to their fields, to their rebuilt homes, to a life of dignity, appeared to be clearing.
But a bitter truth is emerging from the quiet, contested earth. The retreating storm of violence has left behind a poisoned harvest. As the United Nations warned from Geneva this week, the fields these families yearn to till are sown with a hidden, patient malevolence: landmines and unexploded ordnance. The very ground they want to return to, now threatens to claim them upon their return. The hope of homecoming is being met with a lethal, invisible wall. They are trapped in a cruel paradox, told it is safe to return to landscapes that have been fundamentally weaponised against them.
The report from the UN Mine Action Service is a map of potential graves. Their chief in Nigeria states that 80% of civilian casualties are now occurring in these so-called “areas of return.” Imagine that. The greatest danger is no longer the militant with a gun, but the forgotten, sun-baked artefact of the war, lurking beneath a child’s playing field or the foundation of a burnt-out house. The path home has become a gauntlet. The government’s hard won military victory is at risk of being hollowed out, as the promise of safety dissolves into the fear of an unseen explosion.
The efforts in Geneva highlighted a global failing in understanding. Mine clearance is too often seen as technical mopping up, a task for after the peace is won. But as the UN stresses, in places like Nigeria, it is a frontline humanitarian emergency. It is the difference between resettlement and a cruel bait-and-switch. The work being done – training local security forces in risk education – is vital and has had some success, creating a fragile network of vigilance. But education is merely pointing out the snake in the grass. It is not the same as removing it.
Funding for this painstaking, dangerous work is drying up, a stark metaphor for the world’s waning attention.
The people of the northeast have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. They deserve more than to be delivered onto a field of hidden knives. The Nigerian government’s duty now must extend beyond military conquest to the conscientious healing of the land. International partners must see that funding demining is not a discretionary afterthought, but the critical next stanza in the peace process. The displaced are ready to rebuild their lives. We must ensure the very earth does not betray them a second time.
Emameh Gabriel is a journalist and public affairs analyst. He is currently the Special Adviser on Media/Research to the Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development.
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