The news arrived yesterday Saturday 13 June, 2026 like a dull knife to the chest. Retired Major General Abubakar Rabe, a man who wore the green uniform with honour for more than three decades, died in terrorist captivity. He was kidnapped two weeks ago while travelling with his wife on the Katsina road. The former Director of Defence Information spent his final days in chains, reportedly denied his medication for diabetes and hypertension. His captors watched him deteriorate and the state watched from a distance. And now he is gone.
If we cannot save a General, what hope is there for the school children in captivity? What hope for the mathematics teacher in Oyo who was beheaded last month in front of his pupils? What hope for the seventeen police trainees ambushed in Yobe, or the four hundred and fifty soldiers reportedly killed in the last two years of this administration alone? The answer is brutal but honest. There is very little hope.
The killing has not paused. It has evolved. Just weeks ago, on the fifteenth of May, coordinated attacks struck Oyo and Borno States. In Oyo, the terrorists did not simply kidnap. They beheaded Michael Oyedokun, a fifty-seven-year-old mathematics teacher who stood between armed men and his students. They wanted the world to see what they are capable of. In Borno, entire villages were emptied. In the North-West, bandits now operate with the same theology and the same cruelty as the Boko Haram of 2014. The distinction between bandit and terrorist has become a bureaucratic fiction. The suffering is identical.
And yet the response remains tepid. We hear of repentant terrorists being rehabilitated. We hear of Operation Safe Corridor feeding and training surrendered fighters. We hear of plea bargains and deradicalisation programmes. Meanwhile, a General lies dead in a captive’s grave.
There is no true justice in this country. A hungry father, desperate to feed his children, steals a motorcycle—and they lock him away for years, ripping him from the very family he was trying to save. But a man who beheads a teacher, kidnaps a General, and burns a village to ash? He gets three hot meals, a warm bed, and someone to teach him a trade. Then he simply walks free—back to Sambisa to kill again, or he melts into the city as a quiet informant for the next terrorist hiding in the bush—while the thief’s children cry for a father who only wanted to feed them.
That is not justice, it is a moral inversion. That is the state rewarding the worst violence with the softest touch.
This editorial board has watched successive administrations try every possible strategy except the one that would actually work, which is ensuring that consequences for the worst crimes are ruthless, carried out in full public view, and absolutely irreversible.
Clemency for terrorists is not mercy. It is permission. Every captured fighter who is rehabilitated sends a signal to every active fighter in the Sambisa forest and the North-West hills. The signal is this that even if you lose, you will not die. Even if you kill, you will be fed. Even if you behead a teacher, you will be given a second chance.
That signal is why abductions remain profitable, why schools are still empty in some states and why a retired General died yesterday in captivity rather than in a rescue operation that levelled the camp holding him.
We are not asking for vengeance. We are asking for deterrence. The primary purpose of criminal justice is not revenge. It is to make the cost of crime higher than the reward. Right now, for terrorists in Nigeria, the cost is near zero. The reward — ransom, publicity, territory, recruits — is immense. Until that equation flips, the abductions will continue. The beheadings will continue. The deaths of Generals in captivity will continue.
What must change is urgent and clear. The military knows where the terrorist enclaves are. They have the coordinates. They have the jets. They lack only the order to erase those locations from the map, regardless of collateral damage concerns when the target is a verified terrorist stronghold. There must be an end to rehabilitation for terrorists who have killed. A fighter who has beheaded a civilian, participated in a mass abduction or killed a soldier has forfeited the right to a second chance. Capture must mean trial. Trial must mean life imprisonment or execution for murder. There is no third path.
Furthermore, the protection of schools must become a martial priority. Every secondary school in high-risk states should be a fortified zone. Soldiers in every classroom. Walls around every dormitory. It is expensive. It is ugly. It is better than another mass abduction. And there must be a public declaration that ransom payments are a crime against the state. Any government official, intermediary or citizen who facilitates payment to terrorists should face conspiracy charges. The money is the oxygen. Cut it off.
President Tinubu has the military background in his cabinet. He has the mandate. He has the sympathy of a grieving nation. But sympathy is not strategy. Condolence messages are not security. The blood of General Abubakar Rabe is on the hands of his captors. The responsibility for the next beheading, the next abduction, the next General in chains — that responsibility belongs to him.
No more negotiations with killers. No more rehabilitation of beheaders. No more clemency for those who show no clemency to teachers, to children, to soldiers, to Generals.
Enough is enough. The Nigerian state has been too patient for too long. Patience has become passivity. Passivity has become permission. Permission has produced a corpse in a General’s uniform, dead in captivity, waiting for a rescue that never came.
Let that be the last time.
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