Nigeria’s Moral Failure: Negotiating with Boko Haram and Electing a Terrorist Sympathizer

 Nigeria’s Moral Failure: Negotiating with Boko Haram and Electing a Terrorist Sympathizer Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s recent revel...

 Nigeria’s Moral Failure: Negotiating with Boko Haram and Electing a Terrorist Sympathizer

Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s recent revelation that Boko Haram insurgents nominated Muhammadu Buhari as their preferred negotiator during peace talks under his administration exposes a deeply troubling chapter in Nigeria’s fight against one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups. This disclosure, made on October 3, 2025, during the launch of Gen. Lucky Irabor’s book Scars: Nigeria’s Journey and the Boko Haram Conundrum in Abuja, lays bare a pattern of desperation, ethical compromise, and moral bankruptcy in Nigerian governance.

This article by Family Writers Press International stated two grievous missteps: Nigeria’s shameful practice of negotiating with terrorists who have slaughtered innocent civilians, soldiers, and police, and the electorate’s reckless decision to elevate Buhari to the presidency despite clear warning signs of his troubling ties to Boko Haram’s agenda.

Nigeria’s willingness to engage in backchannel talks with Boko Haram, even allowing the group to nominate figures like late Buhari as representatives, is nothing short of a capitulation to barbarism. Since 2009, Boko Haram has been responsible for over 35,000 deaths, including the infamous 2014 Chibok schoolgirls abduction an event Jonathan himself described as a “scar that will die with me.” The group’s atrocities razed villages, bombed markets, and shattered families are not mere statistics but a relentless assault on Nigeria’s soul. Yet, under Jonathan’s leadership, the government formed committees for “dialogue,” granting legitimacy to a group that murdered thousands of innocent people.

This approach is not pragmatism; it is moral cowardice. By entertaining negotiations, Nigeria’s leaders have implicitly harbored these killers, offering them a platform while the blood of their victims stains the earth. Soldiers and police, who sacrificed their lives in ambushes and raids, deserve justice not the indignity of their commanders bartering with butchers. Jonathan’s admission that he hoped late Buhari’s nomination would lead to Boko Haram’s surrender reveals a naive trust in fanatics who weaponize Islamic terror ideology against the state. The result was predictable: the insurgency did not end but metastasized, blending with banditry and spreading into new regions. Such concessions only emboldened the terrorists, proving that Nigeria’s leaders prioritized political expediency over their sacred duty to eradicate evil. This legacy of half measures mocks the graves of the fallen.

Electing late Buhari: A Collective Blind Spot to a Terrorist Sympathizer.

If negotiating with Boko Haram was a failure of leadership, the Nigerian electorate’s decision to elect Buhari as president in 2015 despite his nomination by Boko Haram in 2012 borders on national self-sabotage. Fueled by anti-Jonathan sentiment and promises of security, voters overlooked a man handpicked by Boko Haram’s spokesmen to “represent” them in talks. Though Buhari publicly rejected the role the next day, the endorsement alone should have sounded alarms. This was not ignorance but willful amnesia. Buhari’s northern roots and military background were marketed as strengths against the insurgency, yet his selection by terrorists suggested, at best, a perceived affinity and, at worst, unspoken sympathies that eroded public trust.

Under Buhari’s presidency, Boko Haram did not weaken it evolved. Attacks peaked in 2015, and splinter groups like ISWAP gained ground, exposing the hollowness of Buhari’s “technical defeat” rhetoric. Jonathan’s pointed remark that he expected Buhari to “wipe them out” given his nomination underscores the irony: Nigerians elected a supposed insider, only to endure eight years of stalled progress and ongoing carnage. This choice reflects deeper flaws in Nigeria’s polity, ethnic loyalties overriding scrutiny, propaganda drowning out facts, and a populace too battered by economic hardship to demand leaders untainted by terror’s shadow. By electing Buhari, millions did not merely err, they endorsed a gamble that prolonged suffering, turning hope into despair amid the ruins.

Jonathan’s revelation is not just hindsight; it is a mirror reflecting Nigeria’s fractured response to terror. He rightly notes that the crisis, rooted in ideology, poverty, and external funding, is “far more complex” than military solutions alone. Yet, starting with negotiation concessions sowed seeds of failure. Unyielding justice for victims, not olive branches extended to murderers. Until the nation confronts its complicity from the negotiation table to the ballot box Boko Haram’s shadow will persist, a testament to choices that favored survival over spine.

Family Writers Press International.