Nigeria’s insecurity crisis has acquired a strange and unsettling wardrobe. Over time, uniforms – once symbols of authority, order, and civic distinction – have been repurposed into instruments of terror, impersonation, and moral confusion. They now do more than clothe bodies; they stitch together guilt and grief, collapsing the distance between those who violate society and those who bear the scars. In a country struggling to contain violence, uniforms as stitches of moral collapse, have become one of the most revealing metaphors of governance failure. Uniforms advertise matching cloth and missing accountability; sew violence into sameness; cloth terror as closure; and curate politics of erasure.
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com,
the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Agbedo, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nigeria (Nsukka), Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, is a contributing analyst to USAfrica.
For decades, the uniform marked the boundary between the state and its enemies. Today, that boundary has dissolved. Insurgents parade in military fatigues, bandits impersonate security agents, and criminals borrow the visual grammar of the state to command fear and obedience. Each stolen uniform erodes the state’s symbolic authority, turning clothing into camouflage not only of bodies, but of moral responsibility.
It was within this degraded symbolic space that the federal government introduced the Deradicalization, Disarmament, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration (DDRR) programme. Conceived as a pathway out of endless violence, DDRR promised to dismantle extremist ideology, recover weapons, rehabilitate offenders, and reintegrate them into society. On paper, it mirrored global post-conflict models. In practice, its symbolic execution has generated fresh wounds.
Central to the programme is the sewing and presentation of uniforms for so-called “repentant” terrorists and bandits. This gesture, often defended as harmless rehabilitation, is anything but neutral. To clothe is to recognize; to uniform is to confer identity, belonging, and legitimacy. Uniforms announce inclusion into an organized moral order. Thus, when former terrorists are publicly uniformed, the state performs redemption through fabric.
Nonetheless, symbols do not obey official intentions. They are interpreted through memory, trauma, and lived experience. In communities ravaged by violence, the uniform of reintegration is not read as transformation but as reward. It appears to elevate perpetrators into civic visibility while victims remain socially invisible, trapped in loss, displacement, and silence. The stitches meant to mend society instead reopen its wounds.
This contradiction came into sharp relief in the Kurmin Wali episode. The abduction of 177 Christian worshippers – men, women, and children – was an assault on sacred space and communal trust, a reminder that even prayer offers no sanctuary. The terrorists’ demands -motorcycles and an initial ransom of about ₦28 million – followed a now-predictable script that reduces human lives to bargaining chips.
When reports emerged that some abductees had escaped and others regained freedom, the nation exhaled in relief. But that relief curdled into unease when images surfaced: parents and children clad in identical yellow-and-black uniforms. In that single visual frame, abductees and abductors appeared stitched into sameness. Fabric erased history. Clothing blurred culpability. Here, the uniform completed its transformation from symbol of order to emblem of moral collapse. In the grammar of images, sameness implies equivalence. In societies scarred by violence, equivalence is a dangerous fiction. Trauma does not dissolve because clothes match. Guilt does not evaporate because colour schemes align.
Beneath this visual shock lies a deeper, recurring sore point; i.e., the language with which Nigerians are routinely comforted. Every abduction story ends with familiar verbs. Abductees have been “freed,” “released,” “rescued,” or have “escaped.” These words perform closure, soothing public anxiety. But one question is conspicuously absent: what happened to the abductors? Were they arrested, neutralised, disarmed, prosecuted, or simply allowed to retreat into the forests, emboldened and enriched? In Nigeria’s insecurity grammar, the fate of victims is narrated with emotion, while the fate of perpetrators dissolves into silence. They exit the sentence, and with that exit, accountability disappears.
This silence is not accidental; it is ideological. In deals, Terms and Conditions Apply. No rupture. No deterrence. No finality. By foregrounding rescue and erasing consequence, the state manufactures an illusion of success. Violence is not defeated; it is administratively managed. Each celebrated rescue quietly resets the cycle: abduction, ransom demand, negotiation, release. Nigeria thus appears trapped in an abduction–ransom–negotiation–release loop. Criminals learn the lesson quickly: hostages guarantee leverage, negotiations guarantee survival, and consequences are negotiable. Victims return home, but justice does not. Society exhales, but insecurity deepens.
It is within this loop that the symbolism of uniforms becomes most corrosive. When abductees emerge dressed like their captors, or when “repentant” bandits are publicly uniformed without transparent accountability, moral distinctions collapse. Responsibility dissolves into spectacle. Reintegration begins to resemble costume drama rather than ethical reckoning. Defenders of this approach often invoke pragmatism. Lives must be saved, they argue. Negotiations are unavoidable. Reintegration prevents recidivism. These arguments carry weight, but they miss a critical dimension: legitimacy depends not only on outcomes but on meaning. A state that saves lives while eroding moral clarity risks winning moments and losing trust.
Uniforms, in this sense, mirror Nigeria’s broader governance dilemma. They represent standardized responses applied to complex wounds, aesthetic order imposed over unresolved injustice. Reintegration risks becoming wardrobe change. Deradicalization risks becoming ideological laundering. Repentance, stripped of truth-telling and restitution, becomes a label rather than a process.
Victims notice this asymmetry. Communities ask where rehabilitation is for the displaced, the widowed, the orphaned. Where is restitution? Where is justice that restores dignity rather than merely managing danger? These unanswered questions ferment resentment and sustain the conditions for future violence. This is not an argument against reintegration. Societies emerging from conflict must eventually coexist with former perpetrators. But reintegration without accountability is not reconciliation; it is appeasement. Peace without justice is merely a ceasefire enforced by fatigue.
Words matter in stitching together the verses on Nigeria’s political canvas. Verbs shape perception. Images crystallize ideology. Uniforms condense policy into symbol. To “rescue” without confronting perpetrators is to narrate half a victory. To clothe repentance without public reckoning is to dress injustice in borrowed dignity.
Nigeria’s crisis, therefore, is not only one of insecurity but of meaning. The nation is fighting armed groups in the forests and semantic confusion in the public square. Until language regains moral clarity and symbols align with justice, uniforms will continue to stitch guilt and grief into the same cloth, binding captor and captive in a narrative loop that offers comfort without closure.
