-By Abdul Mahmud
They dress it up as negotiation and baptise it as dialogue, but it is nothing more than doublespeak. A masquerade of words. Behind the velvet of their language lies deceit. To call surrender by another name does not change its essence. To dignify capitulation with the vocabulary of peace is to mock both truth and justice. What they parade as dialogue is often a transaction of power, a bargain struck in whispers, where the people, unseen and unheard, are the coin of exchange. Yet, they justify it as the only path to peace. When northern governors sit across from bandits and terrorists, what unfolds is not negotiation in any true sense. It is courtship. It is a series of dates. It is love in the time of banditry. A theatre of intimacy staged under the shadow of violence. A ritual that strips empathy of its nobility, reducing what should be the compassion of leadership to the self-serving whispers of survival and convenience, which recalls obsequious intimacies that surface in times of adversity, only to blur the line between fear and affection. Gabriel García Marquez, in his literary opus, Love in the Time of Cholera, wrote of a love that endured through decay, war, and pestilence; love that was obstinate, enduring, and almost absurd in its persistence. But, what we are witnessing here is its inversion: not fidelity through ruin, but complicity masquerading as affection. It is surrender disguised as closeness; it is the twisted parody of love, showcased as reconciliation. Not love shaped by hardship.
The first date was awkward. In Zamfara, officials drove into Shinkafi and Dansadau forests to meet warlords who had already massacred villagers and burned farmlands. The state came clothed in the uniform of authority. The bandits came with blood on their hands. Victims were not invited. There was no room for mothers who lost children in Anka or for fathers who buried their sons in Maru. The girls kidnapped from Jangebe Secondary School were absent too. Instead, the state leaned across the table, desperate for calm, while the bandits leaned back, aware of their power. In Katsina, the dates were even more surreal. Former Governor Aminu Masari presided over gatherings in Faskari and Safana, asking men who roamed the forests with Ak-47s to sheathe their swords. He offered them amnesty. He promised them a chance to return to normal life. He said forgiveness was the only way forward. The bandits promised to stop attacks. Weeks later, children were abducted from Kankara school. The romance soured, but the cycle continued. In Niger State, the story was not different. Officials met with gunmen in Shiroro and Rafi, pleading for the release of students kidnapped in Kagara and Tegina. The bandits named their price. Parents sold farmland. Traders emptied their savings. Communities gathered ransom. And still, the killers smiled at state officials, knowing that power sat firmly on their side of the table. Here’s the Babanla of it all. El-Rufai once confessed to sitting with bandits. He called it negotiation. But in truth, it was an act closer to courtship, a ritual of appeasement that gave men of violence the recognition they craved. And like all bad romances, it ended with betrayal of citizens who were left abandoned while the suitors walked away unharmed.
Every courtship has its rituals. Ours, between the state and bandits, has acquired a disturbing familiarity. It begins with what GenZ lovers now call the talking stage – the tentative exchanges where boundaries are tested and each side pretends to listen. Soon it drifts into the season of promises. Governors, with anxious smiles, place their offerings on the table: amnesty, cash, reintegration into a society they once helped to fracture. Bandits, in turn, whisper their vows of restraint: to slow the killings, to reduce the kidnappings, and to hold their fire for a while. These are not promises of love, but pacts of convenience. They are not born of conviction, but of fatigue. It is less negotiation than seduction; and less about peace than about buying time. And like all rituals of courtship gone wrong, the words exchanged are designed not to bind hearts, but to mask betrayal. Both sides know these promises will be broken. Yet they return to the table again and again, like lovers in a toxic affair. This romance is costly. Citizens are the ones who pay the bill. In Sokoto, villagers in Isa and Sabon Birni sold goats to rescue their daughters. In Kaduna and Abuja, families borrowed money to pay ransom for their sons seized on the Abuja – Kaduna highway. When the ransom was paid, when the family was ruined, when the dead were buried, the government still appeared in public with the men who caused the pain. The same killers were photographed shaking hands with officials. The logic of this courtship is simple: violence seduces. The bandits hold power. They can stop attacks or restart them at will. They control vast forests. They instill fear more effectively than the police. The state, weak and insecure, clings to them in the hope that kindness will tame them. But kindness never tames abusers. It emboldens them. Each meeting shifts the line of what is normal. What once outraged citizens now barely raises eyebrows. A mass abduction? There will soon be talks. A massacre on the highway? Another round of dialogue. The extraordinary has become ordinary. The courtship is now part of our political culture that has taken its own linguistic ascription. Listen closely to the language officials use. They speak of “understandings”. They speak of “forgiveness”. One Zamfara governor once urged citizens to “show love” to bandits. These are not the words of justice. These are the words of romance. They reveal the dangerous intimacy between the state and cold-blooded murderers, while citizens stand abandoned.
The Constitution does give not blessings to this romance, nor does the Terrorism Prevention (Prohibition) Act, 2022. The law does not say: dine with terrorists. It says: arrest, prosecute, punish, and protect. Yet, governors bend the law in the name of expedience. Federal law enforcement and state security officials who should protect the state and the law do more than keep quiet. They drape a cloak of protection over such encounters, ensuring that the lovers are not disturbed. Their silence is never neutral. Their silence is both complicity and consent. But, here’s the kernel: each time Abuja averts its gaze, it does more than ignore such encounters. It blesses the rendezvous. It sanctions another tryst between power and violence, another betrayal recorded in the register of statecraft. The flashing convoys, the armed escorts, and whispered briefings are not signs of resistance, they are choreography. They turn meetings that should be interrogation into consecrations shielded by the very institutions sworn to protect citizens. And so, with every silence, Abuja redraws the map of loyalty: not to the governed, but to those who terrorise them.
The human cost is huge. Schoolgirls from Jangebe were abducted with hundreds of classmates. They returned shaken, hungry, and traumatised. When they heard that the governor negotiated with the same men who abducted them, they asked: “Why are they free? Why did they do this to us?” There was no answer. Comrade Muhammad, one of the passengers abducted from the Kaduna-bound train in 2022, once told a chilling story. He said he encountered Abubakar, one of his kidnappers, not in a forest or a hideout, but in a mosque in Kaduna. Face to face. In the open. Among worshippers. The implication is terrifying. For a man who once held a gun to his head to stroll so casually into a mosque suggests more than mere audacity of courage. It suggests assurance. It suggests the confidence of someone shielded by invisible hands. Perhaps, Abubakar had just emerged from one of those secret meetings with the state, the kind where promises are exchanged in whispers and guarantees are offered in silence. Perhaps, he knew he had little to fear. That encounter captured the paradox of our times: victims carry scars into prayer halls while perpetrators walk in with a swagger, as though their crimes had been baptised by power itself.
There is a point that renders these grotesque courtship tragic, and it is this: the closer the state draws to the bandits, the farther it drifts from its people. Each gesture of appeasement towards killers deepens the abandonment of citizens who look to the state for protection. Every deal struck across the table with gunmen is not a negotiation, it is a betrayal carved into the memory of widows and orphans. Every handshake extended to men of violence lands as a slap across the faces of the grieving, a cruel reminder that the state has chosen to share intimacy with those who spill blood rather than solidarity with those who shed tears. In such rituals of compromise, power becomes complicit, and the line between protector and predator begins to blur. The tragedy further deepens in the symbolism of such encounters. To romance bandits is to abandon the living for the company of death. It is to sit in a room perfumed by the ghosts of the slain, and choose intimacy with murderers. Every concession to the gunmen becomes a mirror in which the people glimpse the frailty of the state that prefers to keep company with killers rather than stand vigil with victims. And so the people learn, slowly but bitterly, that the state is not a fortress built for their defence, but a stage where betrayals are performed in plain sight, leaving citizens to wonder: when their protectors embrace their tormentors, who is left to stand with them, the powerless?
This toxic romance has no future. The bandits are not changing. They are growing richer and bolder. Each meeting gives them legitimacy. Each promise emboldens them to demand more. The state, meanwhile, grows weaker. With every compromise, it loses moral authority and public trust. If this continues, the state risks becoming indistinguishable from its new partner; a willing accomplice in crime. Nigeria must end this romance. The state cannot keep dating its killers. It must return to its first love to the people. That requires justice, not appeasement. It requires prosecutions, not reintegration. It requires investment in security forces, reform of intelligence, and development in villages long abandoned. Citizens must feel the presence of the state not only through uniforms, but through working schools, safe roads, and real jobs. The only “dates” worth keeping are with survivors, victims, and communities that still hold faith in Nigeria. They are the true partners of the state. They are the ones who deserve love, not the men who burn villages and steal children. What the government has called peace talks are not peace at all. They are surrender disguised as negotiation. They are betrayal dressed as dialogue. The Nigerian state must choose where its heart lies – with citizens or with cold-blooded murderers.
The dates with bandits must end.