By Evans Ufeli Esq
The Nigerian National Security adviser Mallam Nuhu Ribadu said the terrorists operating in Nigeria are our brothers. How conscionable is it to call terrorists brothers?
When a nation's steward reaches for the language of kinship to describe those who have butchered, bombed, and terrorized, the words do not land lightly. To call perpetrators “brothers” is to set memory against mercy, to weigh the economy of language in a moral balance where one pan holds grief and the other an uneasy hope. It is not a phrase that can be read as a simple kindness; it is a gesture that ripples through the conscience of a people who must ask: do we humanize to heal, or do we humanize to quiet our shame?
There is a kind of moral logic to the impulse. To name an enemy “brother” can be an attempt to remind ourselves that those who err are not beyond redemption, that human beings who commit monstrous acts are nevertheless located within networks of family, poverty, grievance, and failed institutions. Such language can be an opening toward rehabilitation, a rhetorical lever for reconciliation programs that aim to peel away layers of hate and rebuild lives. It speaks to the belief that even the most grievous sinner retains the capacity to repent, to renounce violence, and to submit to the slow, often painful labor of reintegration.
Yet language is never morally neutral. When public figures call terrorists "brothers" without simultaneously naming the horror of their crimes and acknowledging the ravaged lives left in their wake, that tenderness becomes a wound to those who mourn. For survivors and bereaved families the sight of a perpetrator humanized in public discourse can feel like the erasure of suffering; an alibi for the unforgivable. In such moments, mercy without accountability tastes of impunity; compassion without consequence smells of betrayal.
Conscience demands a dialectic between two truths: first, that perpetrators are human and that transformation is possible; second, that victims are owed recognition, justice, and care. Any responsible approach to rehabilitation must begin with the latter. The moral architecture of reconciliation cannot be built on the shaky foundation of sweeping culpability under a universal kinship. Instead, it must erect pillars of truth, accountability, and reparation that can bear the weight of mercy without collapsing into denial.
Rehabilitation of offenders, even of the most heinous kind, is not only a moral choice but a pragmatic one. History shows that punitive containment alone rarely extinguishes violent movements; it often incubates further resentment and veneration. Programs that succeed combine psychological counseling, vocational training, ideological disengagement, and community-based reintegration. They are science as well as compassion: cognitive-behavioral therapy to dismantle the narratives that justified violence, education that opens new horizons, and livelihood programs that offer alternatives to the economy of conflict. But each technical plank must be fastened by moral accountability; public truth-telling, legal consequences proportional to crimes, and an unambiguous repudiation of violent methods.
For survivors, rehabilitation of perpetrators must not feel like abandonment. Victims need visibility: formal acknowledgement of harm, access to medical and psychological care, economic compensation where that is possible, and spaces to tell their stories without shame or fear. Transitional justice mechanisms provide a template. Truth commissions, as imperfect and contentious as they are, have sometimes offered a structural way to balance competing needs: a public forum where victims can name suffering and where perpetrators can confess in exchange for conditional clemency. Yet even truth-telling must be accompanied by concrete measures of reparation and protection; words without structural redress ring hollow.
There is also a communal dimension. Calling smugglers of terror “brothers” inside a polity can be a deliberate political strategy intended to mend social fissures: to communicate that those who crossed into violence were once part of the fabric and might be woven back in. If such an approach is to be ethically defensible, it must be embedded in community-led processes that make victims central actors, not spectators. Communities must help define the terms of reintegration; rituals of apology and forgiveness must be locally legitimate rather than state-imposed performances. When communities manage restorative circles, healings, and local reparations, trust can be rebuilt in a way that top-down decrees cannot achieve.
But there is a red line. Humanizing perpetrators must never slide into normalization or exculpation. To describe barbarity with soft words is to risk dulling the moral outrage that is necessary to sustain vigilance and to prevent recurrence. Language that speaks of kinship must be precise: a recognition of shared humanity; not a diminishment of the gravity of crimes. The state’s language must be careful to affirm the dignity of victims and to uphold the rule of law. Rehabilitation must be conditional, transparent, and measured against risk assessments and a juridical framework that upholds justice.
Finally, the moral imagination must confront root causes. It is unconscionable to treat rehabilitation as a mere interpersonal project without addressing the systemic failures that make some lives fertile ground for violent ideologies: poverty, corruption, exclusion, and a landscape of broken institutions. The deepest act of repair is preventive: building schools where there were none, making economies inclusive, restoring trust in institutions, and cultivating a politics that does not reduce entire communities to stereotypes of suspicion. If those structural sins are not reckoned with, rehabilitation becomes a bandage on a wound that will reopen.
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To call terrorists "brothers" is, therefore, not in itself a crime against conscience; but it is a perilous rhetorical move that must be accompanied by a robust, victim-centered moral program. Mercy that bypasses accountability, or tenderness that erases justice, is a betrayal. True rehabilitation requires a covenant: perpetrators must speak truth, accept consequences, make reparations, and undergo sustained transformation; victims must be heard, cared for, and restored dignity; communities must be engaged in the labor of reconciliation; and the state must heal the structural wounds that birthed violence.
There is a kind of holiness in this difficult work. It asks us to hold two truths at once: the capacity for human ruin and the capacity for human redemption. To live in that tension; to resist both cheap compassion and vindictive cruelty; is perhaps the noblest test of a polity. If we can fashion institutions that honor victims and reform offenders, if we can repair what was broken while refusing to forget what was lost, then the language of brotherhood might be redeemed. Until then, it remains, for many, a word that must be weighed with care, lest consolation for some become erasure for others.
