Borno was the destination, but Borno was also the question.
For three days, inside a room filled with district heads, local chiefs, government stakeholders, human-rights defenders and community representatives from Borno and Adamawa States, we tried to confront some of the hardest questions facing Nigeria’s North-East especially the tiring matter of Housing, Land, and Property HLP and how Alternative Dispute Resolution ADR could help. These were not the polite questions usually arranged neatly inside conference folders. They were the stubborn questions that remain after the banners have been removed, the allowances paid, the communiqués circulated, reports submitted, and the visiting participants flown home.
How does a community receive a former Boko Haram fighter?
What exactly do we mean when we describe someone as “repentant”?
Who determines that repentance has occurred? The state? The military? A rehabilitation programme? The victims? God? And what happens when a government declares a man rehabilitated, but the widow whose husband he may have helped kill still sees him as the face of her grief?
Those questions sat with us throughout the capacity-strengthening engagement. They entered every discussion, hovered above every exercise and refused to be domesticated by technical language. Reintegration may appear simple on a project document. On the ground, however, it is an emotional, legal, political, cultural and spiritual minefield. The house, the land and properties…
The room itself reflected the complexity of the task. There were traditional leaders whose communities have carried the weight of displacement, suspicion and insecurity. There were government stakeholders working within institutions often expected to perform miracles with limited resources. There was the fierce Borno State Chairperson of the International Federation of Women Lawyers, FIDA, bringing the uncompromising clarity of justice into the conversation. There was the regional head of the National Human Rights Commission, a woman whose humanity was as evident as her institutional responsibility. There was also a representative of persons living with disabilities, reminding everyone that displacement, reconstruction and reintegration are never complete when those at the margins remain outside the room.
His presence mattered.
In conflict, disability is often treated as a footnote. Yet persons with disabilities may face the greatest barriers in accessing food, shelter, documentation, justice, information and evacuation. When internally displaced persons’ camps begin to close and families are encouraged or required to return, who asks whether the returning community is physically accessible? Who considers the person who cannot walk long distances to collect relief materials, the deaf woman who cannot hear emergency instructions, or the visually impaired man returning to a settlement whose pathways and landmarks have been destroyed?
A society reveals its true understanding of peace by the people it remembers when the cameras are gone.
Our engagements also examined the widening gulf between local leadership and political authority. How did we get to a place where district heads and traditional rulers may understand the fears, grievances and histories of their people, yet remain distant from the formal decisions that shape those people’s lives? How did politicians become louder than communities? How did policy become something announced to people rather than built with them?
This question reverberates far beyond Borno. It is present in Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, Kaduna, the Niger Delta and virtually every Nigerian community where crisis has taken root. We repeatedly attempt to solve local problems through distant authority. We convene meetings in capitals, write solutions in bureaucratic language and then wonder why communities do not trust the outcome.
Local leadership is not perfect. Traditional institutions can carry their own exclusions, prejudices and internal politics. But no sustainable peace process can afford to treat those closest to the wound as ceremonial decorations. A district head who knows the history of every family in his community may understand a conflict in ways no visiting consultant can capture in a twenty-page assessment. A women’s leader may know which household is hungry before any official survey records it. A youth leader may hear the language of radicalisation before it becomes a security report.
Knowledge does not always wear a suit. Sometimes it sits quietly beneath a turban, speaks in Kanuri or Hausa, and remembers what happened before the first humanitarian vehicle arrived.
For a development worker who has travelled through these territories, I must say this plainly: Borno is beautiful.
That sentence may surprise those who know the state only through headlines of bombings, insurgency, displacement and death. Too often, conflict reporting freezes a place inside its tragedy. Borno becomes Boko Haram. Maiduguri becomes insecurity. The North-East becomes a permanent humanitarian emergency.
But a place is always larger than what wounded it.
Borno is Yerwa. It is history, scholarship, trade, faith, architecture, authority, resilience and memory. It is children in clean uniforms walking towards schools. It is traders negotiating prices. It is women carrying entire economies on their heads and in their hands. It is young people laughing with the stubborn normality of those who refuse to surrender their future to the past.
Across the North-East, particularly within the BAY States of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, much has happened. Much has been destroyed, but much has also been rebuilt. Roads, schools, public institutions and communities have felt the impact of interventions from government, humanitarian agencies and development partners. These efforts are not without flaws. Aid can create dependency. Projects can be designed far from the people they claim to serve. Development language can sometimes conceal waste, duplication and institutional vanity.
Still, honesty requires us to acknowledge that development partners have played a substantial role in helping communities survive, recover and rebuild.
That is why credit must go to the Norwegian Refugee Council, as well as the people and governments of Sweden and Norway, whose support has made important work possible. Credit also belongs to the team from The Tattaaunawa Roundtable Initiative, TRICentre, and the Plateau Multi-Door Courthouse, PMDC, who travelled into this space not to perform expertise but to listen, learn, facilitate and strengthen the capacities already present.
Our attention turned intensely towards Housing, Land and Property rights. HLP may sound like another piece of development-sector alphabet soup, but behind those three letters are some of the most explosive questions in post-conflict recovery.
Who owns the land to which displaced families are returning?
What happens when a family returns after ten years and discovers that another family has occupied its home?
What evidence of ownership is acceptable when documents have been burnt, lost or abandoned during flight?
Can a widow inherit or reclaim her husband’s property?
What happens to children born in displacement whose ancestral homes exist only in stories?
What becomes of farmland that has remained unused, been occupied, reallocated or taken over by government projects?
These are not merely property questions. They are questions of identity, dignity, belonging and survival. A badly managed return process can turn yesterday’s victims into tomorrow’s rivals. When camps close without careful consultation, accurate records, accessible dispute-resolution systems and adequate services in communities of return, displacement does not end. It merely changes address.
Reintegration cannot be reduced to moving people from tents to villages. A roof is not the same thing as home. Home is safety. Home is recognition. Home is knowing that the land beneath your feet will not become the next battlefield.
So, on Thursday, I sat near Al-Ummah Masjid on Kamda Road in Old GRA and asked myself whether the glory of Borno could ever be restored.
The question was not dramatic. It was quiet, almost reluctant. It came from looking at a place that has endured too much and wondering whether history can be persuaded to become generous again.
Later, the following day at the Maiduguri Central Mosque, facing the Shehu’s Palace, I found part of my answer.
We had hoped to meet the Shehu of Borno, Alhaji Abubakar Ibn Umar Garbai El-Kanemi, but he was away. Yet the palace, the mosque and the life around them still spoke. Children played freely on the praying ground. Their laughter rose above the solemnity of the architecture. In the distance stood the House of Assembly, an imperfect symbol of democratic possibility. The evening light rested on the buildings as though reminding us that darkness, no matter how long it has occupied a place, does not acquire permanent title.
Nearby, local hunting dogs moved around the palace surroundings. One had recently littered. In a gesture of extraordinary warmth, the palace’s chief guard offered me one of the puppies to take home.
It was a small moment, but small moments often tell the truth more clearly than official speeches.
A man in a place known globally for war offered a stranger new life to carry home.
That puppy became, in my mind, an unexpected symbol of Borno itself: vulnerable, alive, carrying old instincts and new possibility, needing protection but also capable of becoming a protector.
It was also heartening to see public schools looking beautiful. In Nigeria, we sometimes underestimate what a renovated classroom can say to a child. A decent school building tells a child that the state has not entirely forgotten them. A functioning classroom is not merely an educational facility. In a region targeted by an ideology hostile to formal education, every open school is a counterargument. Every teacher who returns to class is a quiet combatant. Every girl who walks through the school gate is a rejection of the gunman’s theology.
Can the glory of Borno ever be the same again?
Perhaps not.
But maybe restoration is not always about becoming exactly what one was before the destruction. Perhaps restoration is the harder work of becoming something wiser after surviving what should have ended you.
Borno’s future will not be secured by buildings alone. It will depend on whether justice accompanies reconstruction, whether communities participate in decisions, whether women are heard, whether persons with disabilities are included, whether traditional leaders are treated as partners, whether politicians learn humility and whether those returning from violence are reintegrated without erasing the pain of those they harmed.
Peace must not become another project delivered to Borno.
It must be built with Borno.
As the children played between the mosque and the palace, and the evening settled gently over Yerwa, the answer became clearer.
The glory of Borno may not return in the exact garments it once wore. But there is still laughter near the palace. There are still classrooms opening. There are still leaders willing to learn. There are still communities prepared to negotiate belonging. There are still strangers offering puppies as gifts.
And somewhere beyond the grief, beyond the camps, beyond the vocabulary of insurgency and intervention, there is light.
It is not far away, will Borno win—Only time will tell
