Life can change with the smallest of gestures.

For Abubakar Aminu, it was just a phone call. And with that, an invisible thread of suspicion wound itself around him.

In 2014, Abubakar, then in his early twenties, met a regular customer who bought charcoal from him in Kano, North West Nigeria. He knew the man as a tinsmith who was friendly and generous. Within a short time, the business turned into a friendship, and they occasionally shared jokes. 

One night, while Abubakar was out of town, the tinsmith called. They cracked jokes as usual until the man teased that he wanted to sleep over at Abubakar’s house. Playing along, he replied, “My house is always yours. Whenever you feel like coming, the doors are open.” They both laughed together and ended the call.

What Abubakar did not know was that the tinsmith was a wanted member of Boko Haram, his phone already under surveillance. That innocuous call, the harmless laughter, was enough for Nigeria’s secret police, the DSS, to tie invisible strings around his fate.

The next morning, unaware, he set out for Lagos in the country’s South West to restock charcoal. Somewhere in Ogun State, officers closed in on him. They accused him of being a Boko Haram member. He laughed, not in mockery but in disbelief, the laugh of a man confronted with the absurd. But the laughter meant nothing. His wrists were bound, and he was taken to Lagos.

“I was taken to the DSS office for interrogation,” he told HumAngle, his voice heavy with weariness of the memory. From that sterile room, he was allowed to call home to inform his mother of the arrest. Panic travelled faster than the words he managed to utter. His family rushed, pleaded, pulled every string they could find. Nothing worked.

The interrogations continued. They asked, “Who was the man on the phone? How long had they known each other? Where is he now?” Abubakar insisted he was only a customer, nothing more, and that he knew nothing of the tinsmith’s ties to Boko Haram. But disbelief hung in the room like smoke. They were certain he was withholding something.

And so, instead of a court, Abubakar was sent to what he later described as “an unknown detention facility in Abuja”. 

“They downloaded, transcribed, and printed every conversation I ever had with him,” Abubakar recounted. “Page after page, they searched for guilt, but there was nothing.”

Detention incommunicado

For Abubakar, there is no greater cruelty than being punished for a crime one has not even conceived of committing. For ten years, he lived among men who had carried weapons into villages, men who torched houses and watched towns burn, radicals who slaughtered men, women, and children—the actual Boko Haram members.

When the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria began over a decade ago, arrests were often based on the flimsiest of suspicions. HumAngle has reported extensively on this. For some, their only “crime” was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. For others, it was a phone call, a shared name, or a chance encounter with someone later discovered to be an insurgent. Families watched in silence as their loved ones vanished into detention facilities, branded with a stigma that clung even after their release.

A 2020 report by Amnesty International exposed the terrible conditions in Nigerian military detention centres, estimating that at least 10,000 deaths in custody occurred since 2011. Many of these deaths occurred at Giwa Barracks in Maiduguri, Borno State, the epicentre of the insurgency. The report noted a devastating toll, particularly among older men, who, though only 4 per cent of the population, accounted for up to a quarter of the dead. In April 2017 alone, 166 corpses were transferred from Giwa to a mortuary.

At the Abuja facility, Abubakar lived in an overcrowded room, reeking of sweat, disease, and death. “There was a period when over 300 people died in a month,” he said. 

There he spent months. He struggled to recall how long. Abubakar said he was chained with Boko Haram suspects without seeing sunlight. “We would be begging and crying before we could be allowed to just sit for some hours under the sunlight,” he said.

There are two prisons in life: the one of iron bars, and the one built of perception. Abubakar was trapped in both. Even now, he feels watched and is careful with his words. Still, he described the situation in the detention facility as simply “inhuman.” He remembered that when he first arrived, he spent “many days with no food.”

Testimonies from detainees read like horror fiction. Dignity stripped bare, lives suffocated by heat, hunger, and disease. Men collapsed in heaps, reduced to shadows. Survivors speak of floors that served as both bed and latrine, of stench and despair indistinguishable from each other.

Though not a psychologist, Abubakar believes the system was designed to break their minds. “The condition made prisoners fight a lot over a minor issue because everyone would be angry with one another, especially those chained together,” he said.

Months turned to years, and Abubakar felt he didn’t belong there. 

He was one of thousands detained without trial. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, had long accused the government of such practices. By 2014, Amnesty estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 detainees languished without charge.

For victims like Abubakar, proving innocence seemed like chasing a mirage. Yet he clung to hope, praying for the day he would see his mother again.

The mother’s ordeal

While Abubakar was trapped within prison walls, another story was unfolding outside: one of his mother’s sacrifice, despair, and an unbroken faith.

At first, she believed his arrest was a mistake that would be quickly corrected. She held onto the thought that once the truth was known, her son would return home. But days became weeks, weeks folded into months and years, and hope began to wear thin.

She fought, prayed, and cried until her tears drowned her voice. She sold all her belongings, but justice remained out of reach. Instead, she encountered fraudsters who promised to use their “influence” to secure her son’s release. 

“They took her money and vanished, leaving her poorer and more desperate,” Abubakar told HumAngle. 

As a new widow– her husband had died just a year before Abubakar’s arrest– she fought alone. She continued chasing shadows until everyone believed that Abubakar must have been killed and there was no way he could come back home.

Then, after ten years of a futile search, her dream came true. She received a call from Mallam Sidi, a Nigerian military-run deradicalisation centre in Gombe State. It was Abubakar. His voice had changed, but she recognised it. When she told relatives, they refused to believe her.

“Because all her money went to the scammers who promised her that I would be free, family members believed this, too, must be another scammer,” Abubakar recalled.

Paths of return

Before that call, Abubakar had spent years praying for a trial, even if it meant being charged with something. “The experience of not knowing your fate while in detention is worse than the detention itself,” he said.

One day, in 2023, his prayers were answered. He was arraigned with other detainees. “Many were charged and sentenced according to their crimes. And when it came to our turn, I was not found guilty,” he said.

Just like that. There was no evidence. There was no link. His phone call was not a rope but a line that led nowhere. The judge moved her hand, and a decade was set down on the table like a coin that cannot be returned to your pocket. He was discharged. 

But he could not go home. The government required that discharged detainees like him must first pass through a deradicalisation programme at Mallam Sidi, designed for former terrorists. The six-month programme, launched in 2016, combines religious re-education, psychosocial support, and vocational training. The idea: a man who once held a gun should leave with skills to earn a living.

This is the vision in public documents.

Abubakar, though never a terrorist, entered Mallam Sidi and participated in the routine: prayers, counselling sessions, vocational lessons. Instructors explained that religion should be a lamp, not a knife. Abubakar learned welding and metalwork.

At the end of the programme, there were promises, such as vocational kits and support that would last long enough for them to plant their feet and begin to walk. But Abubakar was aware that some graduates had already reported that they received nothing or just a fraction of what they were told to expect.

The distance between policy and practice is wide enough to lose a man in.

“But because I know that I had a shop and an inheritance that I could come back to when released, I wasn’t only planning my future on what I learned but on what I left behind,” Abubakar said. But when he returned, everything had been sold. Even the property he had inherited from his father was gone.

At Mallam Sidi, he received a certificate labelling him a “repentant Boko Haram member.” The phrase jarred. He had never been one. He had entered detention as a charcoal seller and a son; he left with nothing but his mother and the ruins of his business.

The homecoming and struggle for survival

His family drove for hours from Kano to  Gombe to meet him as he completed the “deradicalisation programme”. When his mother finally saw him, the years of waiting collapsed into that single moment.

“We were all speechless,” Abubakar recalled. “We couldn’t control ourselves or our emotions; we only cried and cried.” 

The tears were not just for joy. They carried the weight of loss, the years stolen, the sacrifices made, the silence endured. His mother held him tightly, as if her grip alone could keep him from ever slipping away again. But even then, in the shadow of that embrace, they knew their ordeal was not yet over.

Weeks later, Abubakar and 15 other Mallam Sidi graduates were picked up by the Kano State Government and brought to the government house. Though the state governor was unavailable, officials asked them to state their requests. They asked for something simple: support to earn a living, small businesses, vocational tools, and farming inputs. They left hopeful.

But hope has a way of fading. Four months have passed since Abubakar returned, and the promised support remains absent. The family, already drained of resources, now watches him idle at home. The charcoal trade is gone, and opportunities are scarce.

“All I need is something to make me busy, something that I can rebuild my life with, something that can make me hopeful for the future,” he said.

Back in Kofar Waika, Gwale Local Government Area, Abubakar is slowly reintegrating. His friends have accepted him and are supporting him to go back to his former self.

“There was only one time when somebody accused me of being a Boko Haram member, but I didn’t care because I know I’ve never been one,” he said.

But his mother sees him every day, staring into the distance, haunted by what might have been. The reunion was sweet, but the days since have been bitter, reminding them that survival is not only about release, but about the chance to live well again.