Amazing story about past abuses by security forces & militia in #BokoHaram crisis. Sit back & read, please. And grieve with me over years of a man’s life wasted, over so many people dying brutal deaths.

And yes, I have collected atrocious stories of Boko Haram abuse too, & I have & will echo them. But is symmetry acceptable? Is it too much to expect that state authorities are held to a higher standard? What moral ground can a state claim if it does not accept standards?

Situation has improved now, thanks to NGO and media reporting, donor pressure, #ICRC support and soul-searching on part of some in security forces, militia and political authorities. I really think state & military thinking has changed.

But it is important to keep those histories in mind, as debate rages on "reintegration" of the thousands who have been detained for good and bad reasons in a decade of war.

A lot of damage has been done to many, by all sides. This is part of what Nigeria and Borno must face if they want to move on.

I cannot verify the claims below. But I have no reason to believe the man lied. Story was too detailed & specific to be made up. Too coherent with so many other stories I picked, with so much reporting Amnesty & HRW. Let me just sum it up below, and you go think what you want.

That tired trope of security officials using counter-insurgency contexts to settle scores? Here is an actual case. The man, then IDP in a camp, was denounced as #BokoHaram by a CJTF militiaman because he was organising IDPs to protest his appropriation of camp resources.

Beaten to point of fainting. “Then they bring long nails, 5 inches. They hammer the nails in my wrists, in my forearms, up my arm. They hammer a nail and remove it. And then another one. And another one” Guy did not confess to being BH.

Guy then gets transferred to Giwa Barracks, main military detention centre in Maiduguri. Some detainees attended to him & he recovered. He received a single pill from the wardens (antibiotic?).

400 in a cell. People had to sleep sitting, pressed on each other. People were dying. Often. Insufficient food and water, untreated wounds from torture, suffocation, heat.

The guy was then transferred to Kainji prison, another military facility outside of Borno State. 120 packed in a small cell. 3 days with no food nor water. People began drinking their own urine. Kidney failures. 15 died out of the 120.

Women in the cell opposite them had water bottles, and they begin rolling them over to them. Wardens saw that. They began giving water to women in cups, so they could not help the men any more.

“We were so thirsty we asked the women to fill the empty water bottles with their urine for us”.

He heard there were 2004 people in Kainji then. He thinks more than half died in 6 months.

“Then they built small rooms for toilets. They locked us in there in groups of 4. Two had to stand, two could sit. They were bringing in more and more people. 15 to 20 people died every day. We got only one meal a day, very small.”

Then things improved. Red Cross came and food and clothing and water improved notably. The guy was transferred to Kuje prison, a place with what he thought were decent conditions. And judges dismissed the man’s case altogether.

It then took 8 more months in Kuje – not before release, but before the guy was sent to Operation Safe Corridor (OSC) in Gombe State, a programme theoretically dedicated to Boko Haram defectors.

Food was bad in Gombe. But overall, “In all the detention centres I have been too, the only fair one is Gombe. In Gombe, we interact, we see people. I now know how to read and write. We meet the social workers. Psychosocial support was good."

"We were locked for years. We became crazy. We drank urine. But in Gombe, they sit with us and talk. They asked about my experience and I told them.”

Stay in OSC was supposed to last 3 months, it lasted “8 months 10 days”. Imagine the guy's frustration, the counting… Guy was released & now lives in an IDP camp in Maiduguri, with his family. Upon release, he was given 20,000 naira (50 dollars), 10 yards of cloth & ID card.

One of his CJTF accusers died in a IED explosion. The other left CJTF, possibly because CJTF have been trying to clean up their act.

In this story, there is everything. There is meanness and greed on the part of some (and please, I am not saying all CJTF are like that. Many have sacrificed a lot to protect their communities).

There is sloppiness, certainly – not easy to handle massive influxes on tight resources. But also a very deliberate perversity on the part of others. A desire to destroy and humiliate absolutely.

There is state officials waking up to their responsibility (and it is very brave of them, for they could have just gone on the usual way). And the beautiful resilience of that man who gets on with his life after having 4 years brutally stolen.