Bomba Dauda
The decision by the Katsina State Government to initiate a peace dialogue with over 70 repentant bandits has once again brought Nigeria’s conflicted security policy into sharp focus. While violent actors who terrorised communities, kidnapped citizens, and destabilised entire regions are being courted with dialogue, amnesty, and reintegration, a disturbing contradiction persists elsewhere: Victor “Zidane” Solomon, a community self-defence patriot from Kajuru Local Government Area of Kaduna State, remains on death row.
This contradiction raises a fundamental question of justice, equity, and conscience: why is the defender of a besieged community condemned, while those who unleashed terror on innocent civilians are offered peace deals?
Joshua Solomon, popularly known as Zidane, did not take up arms to conquer territory, extort ransom, or impose fear. He emerged at a time when Kajuru communities were under relentless attacks by armed bandits, villages razed, women widowed, children orphaned, and farmlands abandoned. In the face of state failure to provide timely protection, Joshua stood with his people to defend their lives and ancestral homes.
Yet today, he sits in Kaduna prison, sentenced to death by hanging under circumstances many consider deeply troubling. The trial that led to his conviction has been widely criticised by human rights advocates as selective, politicised, and disconnected from the broader context of insecurity that forced communities into self-defence. The law, critics argue, was applied mechanically without regard to the reality of survival under siege.
The irony is painful. Across Nigeria, governments are increasingly embracing non-kinetic approaches, dialogue, rehabilitation, and reconciliation, to end armed violence. Katsina’s engagement with bandits is only the latest example. Zamfara, Niger, and even Kaduna itself have at various times explored negotiations with armed groups whose actions were undeniably criminal.
If dialogue and forgiveness are now recognised as tools for peace, why is Joshua Solomon excluded from this evolving national conscience?
Joshua did not attack the state. He did not profit from violence. He did not prey on civilians. His actions, whatever legal questions they raise, were rooted in collective self-preservation, not criminal enterprise. To equate him morally with bandits is to erase the difference between aggression and defence, between terror and survival.
Justice must be consistent to be credible. A system that offers olive branches to mass killers but reserves the gallows for community defenders risks losing moral authority. Peace cannot be built on selective compassion.
This is not a call to undermine the rule of law. Rather, it is a call to apply the law with humanity, context, and equity. The same courage being shown by Katsina in opening dialogue with violent actors should inspire Kaduna, and the Federal Government, to re-examine Joshua Solomon’s case. At the very least, his death sentence should be commuted, and his case reviewed with full consideration of the circumstances that produced him.
Nigeria must decide what message it sends to its citizens. If communities learn that defending themselves leads to execution while terror leads to negotiation, the consequences will be grave.
Joshua “Zidane” Solomon deserves justice, not as a bandit, but as a symbol of a people abandoned and forced to choose between extinction and resistance. As Nigeria seeks peace through dialogue, let that peace begin with fairness.
