After living with Boko Haram, runaways, including wives and children, struggle for social acceptance in Nigeria.
A ring with a big red glass stone sits on Mohammed Adamu’s middle finger. It is all that is left of the small jewellery business that he tried to set up.
“It reminds me that I need to push much harder to be able to get out of here,” he said.
Adamu, 30, is a former Boko Haram fighter who now lives in a refugee camp.
He claims he was captured by the group and joined in 2014, along with his wife and four children.
“In the beginning, I liked their ideology, everything happening in God’s name,” he said. “But soon, I realised that it was all about killing people. They just murdered without reason. So, I decided to run away.”
They lived with Boko Haram, but one year into their “captivity”, fighters killed his family members, he said.
In 2017, he managed to flee.
But reintegrating back into society has been near impossible.
After leaving, ex-fighters must complete a government-led rehabilitation programme, which lasts up to one year.
At the end, they receive 45,000 naira, about $125, a sum aimed at helping them kickstart their new life.
When Adamu arrived back in Gwoza, a northeastern town near Cameroon of almost 400,000 people – mostly Muslims, local elders had already decided not to accept back anyone who had lived with Boko Haram.
In an instant, Adamu was an outcast.
He moved into a refugee shelter in Maiduguri, the capital of the northeastern state of Borno, living alongside displaced people, many of whom had lost loved ones to Boko Haram attacks.
Former fighters were not welcome guests.
“If I had known that I would be so rejected here, I would have stayed in the bush,” he said.
He used the last of his savings to buy jewellery to trade in the suburbs, but this brought little income.
Now, Adamu sees no way out of the refugee camp.
