Vigilantes killed repentant bandits. The reprisal came within hours.

Jibia Local Government Area in Katsina had been peaceful for over a year. That matters. It means the security effort was working, at least by surface metrics. Then yesterday at noon, vigilantes on patrol in Falale village intercepted three men described in government statements as "repentant bandits."

They killed them.

By evening, the bandits' allies had launched a reprisal on the village. Eighteen people are dead. Several more are injured.Security forces deployed. The Katsina State Commissioner for Internal Security says order has been restored.

Here's the machinery underneath that sentence.

"Repentant bandits" is the official category for former armed group members who surrendered under Nigeria's various amnesty and deradicalisation programmes. The logic is: bring them in, process them, reintegrate them. It reduces active fighters. It's the same logic that produced Boko Haram repentant fighters in the northeast, some of whom are now embedded in communities they once terrorised.

The problem is that reintegration is almost never completed. There's no sustained livelihood support, no community reconciliation process, no way for the communities who suffered under these men to process their presence. So when repentant bandits reappear in a village — even with official status — the instinct is predictable. And when the instinct acts, the reprisal that follows is also predictable.

The Katsina state government's own statement noted that Jibia LGA "had been peaceful for over one year as a result of strategic security responses." What broke that peace wasn't a bandit attack. It was a vigilante action against people the state had already processed and returned. The programme that was supposed to resolve the violence triggered the violence.

Jibia is also a border LGA, close to Niger Republic. Reprisal cycles in border zones don't stay contained. The fighters who run have somewhere to go.

Nigeria's northwest security approach has always been reactive. Troops deploy after attacks. Amnesties happen without reintegration. Vigilante groups fill the gaps left by formal security forces and make their own decisions about who's safe and who isn't. Yesterday's deaths in Falale are the result of all three of those dynamics landing in the same place at the same time.

Eighteen people paid for a policy nobody finished building.