Wednesday 15 April, 2026

Nigeria published a terrorism financing list. The man who got 10 years sold petrol. He had been waiting for trial for a decade.

On Saturday, the Nigeria Sanctions Committee published its updated terrorism financing list. 48 individuals. 12 corporate entities. Names, nationalities, roles, the specific terrorist groups they allegedly funded.

Two days later, 227 suspects appeared before 10 judges at the Federal High Court in Abuja. Heavily guarded convoys. Military, police, and intelligence supervision. The most visible prosecution of terrorism financing Nigeria has ever attempted.

Five defendants have already been sentenced. The most discussed conviction is Babagana Habeeb, a former Borno senatorial candidate. He got 10 years for selling petrol to Boko Haram.

Habeeb told the court the sales may have been carried out by attendants at his filling station without his knowledge. He was kneeling in the dock. He said he had spent more than 10 years in detention without contact with his family. Two wives. Six children.

He pleaded guilty and asked for leniency. He didn't get it.

Ten years in detention before trial, then 10 years as the sentence. The government's counsel opposed leniency on the grounds that his support contributed to deaths and displacement. That argument is not wrong. The fuel reached the insurgents. People died.

Both things can be true. A petrol dealer in Maiduguri may have supplied fuel that insurgents used. And 10 years in pre-trial detention for a man who may not have known what his attendants were doing is not what justice looks like either.

What the list doesn't settle is the question people in the northeast have been carrying for 15 years. Who funded the insurgency at scale? Who provided the money, the networks, the political cover that allowed Boko Haram and ISWAP to sustain operations across three countries? A fuel dealer isn't that person.

The list of 48 names will be studied. Some names will surprise people. Some names that people expected to see won't be there. That gap between the list and the expectation is where the northeast's real question lives.

Nigeria has now secured convictions in 386 of 508 terrorism cases prosecuted. That number deserves to be taken seriously. The prosecutorial work is real.

But the people who paid the heaviest cost of this insurgency are watching from outside the courtroom. The communities in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa who buried their dead and rebuilt what they could. They are watching a man kneel in a dock for selling fuel. The architecture of the funding that sustained 15 years of violence is still being mapped, name by name, 48 at a time.