It is not the first time that there would be what looks like an organised killing in Benue State, the place having since assumed a notoriety of being a killing field in recent years. But the latest killing bore bestiality that has never before been witnessed. On the night of Friday, June 13, scores of assailants were sighted by locals surging towards Yelewata, a community in the Guma area of the state situated about 120 kilometers from the state capital, Makurdi.
Minutes after arriving at the village, they opened fire on the inhabitants who had a few hours before been either on the farms or at the markets but were then taking their deserved rest. Killing the sleeping people who included women and children was not enough for the assailants. They also set the homes of their victims ablaze. As if the heinous act was not gory enough, they also razed the local food store that contained the community’s annual harvest in a move that was apparently calculated to annihilate. It was a hit and retreat operation that left anguish in its wake.
In just a couple of hours, the body count had reached 150, rising from the initial 100, even as scores of bodies were still missing as lucky survivors desperately searched for their family members. By Sunday, June 15, over 200 people had been reported dead with several receiving treatment in hospitals outside the community, in addition to over 2,000 people being displaced, according to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).
World attention had trailed the incident which bore the semblance of genocide. It attracted the pontiff, Pope Leo, who spoke before delivering the Sunday Angelus prayer and described the incident as “terrible massacre”. He thereafter prayed for “security, justice and peace in Nigeria”, adding: “I am right now particularly thinking of the rural Christian communities of Benue State who have been relentless victims of violence.”
Amnesty International Nigeria had a few hours before called on the Nigerian authorities to immediately end what it called “the almost daily bloodshed in Benue State and bring the actual perpetrators to justice”.
Although no one was left in doubt of who the perpetrators could be, nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. But farmers in the attacked community had accused the cattle herders whom they said had allowed their cattle to feed on cultivated farmland, destroying crops.
Only last month, a similar attack had occurred in the Gwer West area of Benue State, claiming the lives of 20 people in the community. But it had been less reported or just casually regarded as normal.
Perhaps, the reactions from the Pope, as well as from Amnesty International and concerned people around the world, had jolted the Federal Government to react – although it was not more than the usual issuing of threats that were never backed up with decisive action. President Bola Tinubu said on Monday that the government’s patience was running out, saying “enough is enough” while calling it “senseless bloodletting” and ordering the security agencies to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators. Shortly after, a statement emerged from the Presidency, saying Tinubu had shelved an official engagement in Kaduna State the next day and would instead pay a sympathy visit to the government and people of Benue State on June 18 over the latest carnage.
However, indication that the “sympathy visit” would be politicised emerged early on June 17 when a letter from the “Office of the Executive Governor on Special Groups Mobilisation”, signed by Hon. Francis Ngutswen, addressed to “esteemed leaders and registered support groups”, stated that he was working “at the instance of Governor Hyacinth Alia to mobilise massively to give a rousing welcome to our President”. The letter also instructed the support group constituents to “form a colourful shoulder-to-shoulder spread/procession from the Makurdi Airport to Warukum Roundabout and down to Government House, Makurdi where the President will address a Town Hall Meeting”.
It was likened to a political rally, far from the sympathy visit that the world was made to understand. Despite the Benue government also declaring June 18 a work-free day because of the president’s visit, the mobilisers ordered schools to line up their pupils along the routes that the convoy of Tinubu would ply while in the state capital to wave the national flags and sing the national anthem in solidarity in a classic turning of a somber occasion to a festival of sort.
Videos emerged later in the day of the children drenched in heavy rain as they awaited the president’s convoy, instantly sparking outbursts on social media by respondents who described the act of exposing vulnerable children to such discomfort as uncivilised and callous.
After Tinubu and his entourage visited a hospital in Makurdi where many injured from the Yelewata carnage were receiving treatment, they headed to the Government House where the Town Hall meeting was scheduled to hold. It was either the president had been misadvised on the situation or he lacked the grasp of it. But his remark that the massacre at Yelewata had resulted from communal issues, for which he sought to address the meeting, was as faulty as it was unfortunate. He preached “peaceful co-existence” to two sides that have nothing in common aside from one consciously and deliberately oppressing the other.
At the meeting, Tinubu caused a stir as he gazed at the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Kayode Egbetokun, asking: “How come no arrest has been made?” A bemused Egbetokun could only exude the helplessness that his personnel have endured in grasping the wanton killing that has pervaded Benue State in recent years with almost 7,000 lives lost so far. Then he turned to his service chiefs next in a somewhat desperate call: “We thank all of you, but we need to keep our ears to the ground, let’s get those criminals, let’s get them out. DG NIA, DG SSS, retool your information channels and let’s have tangible intelligence so that this will not occur again.”
But as long as the perpetrators continue to be treated as ghosts or appeased, the Yelewata killing will recur again and again. He had not himself helped matters by attempting to politicise the gory incidents in Yelewata and elsewhere in Benue State. Hear him as he addressed Governor Alia: “Your political enemies don’t want you to succeed. Are you just realising that?” To the traditional leaders at the meeting, he said: “By now, you may be bored of hearing my voice, but I give you the assurance, we will find peace; we will convert this tragedy to prosperity.”
However, one of the traditional leaders, the Tor Tiv, Prof. James Ayatse, was less impressed and he let out his mind to Tinubu: “We do have grave concerns about the misinformation and misrepresentation of the security crisis in Benue State. What we are dealing with here in Benue is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits, which has been going on for decades and is worsening every year.
Wrong diagnosis will always lead to wrong treatment. So, we are dealing with something far more sinister than we think about. It is not learning to live with your neighbours; it is dealing with the war.”
Whether the Tor Tiv’s message sank in the president remains to be seen, in view of what the monarch felt about the genocidal issue whose end seems still far from sight. But the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Christopher Musa, sees the solution to carnage from a political point rather than anything else. While speaking with journalists on the sidelines in Makurdi on Wednesday, the CDS fell just short of admitting that the military approach to what he sees as farmer-herder clashes ravaging the Benue area has so far failed to find a lasting peace. He however hinted at cattle rustling as a factor that those who seek solution to the crisis have ignored but which must be considered on the way forward. He blamed the communities for hoarding information that the security agencies could use to flush out the criminals among the herders, tasking youths and leaders in the communities to improve on intelligence gathering and be honest about it for their own benefits.
Musa could not be far from realistic though. There have been frequent violent incidents across the north of Nigeria following disputes between cattle herders and agrarian communities competing for increasingly scant land and water. Accusations and counter-accusations have reigned between the farmers and the herders of the Fulani ethnic group who have laid claim to the farmers’ territories being grazing routes that were legally recognised through a 1965 state legislation. It is not impossible that interpretation of the legislation has led the herders to become armed and militarised in recent years in view of what they perceive as threat by the farmers who lay on the routes.
Meanwhile, as reactions continue to trail the carnage at Yelewata and measures are being taken to make the government admit that it was more of genocide than skirmish, the costs are already being counted in debilitating fashion. With the food store of the community’s yearly harvest razed to rubble, hunger now stalks the area.
This is in addition to the farmers that can no longer access their destroyed farms. There is also the issue of the displaced people who are now homeless, culminating for them the triple threat hunger, poverty and disease. There is a whole lot to do for the community to enable it to recover from the latest trauma, assuming, that is, another carnage of greater proportion does not occur in nearby communities, no thanks to the murderous armed invaders that are still on the loose.
Amnesty International Nigeria recently posited that in the two years since the Tinubu administration has assumed power, at least 10,217 people have been killed in attacks by gunmen purported to be cattle herders in Benue, Edo, Katsina, Kebbi, Plateau, Sokoto and Zamfara states. Benue leads in the death toll with 6,896, only trailed by Plateau where 2,630 people have lost their lives.
Published June 21, 2025
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