The Benue killings have assumed a genocidal twist. The systematic decimation of the largely agrarian population, popularly dubbed the ‘food basket of the nation,’ has reached a frightening scale. It has become an epidemic.
The peak of the massacre occurred penultimate Friday and Saturday in the eerie hours when over 200 persons — some news accounts actually touted 300 — were killed in cold blood in just one community, Yelewata, a quiescent agrarian settlement on the Abuja-Makurdi highway in Guma Local Government Area of Benue State, and in a single sanguinary expedition.
These were neither chickens nor goats. This is the height of savagery that can only be visited on fellow humans by venal brutes in human skin that the killers actually are. It was the most devastating, grisly assault ever visited on Benue by the soulless goons in recent history. To think that the victims included children!
The once bubbly soul of Yelewata has been sundered. The gloom that has descended on the once effervescent community speaks loudly. The quietude is akin to that of the graveyard. Reports said the residents were jolted awake from sleep by gunfire and screams as suspected armed herdsmen invaded the community, torching buildings and killing indiscriminately. Many of the victims were reportedly burnt alive in schools, churches, markets and stores where they had, in a wicked ironic twist, taken refuge from an attack they feared but could not stop.
The carnage was not a happenstance. The locals describe it as a coordinated assault. Just weeks earlier, traditional leaders in Tiv and Idoma regions, who sniffed a whiff of danger, had issued an ultimatum to herders to vacate farmlands over rising tension. But the herders were unfazed by the ultimatum. And they refused to heed it. What followed was the Yelewata massacre.
The extent of the bestiality was beyond comprehension. Many families reportedly lost more than 20 members each to the night marauders’ onslaught. Some entire families of 40 and more were reportedly wiped out. A young girl, identified as Lucy, was said to have lost her mother and five siblings. A native and politician, Frank Utoo, reportedly lost 33 members of his extended family and over 50 political allies.
Yet, the attack was not fortuitous. A survivor revealed that intelligence reports had warned of an impending attack from Nasarawa State routes, yet no security action was allegedly taken. Out of fear and in their bid to escape the attack, residents vacated their homes and began sleeping in communal locations like schools, churches, stores and markets. Those places unfortunately turned out to be death traps. The merciless marauders picked them up from those supposed hideouts and hacked most of them to death.
Benue communities in Logo, Guma, Ukum, Agatu, Kwande, and Gwer-West have also come under sustained attacks by murderous herdsmen, armed militia, and bandits masquerading as unknown gunmen, wiping out families and taking over farmlands. Mass burials are becoming the order.
The carnage has expectedly elicited massive national and international outrage. But the official responses have unfortunately manifested more in missteps. Although President Bola Tinubu was responsive enough to have shifted his official visit to Kaduna for a quick presidential see-it-for-yourself assessment trip to Benue, his actions patently missed the point.
The president, who described the killings rightly as a “senseless bloodletting,” was, however, wrong to have framed the massacre as a communal conflict. The Benue situation is not a conflict between communities. It has even gone beyond the usual farmers-herders’ clashes. It is rather a coordinated genocide, a land grabbing heist being executed by well-armed terrorists against the indigenous peoples under the cloak of a jihad.
Hence, it is a glaring misstep for Mr. President to have raised a committee to negotiate with and reconcile so-called warring communities. To negotiate with whom? With implacable terrorists who are said to be adopting sophisticated scorched earth-like guerrilla tactics in their heinous operations and are carrying a haughty ‘we-are-untouchable’ mentality?
Besides, the Benue State government too carried obsequiousness too far in lining school children on the road in the rain to welcome a president on a mourning expedition. To what effect?
The insufferable Benue carnage, as it were, is an exemplification of the long drawn dreadful alliance of terror groups to corral hegemonic spheres in Nigeria. This land grabbing obsession is the same villaneous campaign ravaging most parts of the North, which has in recent times witnessed a troubling surge in violent attacks and killings driven largely by a mix of banditry and insurgency.
The spate of terror escalated into mass killings in the last few months with no fewer than 383 people killed across the region in just a month, the latest Benue case being the largest casualty in a single operation. The most affected among the 19 Northern states are Plateau, Benue, Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, Kano, Taraba and Borno.
Only on April 17 and 18, at least 56 people were killed by suspected herdsmen during coordinated assaults on Ukum and Logo areas of the same Benue State. Also in April, 40 people were killed after armed men invaded Zike community in the Kwall district of Bassa Local Government Area of Plateau State. Similarly, 57 persons were killed in Borno State recently by militants linked to Boko Haram’s Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad faction.
On Saturday, May 24, 2025, scores of villagers killed by suspected herdsmen were given mass burial by residents of Munga Lalau and Munga Doso communities in Karim-Lamido Local Government Area of Taraba State.
The over 40 victims were slain when the ruthless gunmen stormed the villages around 2am the previous day. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers, numbering over 50, invaded the villages on motorcycles and opened fire indiscriminately on sleeping residents, mowing down anyone in sight.
“We are still recovering the dead bodies, but I can tell you that the casualty figure is high. These are not isolated killings. It is a calculated extermination. People who returned to their homes based on security assurances have now been killed. What do we tell their families?,” was how a survivor and community leader described the doom that visited them.
President Tinubu’s missteps on the Benue massacre are a dangerous trajectory because they connote either a failure of intelligence or deliberate tinkering with intelligence to deceive the president. The grapevine hinted that some Benue elders might have deliberately hoodwinked the president into believing the killings as a communal crisis.
The architects of this plot were said to be those who have an axe to grind with the Benue State Governor, Rev. Fr. Hyacinth Alia, and wanted him removed through a probable state of emergency. Some of these elders allegedly include those who are in a bitter dissonance with the governor sequel to a needless wrangling over who controls the state’s political structure.
The suspected plot, according to the grapevine, was to paint the governor as an incompetent helmsman who could not manage supposed warring communities, allowing the crisis to spew out of control. This is rather unfortunate, if is true, as it amounts to dancing on the graves of the victims of the massacre.
Going forward, the senseless wave of massive killings must be stopped. The terrorists’ bloody quest for hegemonic spheres must be sullied by all means and their land grabbing obsession foiled. President Tinubu is thus on the cusp of history, which has, at this time, placed this responsibility on his shoulders. An intrepid leader who has often demonstrated that he has the courage of his convictions, Tinubu can ordinarily achieve it if he can rise above the titanic hurdles that will certainly be hurled his way.
First, what Benue and other states being ravaged by terrorist attacks need is not a committee but protection through an impregnable security bulwark shielding them against further mindless bloodletting.
There must, therefore, like some analysts have posited, be an immediate military intervention in all affected Benue communities and other critical areas that will tame the ragtag armies of the terror gangs, a military network imbued with clear rules of engagement to protect civilians.
There must also be public identification and prosecution of the perpetrators and their sponsors, some of whom are, no doubt, highly placed but certainly not above the law.
The oblique complaints about soldiers in combat being shortchanged by being denied their inconvenience allowances and armed with obsolete weapons to confront the terrorists clutching sophisticated arms must be addressed at the highest level of governance.
The implementation of the Forest Guards initiative, already approved by President Tinubu, must be fast-tracked. The recruitment, training and deployment of this strategic paramilitary squad must be top notch. This is not an initiative to politicize. They must be armed with weapons sophisticated enough to be able to rid the various forests across the nation of a miscellany of heavily armed bandits-cum-terrorists, who are holed up in those places.
Finally, the time could not have been more auspicious for the decentralization of the nation’s policing system by allowing state and community policing, to act as effective counter force to the marauding terrorists. There is really no monopoly of violence. The strength of those villains lies in the sophisticated weapons they carry.
All the leadership needs do to demystify them is to also provide very sophisticated weapons and other appurtenances for all the security apparati at various levels, including the Forest Guards and state and community police personnel to be able to confidently confront the terrorists fire for fire.
This is where the National Assembly comes in. Our federal legislators must rise up to the occasion by promulgating appropriate laws allowing the Forest Guards, state police-cum-community police personnel and other paramilitary forces that may be raised to counter murderous terrorists, to carry sophisticated weapons.
This is the only way to stop the egregious elements. The expansionist obsession of these daredevils must be sullied before they overrun the nation. The time to act is either now or never!
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