Mr President, I am a very concerned citizen who is compelled to respond to the press statement issued on your behalf by Mr Bayo Onanuga, your Special Adviser (Information and Strategy) and released on his Facebook page shortly before 9:00 pm (Nigerian time) on Sunday, June 15, 2025.

Mr President, apart from your speech declaring a state of emergency in Rivers State, this very one is the worst thing I have read coming from you since you became president of our republic. I don’t know why you or anyone who advised you about it (if any) would think this is appropriate.

First, your response came too late. How can you wait till now to respond to what is essentially a genocide in a Benue community? Did you not see the pictures? Did your security briefings not tell you clearly that hundreds of innocent people – men, women, babies and children -were hacked to death and burnt in their homes and in their streets at night and their homes, goods and property destroyed? The horror of what happened is known to the whole world and even the Pope spoke about it publicly before you! How can that be, Mr President? How?

Secondly, what is the point of coming publicly to tell the world that you are directing security chiefs to implement your earlier directive to bring lasting peace and security to Benue State? How can you give a directive that has not been implemented? To add insult to injury, you have to now come publicly to say those you gave the order to earlier should implement the order you gave them earlier after hundreds of lives have been unnecessarily lost. You are sacking no one, asking no questions, just repeating an order you gave before whose non-implementation has led to unnecessary loss of lives of our countrymen and women. Please, tell me, who is the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria? Is it you or the people you gave a directive who refused to carry out your directive and who now you’re publicly begging to carry out the directive after the unnecessary loss of hundreds of lives? And, by the way, is this “directive to bring lasting peace and security to Benue State” something you just order from Temu or Amazon and they deliver it and implement as you have directed?

Mr President what the press release reveals is confusion at the heart of your government, a confusion in the way you are dealing with insecurity. The disconnect between you and whoever you are directing is obvious. What your own statement about this issue as documented in the press release has revealed is that you are doing nothing about the situation in Benue State, even though these killings have been going on for a while. No serious government will allow what has happened in Benue and react to it like this. I mean, did the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lieutenant General Olufemi Oluyede not tell us less than two weeks ago that he was relocating to Benue to address this incessant killing of innocent villagers by herders and militia groups? What was that all about?

And some of your language in that press statement is plain conscienceless and appalling. You are calling what happened in Yelwata “reprisal attacks” when there is no report that the babies, little children, women and men hacked and burnt to death in that community had gone out earlier to attack those who came to kill them later. I mean, when did the people of Yelwata attack anybody to deserve being attacked in retaliation? Where did you get the idea that these are “reprisal attacks” by persons earlier attacked, Mr President? Or is this another brand of blaming the victims for their own gruesome death?

Mr President, you’re calling them “warring parties” when your own party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Benue, issued a statement on the 14th of June 2025 stating clearly that this is an “unprovoked and barbaric massacre.” They say it is “a calculated ethnic cleansing campaign and a deliberate attempt to displace the indigenous people of Benue State from their ancestral homes.” So, which is it? Are we to believe you or your party on the ground in Benue State? Are we to believe you when the fact is that the Yelwata people were not warring with anybody before they were gruesomely butchered and burnt in their hundreds in their own homes at night and their property and sources of livelihood destroyed? You are calling on some unnamed “political leaders and community leaders” to “rein in those who go out to cause provocations and ignite reprisal attacks.” How? Who or what ignited “reprisal attacks” in Yelwata? What reprisal attacks, Mr President? We only have one party committing genocide against another and now they’re “warring parties” and “reprisal attacks”? No, Mr President, no.

Let’s be honest, Mr President, your response is poor, very poor. You need to rethink this whole thing now and act firmly and be seen to be acting firmly.

Here are the things you need to do now:

(1)   Declare a state of emergency in Benue State and this time, do it constitutionally and by the book. You do not have to suspend or remove the Governor; you have no such power. But section 305 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria gives you enough power to make the Proclamation and make it effective. You don’t have to wait for the Governor to request that you issue a Proclamation of a state of emergency in the State. This is one of those situations where you can simply exercise your power under section 305(5) because the Governor has obviously failed “within a reasonable time to make a request” to you to issue such a Proclamation. I mean, I wouldn’t blame him, considering your exercise of this power has included the overreach of suspending a Governor in Rivers State. No one offers his head for the guillotine. But, of course, if you do this without suspending the Governor and the Benue State House of Assembly, you will be acting constitutionally and appropriately. The Governor is clearly overwhelmed; you need to act now under your section 305 powers in conjunction with the National Assembly.

(2)   The state of emergency for a period of six month should involve you carrying out massive security operations in all the nooks and crannies of the state with the singular aim of fishing out the perpetrators of this genocide and bringing them to book. For this purpose, all ongoing military exercises in the state, for instance Operation Whirl Stroke (OPWS), should be subsumed under the new operations to be led directly from the office of the National Security Adviser (NSA) and the Defence Headquarters. The Benue State Commissioner of Police, Mr Emenari Ifeanyi has already given a clue as to who the security services should be looking for because he has said they have already arrested a large number of bandits and armed herders (not farmers), which tells us these are the people involved in these killings. In carrying out these security operations under the emergency Proclamation, it will not matter if there is a reasonable curtailment of civil liberties in the period of six months the security operations are on. Peace must be enforced in Benue now.

(3)   For the optics and the substantive effect, you should visit Yelwata immediately and let the people there and the whole world see you there on the ground standing side by side with Governor Alia, commiserating with the people and assuring them of your government’s determination to catch the perpetrators of the heinous crimes and bring them to book. Promise and give them material and financial support to rebuild back their lives as much as they can. Let Nigerians and the world see you are with them.

(4)   Finally, you need to stop putting pressure on the Governor of Benue State to “immediately lead the process of dialogue and reconciliation that will bring peace to Benue” because there is no room for dialogue and reconciliation with people who commit genocide, people who openly go out to gruesomely murder whole communities for whatever reason. This is not politics; this is a matter of law and order and that is how it should be handled. You need to support Governor Hyacinth Alia to get those behind this nonsense and bring them to book, not force him to sit down and be doing pretend dialogue and reconciliation with mass murderers. This whole thing got up to this point because the administration of Muhammadu Buhari and now your own administration have chosen to mollycoddle mass murderers in the name of dialogue and reconciliation. Enough of that, Mr President.

Nigerians are watching, the world is watching, but you are the one leading. We watch.

Thank you, Mr President.

Your Compatriot,
Citizen Kennedy Emetulu