Security agencies could do more to contain the violence

In the past few weeks, Benue State has been a graveyard of innocent children, women, and indeed men – victims of incessant conflict and unprovoked attacks by suspected herders. Statistics may not be reliable, but more than 200 people have been killed since the renewed attacks commenced two months ago. As things stand today, no community in the state seems to be safe. Not even the internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps where hundreds of thousands had fled to escape the all-pervasive violence.

While we commiserate with the government and people of the state on the growing brutality targeted at innocent citizens, we are worried that these incessant attacks can only worsen the general feeling of insecurity across the country. Especially when they are being perpetrated mostly by some roving gangs of killer herders. Governor Hyacinth Alia has declared that Benue State is under siege from terrorists and bandits, saying that recent attacks are beyond the perennial clash between herders and farmers. “The way these attacks come and the intel we receive, it is a directed calibrated plan and then executed,” Alia said last week. “For some reason, none of them (killers) is ever caught. They come in in the thick of the night, hit, run and nobody sees a trace. So, it is some terrorism that is eating us up.”

 Under the banner of ‘The Voice of the Voiceless Women in Apa’, hundreds of women trooped out in Ugbokpo, headquarters of Apa local government area of Benue State, last week to protest the killings and destructions. The protest followed last Sunday’s bloody incursions on Ijaha, Ibele, Ochekwu and EdikwuAnkpali communities by these armed marauders, which claimed dozens of lives and left several others injured in a state that is now firmly under the grip of violent men. In their statement, the bereaved women claimed that herdsmen had forcefully entered their farms and homes “to kill and destroy our children, husbands, and loved ones, including our fellow women. And today, our children can hardly go to school, our lives are in danger, and our future is in a shambles.”

 In response to the growing lawlessness, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), OlufemiOluyede, has temporarily relocated to Makurdi. But while that may be good for the optics, the situation in Benue State requires much more. The culture of impunity persists around Benue/Plateau States and indeed beyond because the relevant security agencies have not succeeded in apprehending and bringing to justice the entrepreneurs of violence. Until that is done, there may be no end to these indiscriminate and unwarranted killings that portray Nigeria in bad light before the international community by depicting us as a people who place little or no premium on the sanctity of life. 

Conflicts between farmers and herders are common and vicious in the country’s Middle Belt over grazing land for cattle. Itinerant herders and indigenous farmers often clash when cows left to graze openly and deliberately stray on to farms. These are worsened by the climate crisis occasioned by desertification, while farmers and the villagers also allege land-grabbing and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, these tensions are often exacerbated by overlapping ethnic and religious divisions. In the aftermath of the enduring violence, children, women and the elderly are killed without compulsion. That has been the pattern over the years, although recent killings defy simplistic explanations. The Prohibition of Open Grazing and Ranches Establishment Law 2017 (as amended) in Benue State was meant to address the problem. But it is a law the state cannot enforce. Expectedly, the killings have impacted heavily on farming activities in a largely agrarian Benue State described as the “Food Basket of the Nation,” producing significant amounts of Nigeria’s staple food crops such as yams, maize and soybeans. With many of the local communities said to be occupied by outlaws, farming is now practically impossible. The greater danger is that if what is fast becoming a premeditated genocide continues, it can only breed reprisal attacks and an endless spiral of bloodletting.