EDITORIAL: Benue Massacre: Tinubu, enforce state policing now

Benue State has been struck by massive tragedy and grief, following the massacre of over 200 persons in Yelwata in Guma Local Government Area, by a band of savages that invaded the community. Houses were burnt, with thousands of people maimed and hospitalised. The survivors are now homeless, and gripped by ceaseless fear.

The malevolence, however, is not new to the state. But it has awoken the country’s political establishment and security agencies, yet again, to the challenges of such attack – a most horrifying act of barbarity, for which the world has joined Nigerians in condemning and calling for decisive action of the authorities for its end.

Consequently, President Bola Tinubu visited the state last Wednesday, to express his solidarity with the people, having earlier denounced the killings and urged the people to coexist harmoniously with their neighbours. Before the visit, heads of all the security agencies, led by the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Christopher Musa, had relocated to the state to chart a new course of strategic response to the gruesome incident.

The CDS and the Senate hit the right chord, when they separately expressed their tiredness of experiencing this recurrent carnage. The Senate spokesman, Yemi Adaramola, said the chamber had become weary of observing a minute of silence each time such tragedies occurred. So are psychologically fatigued Nigerians. The president and the service chiefs should prove this time that last week’s gathering in Benue and visit to the hospitals were not merely for the optics.

Sadly, analysis of how this tragedy occurred revealed the same sickening pattern of the failure of intelligence by the security establishment and the escape of the killers. Worse still, no arrests have been made, for which the President put Inspector-General of Police Kayode Egbetokun on the spot. Pointedly, he queried the IG: “How come there are no arrests”? Mr Egbetokun was bemused. It was an operational letdown that points to the near intractability of killings in Benue State and elsewhere.

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The masterminds of this soulless undertaking are suspected killer-herders armed with AK-47 rifles, hibernating in the Benue–Nasarawa states conurbation, with many forests and river channels they often take advantage of. Mr Musa corroborated this, saying: “We always have information that these people are coming from across borders.” Governor Hyacinth Alia insists that, “They come and hit and go back,” in a guerrilla fashion.

Motives behind these killings, observers argue, are varied and complicated. They range from herders’ quest for grazing land, sectarian to ethnic or indigenes-settlers’ questions. These are poignant concerns that continually hobble the nation-building process, which the Nigeria State has not been able to get right in over six decades of its independence. Perhaps, the President had this in mind when he enjoined the people to “learn to live in peace with their neighbours” in his first reaction to the bloodbath.

But one of the state’s paramount rulers, Tor Tiv, James Abates, disagrees with the President’s diagnosis. He told him point blank that, “What we are facing is a genocidal campaign and land grabbing question that has been going on for over 40 years; not learning to live with your neighbours.” In April, similar attacks in Bokkos and Bassa LGAs of Plateau State resulted in over 100 deaths and forced the same outburst from Governor Caleb Mutfwang. He stressed that 64 communities in the state had been taken over by these armed invaders, while the original inhabitants have been chased out, and the communities renamed.

It smacks of a new low in personal loss in this type of tragedy that one survivor, Michael Ajah, lost 20 members of his family. “11 of my family members died in this house; eight died in the other store and some died here,” he recounted in deep pain. Another, Joseph Kwagh, reportedly lost eight family members – six siblings, his father and step-mother. Indeed, it was a “Terrible massacre,” as Pope Leo X1V reacted in a Sunday Angelus, following the incident. He consequently sued for peace.

The situation could improve if Mr Tinubu’s charge to the CDS to “take the criminals out” and for the intelligence communities to “retool their information channels” are taken seriously. Violent and extremist groups such as Boko Haram, ISWAP, Lukurawa, Ansaru, herder-killers, kidnappers and bandits have taken advantage of gaps in the security architecture to question the authority of the Nigerian State, more visible in Benue, Plateau, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger, Katsina, North-Central, South-East and South-South. The Peace Committee was set up by the President for fence-mending in Benue, and Forest Guards were earlier announced to provide additional security support. These measures should begin to work without delay.

With the benefit of hindsight, presidential directives in themselves are not magic bullets, as the regime of President Muhammadu Buhari revealed. He had, for instance, ordered the then Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to relocate to the same Benue State in 2018, when these mass murderers also struck. But the police boss never did and Mr Buhari never followed the order through. He also deployed 1,000 soldiers to Zamfara State on three occasions, over waves of banditry and killings. He personally visited, wearing military camouflage to boot, in a seeming show of force. Yet, the problems lingered.

For these reasons, President Tinubu as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces should be different. Even more is the astonishingly horrid tally of 17,000 Nigerians killed in the two years of his presidency, according to Kabir Adamu, head of Beacon Security and Intelligence Limited, which keeps daily data of this surreal events. Out of this figure, 1,043 were killed in Benue, he had told the BBC.

It is a contradiction in terms that the country’s leadership wants to end insecurity, but has not considered the creation of state police as a matter of national urgency. Two years have passed since the idea received renewed attention. Undeniably, these egregious killings are the consequences of swathes of our territories being under the control of non-state actors. The numerical strength of the police and soldiers are simply inadequate to guarantee the country’s territorial integrity.

Since all the governors are in agreement with the proposal on state police, the time to consummate the plan is now. The plaintive outburst of Governor Alia is instructive here: “We are bleeding, we are in sorrow.” “I would encourage us all to keep calling for community policing because it’s the only way. It is only people from within the state and the local government who can understand what is going on with them.”

A society were human life is no longer sacred suffers the routine termination of life by individuals without consequences. The government becomes helpless and the Hobbesian state of nature in which “life is nasty, brutish and short” reigns supreme. Nigeria is arguably at this critical juncture. Ironically, security crumbled under Buhari. The 53,418 Nigerians killed by non-state actors between 29 May 2015 and 15 October, 2022, according to the Nigerian Security Tracker data, is chilling proof.

This ghastly drama should not be allowed to degenerate, especially when the country is not in a civil war. To stem this Satanic tide, the politics surrounding it, which demobilised the police from arresting and prosecuting these wanton killers of innocent citizens, should be eliminated.

We have noticed that the military have continued to leak their operational strategies, evident in the CDS’ disclosure that “precision strikes” would be initiated against the Benue killers. This is a blunder that would help them to relocate. This routine national requiem should stop and it can only happen when the president takes the bull by the horns!