Daily Trust Editorial of Sunday April 16, 2023
Benue is burning, again. Since January this year, hardly a week has passed without news report of killings in one or other communities in the state, indicating a steady but dangerous escalation of the inter-communal fire that has engulfed the state over the past ten years or so, with no reprieve on the horizon. Daily Trust believes this unfortunate cycle of attacks and counter-attacks in Benue must cease, now.
In the week ending last Saturday, 8th April, dozens of people were reportedly killed in separate attacks by armed groups across several rural areas of the state. As part of these attacks, Benue State police spokesperson, Catherine Anene, told newsmen that 28 bodies were recovered at an Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp in Mgban Local Government Area of the state between Friday evening and Saturday morning of that week. Earlier on Wednesday that same week, suspected herdsmen reportedly killed scores of villagers at a funeral in Umogidi, a remote village in Otukpo Local Government Area of the State. Paul Hemba, Security Adviser to the Governor of the State, told newsmen that 46 bodies were recovered in that attack alone.
Altogether, and citing the Governor of the State, Samuel Ortom, this newspaper reported just this past Wednesday that 134 people were killed by armed men in separate attacks in the four days between 3 and 7 April, 2023, across Guma, Otukpo and Apa local government areas of the state. About a month before all these, on 7th March 2023, newspapers reported at least 36 people were killed by suspected herdsmen in Kwande Local Government Area (LGA) of the state. Equally noteworthy, men of the Nigerian Airforce opened aerial fire on pastoralists returning from Benue into Nassarawa State where they had gone to reclaim their over 1,000 cows seized by the Benue Livestock Guards, killing at least 38 of them.
At the heart of the worsening crisis in Benue is the inter-communal rivalry and competition for space, farming and grazing resources, and a crude politics of identity between minority Fulani pastoralists and majority local farming communities in the state. Add to these the raging effects of climate change that have shrunken water and land resources that both farmers and herders need. As a result, competition for scarce resources between the two groups easily morph into wider ethnic and religious conflicts and revenge violence by rival militia groups established to “protect” the warring communities. Worse, these conflicts are often cynically exploited by politicians and local community leaders on both sides, who do little to bring about lasting peace than trade blames.
That similar attacks occur between peoples of the same ethnic and religious groups in states like Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara, arising from the same competition for scarce resources, does not matter to community leaders in Benue. Rather, each side of the divide appears content with playing the victim card in narratives that unfortunately only exacerbate ethnic and religious fault lines.
The state government has also failed to provide the sort of leadership required to bring the communities together to work towards peace. Instead, Governor Ortom, in particular, has continued to engage in rather demagogic rhetoric and divisive policies that only serve to inflame passions, harden hearts and pitch the communities against each other, without solving the problem. And rather than work with the federal government and its security agencies, such as the police and military, to help tame the tide of rising violence in his state, he has sought to cast himself as the victim of a non-existent federal aggression. There is no doubt that the conflict in Benue State preceded the government of Samuel Ortom; there is similarly no doubt that his demagoguery, actions and policies have only made them worse.
But if Ortom’s government leaves a vacuum of leadership in the State, the federal government, which has the overriding responsibility of protecting lives and property has not stepped in to fill it. And that, we must note, is a gross failing of President Buhari himself. It is true that Ortom has not made it easy for the federal government to help in Benue, but that should not matter because the President is not just Protector-in-Chief of all Nigerians wherever they live, according to our constitution, he is also the father of all, according to our traditions. Both roles are no trifling matter, and it should be possible for the President to use the resources available to his office to find a way to work with, or around, the local government and communities to intervene and bring about enduring peace in Benue. President Buhari has not much left in office, but he could still do so much to avert a civil war of sorts in Benue.
Daily Trust urges all stakeholders to realize what is at stake here: Benue lies at the nexus of several states like Nassarawa, Plateau, and Taraba, all of which share similar demographics. Thus, escalating communal conflict in Benue could spiral into anyone of those, potentially making the situation much worse. We, therefore, urge the local communities to adopt more peaceable attitudes to one another by agreeing to work towards peace. Above all, we urge the in-coming federal and state governments not to abandon Benue to the dictates of sectarian passions, as their soon to be predecessors have arguably done over the past eight years.