By Chidi Odinkalu
Mbabai, the village where Tarnongo Mike Utsaha was buried on April 1, 2023, used to be part of the municipality of Makurdi, the capital of Benue State. It only became part of Guma Local Government Area in Benue North-West in 1987. Current governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, also comes from Guma.
The LGA derives its name from River Guma, which empties into the River Benue, part of a network of fresh water sources that have historically defined that part of Nigeria as the nation’s food basket. With arable land drained by an abundance of freshwater sources on the foothills of the rainy season, this is a neighborhood that should ordinarily bustle at this time of year.
The journey into Guma with
Mike’s remains revealed the opposite. Mbabai and its neighboring villages had
long been drained of life by mass atrocity. Mourners to the funeral needed the
forceful presence of massive deployment of hundreds of well-armed soldiers
along the route and in surrounding bushes to reassure them about their
safety.
The compound in which the burial
itself took place was nearly desolate. A capacious country home belonging to
Mike’s dad, a retired judge, had been burnt twice over in attacks reportedly
perpetrated, the villagers said, by armed herders. All the mourners could do
was linger in the village long enough for the body to be laid into the ground
before everyone scampered, grateful that there were no tragic incidents.
As the mourners left, it was
impossible not to ask how the people of Guma, nearly all of whom cannot afford
what it takes to secure the kind of martial deployment that accompanied Mike’s
cortege, bury their dead. It did not take long to find out.
Mgban is a village also in
Guma, not too far from Mbabai. Like Mbabai, Mgban has also been decimated by
regular attacks from armed herders. Most of the village lives in internal
displacement. By an arrangement involving the state government and the Benue
State Emergency Management Authority, the Benue State Police Command deployed
several police officers every evening to guard the Local Government Education
Authority, LGEA, Primary School in Mgban, so that those left in the community
can go there to sleep at night.
That was until one week
after the burial of Mike Utsaha. Shortly before mid-night around Good Friday,
according to survivors, the police officers deployed around the LGEA Primary
School in Mgban all entered their vehicles and left the premises without
warning. The villagers already at the school to pass the night had no place
else to hide.
Moments after the
police retreated, armed attackers arrived, making game of every person in
sight, mostly the aged, women, and children. Initial casualty count was over 43
killed by sunrise. By the end of the morning after the massacre, another 45 had
also been evacuated to nearby hospitals in critical conditions. The dead got a
quick and perfunctory mass burial.
Less than 36 hours before
the Mgban massacre, on Wednesday, also in the Christian Holy Week, another
attack on mourners in Umogidi in Entekpa-Adoka District of Otukpo LGA,
reportedly killed at least 52 persons. Another mass burial was all that they
could get. Also, 48 hours before the massacre in Umogidi, a similar attack
liquidated at least 47 unarmed persons in Ikobi village in Apa LGA, including
the local chief.
Amidst this orgy of massacres,
Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, who has since lost the ability to safely
visit his village in Guma, travelled to Port Harcourt, Rivers State, around
April 6, reportedly to attend the commissioning of projects by his counterpart
in Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, both of them as guests of Rivers State
Governor, Nyesom Wike. It was a characteristically thoughtless journey by a man
who had long ago lost any sense of what a governor exists to do.
The symbolism of the
encounter in Rivers State between the governors of Benue and Kaduna states,
once implacable political foes, was not lost on many. In Port Harcourt, they
could have been mistaken for a compatibly contented political pairing. Less
than two years ago, in May 2021, they were at each other’s throats exchanging
choice epithets with the abandon of drunken sailors in a bar-room brawl.
Between them, these
two men have presided over arguably two of the worst records of mass atrocity
in Nigeria in the past eight years. In 80 days in the first quarter of 2023,
Kaduna State reported at least 125 killed and 60 abducted. Those who specialise
in tracking these incidents would swear that these numbers massage the reality.
Over five days in the first week of April 2023, Benue State lost at least 134
persons in a killing spree. In the period since the end of the presidential
election in February, over 400 have reportedly been massacred in Benue State
alone.
The timing of these massacres is significant. On April 8, 2023, a national daily reported that “[p]alpable fear pervades the entire horizon as renewed incidents of banditry, kidnappings, killings take centre-stage after a ‘cease-fire’ noticed in Nigeria ahead of the general elections in February and March”. The previous day had witnessed the high profile abduction of law professor and former Deputy Governor of Nasarawa State, Onje Gye-Wado, near the Federal Capital Territory.
The newspaper also recounted a staggering rise after the vote of mass abductions
of children as well as massacres in many states around the country, including
Benue, Edo, Imo, Kaduna, Kano, Nasarawa, Lagos, Zamfara, among others.
Confronted with this trend, President Muhammadu Buhari, whose primary job is to guarantee the safety and security of all these people, had a statement issued in his name calling for “an end to extreme violence”.
It was disconcerting to see the president
mistake himself for a non-governmental organisation and reduced to condemning
violence and calling for something to be done about it, as if he had forgotten
that it was his place surely to do that something. The statement also seemed to
imply that violence was alright if it was not considered “extreme”, but
provided no criteria with reference to which to determine what extreme violence
means. It was a very odd kind of thing for a president to say. But this
Nigerian president has built his brand around toxic awkwardness.
Then, three days after issuing
this statement, entirely in keeping with his habit of disregard for Nigerians
over the past eight years, the president sauntered off to Saudi Arabia on April
11 for a nine-day jaunt. What he went there to do was unclear, a fact not much
helped by the desperate effort by his team of media handlers who were busy spreading
false information about the trip.
While Buhari
remained in Saudi Arabia, Samuel Ortom quickly announced the demobilisation of
the Benue State Livestock Guards, the militia group established to enforce the
state’s anti-open grazing law. Many people read this to mean a suspension of
the law itself. The Governor begged to differ, claiming that the law still
remained very much in force without explaining who will now help him to enforce
it.
Those who wonder how
these killings have lasted and deepened in intensity for as long as they have
need not worry anymore. With a law without enforcers and a state rapidly
turning into a cemetery, Benue State’s Governor Ortom probably knows one or two
things most others may be unable to voice. First, the owners of the atrocity
killings in Nigeria are back after the business of election rigging. Second, it
is not difficult to know who they are.
When Catholic Bishop of Sokoto,
Matthew Hassan Kukah, spoke in his Easter Message about the urgent mission of
helping Nigeria “recover from the feeling of collective rape by those who
imported the men of darkness that destroyed our country”, he knew what he was
talking about.
*Odinkalu,
Professor of Law, is a commentator on public issues
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