Emperor Tinubu And The Jos Massacre

By Ugoji Egbujo

Emperors owe no duties to their subjects. When they deign to show pity, it must be applauded as great charity. 

*Tinubu

President Tinubu cannot feel the people’s pain. He didn’t tell the truth to that woman who clutched to her dead son, Ayiba,  and stirred the soul of the nation. He owes Jos—and the many other communities ravaged by insecurity—the constitutional duty to protect lives and property. Yet Tinubu is too busy with politics and propaganda, too self-absorbed to be moved by bloodbaths, mass graves, broken families, and displaced communities—the real, substantive consequences of rampant banditry. Possessed by an obsession for political conquests, he cannot summon the empathy required to engineer genuine solutions. 

When Tinubu paid a condolence visit to Jos after the recent massacre, he only stopped at the airport. Because he had no time to travel into the city, the victims and their families were ferried to Yakubu Gowon Airport in Heipang for the photo-op. Such callousness  comes naturally to emperors. After the picture session, Tinubu continued on his journey to Lagos for his Easter holidays. The sole beneficiary of the visit was Tinubu.   The happiness of the emperor, after all, is the priority of the empire. So it was not salt on the wound. Far from it.  Perhaps Tinubu should have skipped Jos altogether and sent Nuhu Ribadu to lecture them on Tinubu Gains and  how safe the country has become.

In Africa, condolence visits are not performed from afar. The venue is the center of the tragedy or mourning . Sympathisers may shed crocodile tears, but they cannot summon the bereaved to a meeting at the market square. Yet an emperor is not accountable to commoners. If the victims had been big politicians or royals, Tinubu would not have stopped at the airport to perform a ritual which eventually became a brief service of worship songs for Tinubu by sycophants. 

Tinubu stopped at the airport because the victims were inconsequential peasants. By that fleeting  stopover , Tinubu had already given them more than they deserved. That was why he did not bother to tell more stories. He told the people of Jos, “Your airport has no light.” Perhaps it was the fault of the people, rather than the federal government, that Jos Airport, which is almost 50 years old , has no functional  runway lights. That was Tinubu’s reason for not visiting Jos North. That is how emperors speak. The people of Jos must applaud him for coming.

These insensitive visits that bruise the wounds of grieving families and communities have become Tinubu’s habit. In the aftermath of the slaughter of over 200 people in the Yelewata massacre in Benue, he had no time for the state. When he finally carved out time from his fabled tight schedule, he stopped in Makurdi for two hours. Victims were brought from long distances to meet him in a hall. Schoolchildren were made to line the roads in blistering rain. The hall was decorated like the venue of a  political carnival and  feast. That day, Tinubu told Benue  people he could not visit Yelewata because “the people had no good roads.” That is how emperors roll.

By skipping Rukuba Jos , Tinubu actually snubbed the victims of the massacre. Were it not for his political opponents who might use it against him, he would not have bothered going near Jos at all. But that brief visit that never left the tarmac is worse than a no-show. Had he simply told the people of Jos he could not come because of his tight schedule, they would have understood. He is a  busy big  man. Perhaps when elections draw close, he will make out  time to visit Jos and drink fura on the streets .  Perhaps these inconveniences occasioned by the existence of the opposition are exactly why Tinubu’s men are out to liquidate opposition parties—so the emperor can enjoy the perks of his office undisturbed.

Does Tinubu understand the full weight of his constitutional responsibilities? Perhaps he does not need to. Perhaps the constitution itself is overdue for a proper amendment to reflect the reality of a king . Before then,  it is the job of the sycophants around an emperor in a democracy to protect him from the ego-puncturing truth of his incompetence. The political jobbers and bootlickers must blind him with adulation. They must not let him appreciate that his role is not to junket around the world but to protect the masses. They must feed him the idea that the proliferation of jihadists and bandits is the handiwork of his opponents. So that when Tinubu visits places like Jos and Yelewata, he arrives as if the incidents and the victims themselves are out to stain his immaculate robes.

The Jos airport is so far from the city that a condolence visit conducted there can only be farcical. It is inhuman to pack grieving families and survivors into buses, haul them to the airport, and make them listen to the president ramble and milk obeisance from political and traditional rulers past and present. What would it have cost Tinubu to sleep in Jos and meet with community and youth  leaders? The Plateau crisis has lasted two decades. Yet when a rare opportunity arose for deep immersion into the problem, Tinubu skipped past it to enjoy his holidays. The emperor is too big. He consumes eulogies. Local leaders should appreciate his exalted status and stop expecting him to meddle in petty crises.

But is it possible Tinubu simply did not feel safe going into Jos? And that he could not tell the people outright, “Your city is not safe”? So he scheduled his trip to arrive late, conveniently using the airport-light excuse to duck and  hide.  Otherwise, why could he not visit in the morning? On Good Friday, perhaps, if he was too busy on Thursday? Remarkably, the state governor himself visited the scene of the attack in an armoured personnel carrier. It took the insistence of the people—who refused to be ignored—for the governor to step out and stand with the traumatised survivors and the corpses. Well, an emperor cannot subject himself to unnecessary risks for the sake of mere peasants.

If Angwan Rukuba is unsafe for Tinubu and his security chiefs, then it is demonstrably unsafe for the people who live there. Ordering security agencies to “pursue the perpetrators” and promising CCTV deployment in Plateau are mere platitudes. The government knows the major bandits by name. Words and cameras do not stop AK-47s at night. Real accountability would look like sustained, intelligence-driven operations that dismantle the networks, prosecute the sponsors, and address the root drivers—land disputes, farmer-herder mediation, porous borders, and the ethnic politics that fuel the fire.

Plateau deserves more than condolence theatre. The Plateau crisis, like the others tearing apart  the country, demands results.

Who will tell the president that he has lost touch, and that the nation is bleeding?

*Dr Egbujo is a commentator on public issues