Benue: The Beginning of the End?

By Msonter Anzaa

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On New Year day, another edition of the Annual Fulani Killing Festival was held in communities across Benue State. And this latest outing was not devoid of the barbaric pattern that has become the signature of the Fulani’s presence. The details of the massacre – the diligent butchering and wholesale mop-up of humanity – are already out there in the press. In the twinkle of an eye, people who were preparing to celebrate the New Year – to thank God for surviving the economic hardship which is another deliberate creation of the leadership of our nation over the years – those people were slaughtered like rams. They did not die in battle; they were murdered, several of them in their family compounds or farmlands. Children, barely old enough to say “Fulani,” were cut to pieces on the very pieces of land they called home. In three days, seventy-three people went down.

I followed my unit consultant for routine ward rounds at the Benue State University Teaching Hospital and saw more victims of the invasion. There was a man whose entire wrist was slashed – the skin, tendons and bones. He writhed in agonizing pain each time the doctor touched the hand. In the next ward lay a woman with a fractured forearm and wrist. In a bid to escape the Fulani, she and several others had stocked themselves in a tipper truck which fell on its side injuring them. At the other end of the same ward, we saw a girl who had also been in the tipper. She was being investigated for a spinal cord injury. The next day, I stood at the gate of the hospital and watched truckloads of coffins convey the corpses to the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida Square, Makurdi, for the funeral service ahead of a mass burial later that day.

In the days that followed, the world watched the Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government’s active inaction with embarrassment and mounting rage. But we in Benue were not disappointed. The federal government stayed faithful to what is indisputably a well-conceived script of indifference towards the plight of the people. Its officials embarrassed themselves through the insensitive comments they made about the massacre. The Inspector-General of Police denied the massacre on television, arguing that what had happened was a communal crisis. The Agriculture Minister, Audu Ogbeh, has since been all over the place with his latest innovation – “cattle colonies.”

The word “Fulani” through its public face – the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore – has become a household terror in Nigeria. The Fulani have blatantly and most provocatively carried out their agenda of destruction with abandon. Last year when the Benue State Government made the Anti-Open Grazing Law, the Fulani swiftly called a press conference and threatened to fight against it. The federal government wants to deceive Nigerians into believing that this is not an occupation agenda although it clearly is. The Fulani have never left anyone in doubt as to what their intentions are. In that press conference, they claimed they are the original occupants of the Benue Valley and are fighting to take it back.

But rather than rise above the ethnic allegiances of its officials and address this Fulani agenda with the resoluteness required, the government has sought to defend it. In Southern Kaduna, Governor El-Rufai reportedly claimed the invaders were foreigners who were in Nigeria to avenge the killing of a member of a “prominent” Fulani family. And in a bid to secure peace, the state government was allegedly paying the invaders compensation. One constant argument of the Fulani patrons is that the killer mercenaries are not herdsmen but invaders. Even in government, this seems to be the prevailing narrative. Although Nigerians are no longer interested in the argument about the origin of the killers, they are curious about why the government faithfully refrains from its constitutional duty of providing security each time these “invaders” are in town. People have also noted with suspicion the disparity in deployment of troops in areas of conflict across the country. For example, Operation Python Dance was swiftly launched to quell the agitations for Biafra in Umuahia. There was also Operation Crocodile Smile in the South-South. However, no operation, not even Cock Crow, has been launched in Benue.

Apparently, only President Buhari knows why his government is always handicapped against the Fulani. The government’s only stand has been to acquire grazing land for the herdsmen in the very places where they are annihilating communities. Whenever there is a fresh attack, the government only shouts this position louder. Is it not curious that on one hand the government says the killers are not herdsmen, and yet on the other hand, it says the solution to the killing is to provide grazing land for herdsmen?

As these arguments go forth and back, we still have the chance to salvage this nation and build a genuinely prosperous country. But men of goodwill from all ethnic and religious persuasions must prevail on the federal government to impartially arrest and prosecute those responsible for these atrocities. We must not be silent. For when the kind of thing happening in Benue only attracts the kind of response the government has always given, it signifies the beginning of the end except men of goodwill break their silence. Good night.