ABAGENA IDPS CAMP KILLINGS AND MATTERS ARISING
MIKE ASSOH 08024562488 (SMS Only)
RANDOM THOUGHTS
That the arable land of the Benue valley has been turned to killing fields by marauding Fulani herdsmen wielding AK47 riffles is no longer news. What is news is the cold blooded murder of people in an IDPs camp, who have fled their homes and were taking temporary refuge where they are exposed to all the elements that make life unbearable.
Abagena is a community on the outskirts of Makurdi, the Benue State capital. The sleepy community is less than a kilometer away from what used to be Agan Toll Gate. Herdsmen invaded the Abagena Internally Displaced Persons Camp, leaving behind seven dead bodies with slit throats, cracked skulls, spilt brains and dismembered limbs. Though Benue State has recorded attacks from the herdsmen in the past, the impunity and boldness with which the recent attacks were carried out with conspiracy of silence from the center, leaves so much to be desired. Dayo Sobowale had this to say in his column in the Nation of 1st May, 2021:
“It is well known that armed Fulani herdsmen have been having a field day in the entire South West of the nation destroying farms and terrorizing the area with impunity while government has wittingly or not turned a blind eye to their atrocities. Indeed, Miyetti Allah gloats regularly with cheeky impudence if not impunity as if it knows that it is a sacred cow that government cannot touch or punish in any way whatsoever. Tribalism has played a large part in government’s aloofness or inability to call both the Miyetti Allah and Fulani herdsmen to order because the President is Fulani and has once intoned or reminisced publicly that if he had not gone to school he would have been a Fulani herdsman.”
Though the Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom has taken the herder induced killings in the state in his strides, the Abagena attack was one too many and as he rightly said, enough is enough. Was there any consoling word from the Presidency? Your answer and guess is as good as mine. The Presidential Spokesman Garba Shehu heaped blames on the Benue State Governor without voicing one word of condemnation against the callous and barbaric attack on the herdsmen. This is to be expected. Fr. Ejike Mbaka recently came under attacks for calling on the President to resign or risk impeachment for failure of leadership. What response came from the president? Threats of report of the fiery Priest to the Pope and the Vatican and cheap blackmail that his utterances are as a result of the refusal of President Buhari to award contracts to his cronies as the priest has requested. When has solicitation for contracts become a crime?
Killing of helpless people who are seeking refuge in an IDP’s Camp is a gross contravention of all laws and must be condemned. Government exists to provide security to the citizen by ensuring that life and property is accorded requisite protection by the government.
A group of people displaced from their homes into an IDPs Camp could not even be looked upon with pity by the blood thirsty herdsmen. No effort to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators to date. Government entails a social contract pact between the government and the governed. Breach of the social contract brings in anarchy and a sure return to the Hobbesian state of nature where life was nasty, poor, brutish and short. As the Governor of Benue State lamented, even a goat can bite when pushed to the extreme.
President Buhari must heed to the call to sit up and tackle insecurity in this country or else the doomsday prophecies of war and division may become inevitable. Our borders have suddenly become too lax and porous for the infiltration and influx of herdsmen of all nationalities into the Nigerian hinterland without restraint. It is a known fact that most herders move around with sophisticated weapons, yet they could not be arrested as if they are sacred. President Buhari at his inauguration on 29th May, 2015 told a ravaged nation crying for direction, that he belongs to nobody. It is time he lives up to that and restore security to the land, not sparing any creed, culture or tribe. The time for the President to act is now.
