Suswam learned. Ortom learned. Alia will learn. But why must Benue bleed before her leaders act?
This isn’t politics. This is blood. This is Benue. And the world needs to know.
Appeasement has failed. Dialogue has failed. Yet the killings continue. When will Benue matter enough?
There’s something painfully predictable about the Fulani herdsmen’s attacks in Benue State. It’s the same story on repeat, just with different governors, different excuses, and unfortunately, fresh graves.
It all started, at least in this brutal form, in February 2011. Gabriel Torwua Suswam was Governor then. When the first attacks happened, he looked away. Maybe he thought they’d pass. Maybe he thought it was just a clash, something that would resolve itself. But it didn’t.
The killings didn’t stop. Instead, they grew bolder. Louder. Bloodier.
At some point, the noise became too loud to ignore. So, Suswam tried dialogue. He sent people to the Caliphate to appeal for peace. They came back with preconditions. Conditions no honest government could meet. Peace meetings were held, agreements were made, and broken almost immediately by the Fulani.
Then in 2014, reality slapped him in the face. In Guma LGA, herdsmen opened fire directly at him during a tour. That was when he truly understood. That was the moment it stopped being a “Fulani issue” and became his problem. He changed his strategy. And for a moment, Benue caught its breath.
Then came Samuel Ortom.
He walked in with good intentions but the wrong approach. First, he dismantled the community defense systems people had built out of desperation. Then he tried appeasement, created an Office for Fulani Affairs and handed it to a Fulani man. Formed committees to enable free grazing across the state. Paid compensations to herdsmen for missing cattle, even when those same herdsmen were spilling human blood across villages.
Ortom wanted peace. He believed in diplomacy. He gave everything, time, offices, resources, political goodwill. But the Fulani gave nothing back. The killing continued, unprovoked, unchecked.
Then, Ortom had a political fallout with the APC, and just like that, his eyes adjusted. He started to speak the truth he should have embraced from the beginning. It was almost as if being in APC clouded his judgment, as if party loyalty came with blindfolds.
It was too late.
If Ortom had picked up where Suswam left off in 2014, used force where force was due, fortified communities, declared zero tolerance, we might not be here. But like Suswam, he had to learn the hard way.
Now it’s Hyacinth Alia’s turn.
He came in fresh, confident, backed by a party that believed Ortom had been exaggerating the Fulani threat for political gain. Alia dismissed the urgency. He assumed the killings would naturally fade out now that Ortom, the so-called dramatist, was out of the way.
So, he didn’t build on Ortom’s security frameworks. He didn’t ask hard questions. He didn’t consult the communities that were bleeding. He believed he didn’t need to use Fulani killings to gain popularity,he already had enough “projects” to showcase.
But the killings haven’t stopped. They never paused.
Last week, another village buried its children. Crops are still being razed. Women still sleep in the bushes. Young boys have stopped going to school because they’re the new defenders of their homes, armed with sticks, stones, and prayers.
Governor Alia still speaks softly. He still walks around the real crisis. But like the others before him, time is ticking. Sooner or later, the truth will knock on his door, not with a memo, but with gunshots and wails from the land he swore to protect.
The herdsmen don’t care about your political affiliation. They don’t care if you’re PDP, APC, or neutral. They only know one thing: violence. And Benue has been bleeding for far too long.
It’s a sad pattern. Every governor of Benue must learn this lesson personally before acting decisively. Why must our leaders wait until the bullets reach their convoy before they believe us?
Benue is not just a line on the Nigerian map, it is home. It is where dreams used to grow on farmlands, where children played without fear, where life was slow and safe. Now, it is a cemetery of broken promises and shallow graves.
This is not about politics. This is about life. Innocent, defenseless life.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s time the world stopped seeing Fulani herdsmen terrorism as a Nigerian problem and started calling it what it really is: a systematic, coordinated campaign of terror against indigenous people in their ancestral lands.
We’ve said it before. We’ll say it again. But this time, we won’t whisper.
Stephanie Shaakaa
University of Agriculture Makurdi
Benue State.
