CHIDI ANSELM ODINKALU FROM PREMIUM TIMES
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.
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’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.
Mbabai, the village where Tarnongo Mike Utsaha was buried on 1 April 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. The 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 neighbourhood that should ordinarily bustle at this time of year.
The journey into Guma with Mike’s remains revealed the opposite. Mbabai and its neighbouring 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 of 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 atrocity incidents.
As the mourners left, it was impossible not to ask how the people of Guma, nearly all of who 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 midnight 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.
