By Sam Akpe
First, the eyes went misty; then immediately graduated to hot and frightening tears, pouring down the face. I was not voluntarily crying. But something I detested, and which I could also not avoid, ignited the hidden emotion in me. Then the tears came rolling down.
I had just opened my mobile phone and was reading an online publication describing in gory details how the people of a certain community in Benue State were brutally murdered by a group identified as Fulani herdsmen. Then I saw a despicable spectacle – pictures of those massacred. At this point, I couldn’t handle it any longer.
Imagine the twisted bodies of children and women soaked in their own blood. Some had their eyes pulled out and displayed. Others had their hands and legs cut in pieces and scattered everywhere.
Pregnant women were subjected to brutal, inhuman surgery while still alive as they had their stomachs cut open with knives and daggers with the unborn children pulled out and slaughtered. Some men and women had their tongues pulled out and their genitals either shot with automatic weapons or sliced with knives.
But why; why! Who could have believed that Nigeria would experience this inhuman religious – or is it business or political agony in our lifetime? What did those villagers do wrong? How did the little children and the unborn ones affect the business of these herdsmen?
I just do not yet understand. How can human beings do this to their fellow living beings; created by the same God and occupying the same country? How can a group of people secretly backed by the big and mighty in the society, enter a community, burn down all the houses and slaughter the inhabitants under any guise?
How easy has it become in Nigeria of the 21st Century, to take human lives and murder peace and simply walk away in triumph? Are we at war? How can this kind of terror be unleashed on human beings and the government in power is busy campaigning for re-election instead of fulfilling its first constitutional requirement – that of protecting lives and property of the citizens!
Again, at about a few days later, I saw pictures and videos of dozens of coffins displayed as though they were farm products ready for sale. The coffins, surrounded by hundreds of mourners, contained bodies of children who would have become engineers, inventors, great authors, scientists, Nobel Prize Winners, acclaimed intellectuals, doctors, economists, and a lot more if they were nurtured and allowed to live. Instead, they were murdered for no reason whatsoever.
Let’s spare a moment and reflect. Those men and women killed were human beings like us. They had blood and water running in them. Those children could have been our children (did I hear you say God forbid?). Those houses burnt and farmlands destroyed could have been ours.
The most annoying part of it is the decision of the government to start playing politics with an issue we should all be concerned about. A few days after the massacre, our friend and senior colleague, Femi Adesina, who is the chief spokesman to President Muhammadu Buhari, was quoted as saying on twitter that under the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan; about 756 people were killed by the same Fulani herdsmen.
Come on! Does the fact that the killing did not start under Buhari’s administration justify the act? I am not concerned about the statistics. I am more concerned about the need for that piece of information at a time the nation is mourning. As a reporter, I believe that every news item or deliberately, conceived information released to the public must have a time-value.
Why was that information necessary at a time we should be thinking of solutions to the problem? Why is it that at anytime people talk about the short-comings of the Buhari administration, his media handlers will come up with inexcusable comparison with that of Jonathan? Was this not the same reason Nigerians voted that administration out of work so that things would change?
Something drastic has to be done fast to stop this destructive expansionist drive of the Fulanis. The words of Paul Unongo and Lawrence Onoja on Thursday must be taken seriously. Both had declared that Benue people are ready to raise and train an army to protect themselves if the federal government could not do that for them.
The two may be speaking the minds of other leaders across the country. If government creates situations where citizens in each community mobilise and take up arms in self-protection, then there would no longer be a country called Nigeria. Again, God forbid!