To walk the trails of Hurti today is to plod through ash and blood. It is to inhale the silence of a town stripped of laughter and homesteads where children’s voices once echoed, until they got choked forever by gunfire. Hurti, that rustic hamlet cradled within Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau State, was not the first, nor, ominously, the last. But its horror, a massacre visited upon it on April 2, has already dissolved into the fog of Nigeria’s collective amnesia, barely a month since its soils got drenched with the blood of its young.
Nigeria has moved on. But the graves remain chock-full of charred bodies, dreams aborted, and lives unlived. More pitiful is the fate of the innocent kids interred in the earth, their futures terminated. Yet to understand the anguish of survivors, young and old, is to confront the seething backdrop from which their tragedy emerged.
For over two decades, Plateau State has stood on a fault line of simmering conflict, a geopolitical fissure where religion, ethnicity, politics, and land converge in an uneasy and often deadly embrace. Since 1999, more than 53,000 lives have been lost to communal strife across Nigeria. Plateau’s portion of this grim ledger is a macabre masterpiece: 700 killed in Yelwa in 2004; another 700 in 2008; over 1,000 in 2010; 300 wiped out in Mangu in 2023. The litany of death continues, each entry more grievous than the last.
And now, Hurti joins that dark roll call. The sun did not blink the day Hurti bled. It hung, aloof and unrepentant, as if casting light on a tragedy it did not trigger. Under its fulgent beams, a thriving village disappeared in plain sight. Hurti, a hamlet tucked in the hem of Manguna District, in Bokkos Local Government Area (LGA) of Plateau State, startled from its mundane hum around 3.35 pm. In that fateful hour of April 2, 2025, death came hurtling at Hurti on motorcycles with a slayer in each seat. They slit the throat of the Mangut boys: Saltifat, four and Justice, seven, and tossed them into their burning home. Fatima Yusuf, barely nine, saw them hack her father to death; Josiah, eight, begged the assailants to spare his father. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” he cried. “Please, please!” But death is not sentimental. Neither was its squad of maniacal reapers.
The bloodbath in Hurti, like that of Zike, Ukum, and Logo, follows a haunting pattern. They are attacks, largely unprovoked and wholly forgotten battles in which the casualties are always poor and faceless, the perpetrators seldom named, and the state perennially absent.
To grieve for the victims, the children in particular, is to remember that they are not alone in their fate. In Buni Yadi, Yobe State, on February 25, 2014, 59 boys—students of the Federal Government College—were slaughtered in their sleep by insurgents. The massacre was apocalyptic. Then it was archived. Nigeria moved on. The same cycle of slaughter and forgetfulness enveloped Zabarmari as peasant farmers were hacked to death while harvesting rice. The victims all share a common profile: poor, invisible, expendable.
This is not mere neglect. It is pitilessness. A systemic corrosion of compassion runs like venom from the corridors of governance to the convenient soapboxes of social critics. Nigerians talk a good game, hence our penchant for performative grief with calculated detachment: one-minute silences, press statements with bloodless condolences, photo ops and visits delayed until the spotlight fades. The rituals are rehearsed.
The callousness that stalks Nigerian society is no passive force, it is ravenous, gleeful in its consumption of the weak. It is what allows policemen to collect bribes from disaster victims, soldiers to withdraw from besieged communities, and governors to headline music and sports fiestas while children are buried en masse. It is what makes officials toss “relief materials” at villagers – bags of rice in exchange for sons and daughters razed to ash.
But the most damning indictment lies in the societal shrug. The Hurti massacre and Bokkos in general have not only been forgotten by Nigeria’s leadership and security agencies, but also by the very citizens whose empathy should rise above tribal trenches. Our moral pulse has weakened to a flutter. We have become a people desensitised by overexposure to horror, insulated by the belief that suffering, if not in our backyard, is not our burden.
What we fail to understand is that this pitilessness is a pandemic. It will not remain in Bokkos. It mutates and spreads from Hurti to Ikorodu, from Zamfara to Anambra, leaving in its trail corpses and hollowed communities, children raised in trauma, and a nation splintered by suspicion and hate.
The cycle of reprisal killings and ethnic vendettas, whether visited on Berom, Fulani, Mwaghavul or Tiv, stems from the same toxin: mutual dehumanisation. The attackers of Hurti, reportedly Fulani militia, embody a villainous disposition long festering on both sides of the divide. But let us not be naïve. Fulani communities, too, have suffered brutal retaliations in Jos and its volatile outskirts. Entire villages have been wiped out in vengeance. This blood calculus and arithmetic of an eye for a tribe is unsustainable.
Read Also: Oyetola rallies France for Nigeria’s IMO bid
It is time, long past time, for a reckoning. Government, community leaders, traditional chiefs, and civil society must sit, not armed with accusations but with sincerity, to renegotiate coexistence. Not in panels or commissions that issue dust-gathering white papers, but through local peace councils empowered to enforce dialogue, mediation, compensation, and reintegration. Let us establish regional peace boards across flashpoints, integrating religious leaders, traditional rulers, security operatives, and victims’ representatives. The goal must be disarmament, reconciliation, and shared economic development.
When schools turn into cemeteries and farms become killing fields, there is no national development—only national decay. We must also retool our policing and security architecture. Nigeria cannot keep papering over gaping wounds with the band-aids of ad hoc deployments and military showboating. What is needed is intelligence-led security, rooted in local trust and built through real-time surveillance, community policing, and consequences for failure. No more excuses, no more impunity.
But even these efforts will flounder unless we confront the moral drought at the heart of our polity. We must unlearn the bestiality of our past and break from the brutal cycles of vengeance. For every Fatima left unavenged, another child picks up a knife. For every village unprotected, a new militia rises. What future awaits a nation where children are groomed in grief and taught to hate before they learn to read?
The cost of our indifference is generational. The children of Hurti, those who survived, bear the scars not only of what was done to them but of what was denied them: the justice that never came, the love that was never shown, the homeland that failed them. They will remember. And what they remember will shape what they become.
We owe them better. Nigerians must embrace a new social creed: one that prioritises humanity above heritage, dignity above dogma, compassion above conflict. We must teach our children that patriotism is not tribal allegiance but shared empathy. That to be Nigerian is not to be Hausa or Yoruba or Igbo or Tiv or Fulani. It is to be human and humane.
The fate of Hurti’s children is not sealed in their deaths but in our response to them. History will not judge us for what happened in Hurti. It will judge us for what we did afterwards.
