- How a hamlet’s pain became Nigeria’s shame
- The terror of moving on: Child survivors of genocide spiral in throes of trauma – Psychiatrist
- At least 52 children, adults murdered across Bokkos council, 1,820 displaced
- Culprits will be prosecuted – President Tinubu, NSA Ribadu
There was no pity on the edge of the blade that butchered the Mangut boys. There was no mercy in the heart that furnished the knife. Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven, got their throats slit by Fulani assailants, late afternoon on Wednesday, April 2nd. Subsequently, their bodies were flung into their burning home. Their mother, Julia, found them in the ruins where the house once stood. Two little corpses, charred to the bones. Flies hummed over them like mourners without grief, the air crackling with rage against those who fed their innocent necks to the sharpened kiss of a blade. Julia, 48, watched it all unfold from a distance, her heart pulsing rapidly, torn between a call to maternal rescue and the terror of certain death.
This is the story of a family’s tragedy, in part. But more hauntingly, it is the story of how Hurti fell, dragging into its rubble, Saltifat and Justice Mangut, and a host of other innocent kids.
When Hurti bled…
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. “We saw them arriving, three men on each bike. Everyone of them had a gun,” recalled Julia.
The invaders descended without warning, a murderous motley cloaked in the garb of Fulani militia, their rifles strapped across their backs. When the guns began to blaze, the children of Hurti were the first victims. As the air split with gunfire, children screamed and adults scampered to safety. In the melee, the invaders looted granaries and livestock, although it was not hunger they sought to satisfy. They slaughtered residents and tossed them in the flames of their homes, which they set ablaze.
As the chaos unspooled, Julia scurried to gather her kids, but she lost her grip on their tiny hands. “I ran into the bush to hide. I prayed they’d be spared because they were children,” she said. But Saltifat and Justice were not spared. They were caught, trembling under the pitiless blades of the death squad, their eyes searching the expanse, wondering if their mother would come flying to their rescue. She didn’t.
One of the assailants struck with the knife: quick, mechanical, and unfeeling. First Justice, then Saltifat. The blade pierced through each child’s pharynx, severing their throats from their broken screams. “I could not come out to rescue them because they would kill me,” said Julia, her voice cracking inward, into a sob.
After the attackers set fire to Julia’s house, they tossed her boys into the flames, like broken dolls. The Mangut home thus became a funeral pyre.
After the mayhem…
The next morning, while the embers cooled and the attackers vanished into the expanse, Julia returned to see what was left of her world. In place of her home was rubble, smoke still slithering from its ruins. And there lay her sons, still and scorched, flies buzzing over their carcasses like cruel archivists of decay. The insects feathered soot with their wings, as if to accuse the world that allowed their deaths.
Heartbroken, Julia knelt screaming, but her tears had burned out in the night like the beams of her home. “They were just lying there,” she said. It was jarring for her to see that the fire did not take all of her boys, as their little hands were still showing. Julia wailed, not in the tenor of the weak, but as a woman who has experienced madness and survived.
There is a peculiar poetry in her grief. For the 48-year-old, the acceptance of her boys’ demise manifested in silence and the grimace that crept into her face at every reference to their fate; this was more heart-wrenching than any wail. Julia’s acceptance was borne of hopelessness and resignation. A stoic surrender to a savagery she could neither explain nor reverse.
“I have accepted my fate,” she said. But could the children who died with their eyes wide open have accepted their fate as stoically as their mother now seems to? Death came too swiftly, perhaps for Saltifat and Justice to ask “Why?”
As Hurti bled and burned, more children were hacked to death alongside older victims in an orgy of violence that claimed at least 46 casualties from Hurti hamlet alone, according to the villagers and official figures. One of the victims was Enoch Jabarang; just nine, he reportedly screamed for help as they cut him down, leaving him splayed like discarded meat. Then there was one-year-old Bright Ephraim, who was too young and innocent to make sense of the knife piercing his infant flesh. There was Isaac Michael, 13, who, until his merciless execution, exhibited the farming genius native to Hurti. Lest we forget seven-year-old Orji Tobias, who tried to run but tripped over his own legs. A machete met him there. Like the others, their bodies were mutilated and left for the vultures.
Fatima’s faint plea for tomorrow
As the violence unfurled, in another part of the village, Fatima Yusuf, nine, ran barefoot, chanting a desperate plea to heaven. “I was playing with my friends when they arrived,” she recalled, in sentences that started strong but trailed off into sobs. “Then people started running and shouting at us to run. So we ran. My friends and I started running and crying, ‘God, help us! God, help us!’ We were all calling God, calling God, over and over.”
God listened, and Fatima survived. But her father, Samuel Yusuf, didn’t. Slain while trying to herd his family to safety, his body was later found, sprawled in his scorched abode. In the quivering diction of a child, Fatima pleaded for help, in the tenor of a child now burdened with filial leadership as the eldest of four siblings, from a broken home. “We have nothing. They burned our clothes, our food. We are begging people. We are asking the government and kind people. Please help us.”
Culprits will be prosecuted – President Tinubu, others
The tragedy in Hurti is yet another statistic in Plateau’s calendar of armed violence. To label it a communal clash, however, is to rinse the massacre of blood. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu swiftly condemned the killings and assured the State Governor, Caleb Mutfwang, of federal support. He said, “These attacks on defenceless citizens are unacceptable. I have directed security agencies to hunt down the attackers. They will be severely punished.”
The president instructed the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) to collaborate with the State authorities to provide relief to affected communities, and reiterated that, “Violence has no place in our country. We will not relent in our duty to protect every Nigerian. We will work harder to root out the forces of evil.”
The Northern States Governors’ Forum (NSGF), on its part, described the attacks as senseless and a threat to the unity and stability of the northern region. Chairman of the forum and Governor of Gombe State, Muhammadu Inuwa Yahaya, in a statement, said the violence and bloodshed ravaging the rural North is a stain on the conscience of the region and the nation. “The sanctity of human life must never be taken for granted. These heinous attacks on innocent people are unacceptable and must be condemned by all,” he said.
Also, the National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, while visiting Plateau State to condole with victims and bereaved families, vowed that the culprits would face justice. Ribadu noted that some casualty figures were exaggerated, stressing that nearly 2,000 terror suspects have been prosecuted nationwide in the past 18 months.
He said, “Security is everyone’s responsibility. We must unite to restore peace. What happened in Plateau will not be allowed to happen again,” he assured, adding that there have been arrests and those found culpable will face justice. “We are committed to ensuring they are prosecuted. We are doing this across the country.”
Plateau Governor, Caleb Manasseh Mutfwang, also commiserated with bereaved families, reaffirming his commitment to justice and security for the people of Plateau. According to him, new strategies are been devised to tackle insecurity in Bokkos and ensure the safety of farmers towards the next planting season.
Mutfwang vowed to ensure the prosecution of all those responsible for the bloodshed, adding that some of the suspected masterminds of the attacks have been arrested. “We will no longer allow those arrested for crimes in our communities to walk free. I will pursue and ensure the prosecution of all those whose hands are stained with the blood of our people. They will face the full wrath of the law,” he vowed.
They slept beside us, then butchered us
Reacting to the governor’s pledge, Hon. Yohanna Ayemange, a councillor and Hurti elder, restated his people’s commitment to see justice served. The massacre, he told The Nation, was not perpetrated by strangers. “We know the culprits. They are our neighbours. We live with them. We have submitted their names to the authorities,” he said.
According to Ayemange, the attackers comprised Fulani men from Jesho, a nearby hamlet, and others from within Hurti itself. They wore no masks when they descended on Hurti with guns and knives, razing lives with the same hands that once shared meals across compounds. He said, “There was no fight. No quarrel. Nothing. We’ve farmed together and even done joint-season farming. Yet suddenly, they turned on us. That’s why it’s hard for us to understand. These people didn’t sneak in from the bush. They walked out of homes beside ours,” he said.
What pained Ayemange most was the scale of cruelty; the attackers made no exceptions, not even for infants.“Who puts a knife to a child’s throat?” he railed. “How did we get here? This is wrong. It’s so wrong,” he lamented.
Yes, there had been minor tensions before; cows grazing on crops, land disputes but these were resolved. Even though the culprits rarely apologised, they were forgiven, said Ayemange, insisting that nothing warranted the April 2nd bloodbath. “We even pardon them when their cattle enter our farms. But what did we do to deserve this?” The names of many of the assailants, Ayemange said, have already been submitted to security agencies. “They are on the run now, hiding in the rocks. But if the government arrests them and brings them back to this village, it will cause more problems. Our youths are angry. Very angry. We want justice, not appeasement. Those who did this must be prosecuted according to the law of the land,” he said. “We cannot just bury the dead and move on.”
The terror of moving on…
If adults like Ayemange find it difficult to move on, it’d be unrealistic to expect the same of child victims and survivors. Aside from the bloodletting, the psychological carnage wrought upon the children of Hurti and Bokkos, in general, is only the latest scar in a long, bloodied history of violence. Hurti is now filled with ghosts, too young to have died, and survivors too small to bear such a memory.
For instance, Fatima and others who survived have become reluctant inheritors of a misery no child should ever know. On April 2, the nine-year-old suffered a grisly exposure to death; the kind that gurgles in a father’s throat as it is slit by a man who once greeted them on the footpath. When the gunmen struck, her father raised his hands instinctively to plead and shield his family. But they didn’t listen. Her father’s death scream was the last thing binding her to the carnage. In those few minutes, Fatima aged several years. These days, she lacks the passion for pranks or prancing with peers in the rain. Fatima speaks of hiding in the bush, holding her breath, and seeing the dried rivulet of her father’s blood under his scorched remains.
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And then there is eight-year-old Josiah, who saw in his father a hero and invincible protector. On April 2, Josiah saw his hero mauled and collapse in a heap of burning flesh. Neighbours recounted how the latter begged the assailants to spare his life. But they ignored his pleas, stabbing him repeatedly while Josiah screamed himself hoarse. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” he cried. “Please, please!” But death is not sentimental. Neither was its squad of maniacal reapers.
Had a neighbour not snatched Josiah into a sprint through the bush, he would not be alive today. Yet in many ways, Josiah did not survive. The boy who emerged from the bush was not the same one who laughed at his father’s jokes as they tilled the soil during planting season. Josiah now flinches at every loud sound. He doesn’t eat much and wakes up screaming at night, sweating and crying, “They have come again!”
Hundreds of kids are exposed to similar trauma across the conflict zones of Bokkos LGA. At least seven communities in Bokkos LGA were attacked between late March and mid-April 2025: Ruwi, Daffo, Manguna, Hurti, Tadai, Mandung-Mushu and Kopnanle. In all, more than 52 people were reportedly murdered. Over 1,820 residents have been displaced, with three camps established in Daffo, Hurti, and Gwande, while others are sheltering in nearby communities. Five people remain missing in Hurti. Two critically injured victims are receiving care at Plateau Specialist Hospital, while more than 20 others are being treated at the Cottage Hospital, Bokkos Town. The security situation remains tense as NEMA, in collaboration with the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) and the Bokkos council authorities, coordinates humanitarian assistance.
In the case of Hurti, the attackers reportedly comprised men from Jesho and their Fulani neighbours in Hurti. For several kids and teenage survivors, this was mind-boggling. Japhet Michael, 17, noted that those who killed his father were men with whom they once shared land during planting season. This shattering of trust haunts the children as much as watching their parents and friends get murdered in cold blood.
Psychologically, many of them are spiralling. While the world may speak in vague terms of “trauma” and “depression,” the true extent of the horror finds its gravest interpretation in the clinical voice of Dr. Rashidatu Kaito, a child psychologist. Kaito explained that when a nine-year-old girl like Fatima sees her father bludgeoned to death and watches him bleed out and get burned, something irreversible happens in her mind. “Her foundational belief that the world is a safe place collapses in an instant. At that age, the father figure isn’t just a parent. He is the embodiment of safety, identity, and order. To witness the fall of such a figure and his subsequent annihilation in a brutal manner rewires the child’s brain. It sets off a neurological alarm that never switches off.”
According to her, that child may never see the world the same way again. “She has learned, tragically, that the people she loves most can be erased in moments. That trauma stays forever fresh and becomes a lens through which all future relationships and expectations of life are filtered,” she said.
Dr. Taire Osaro, a consultant clinical psychiatrist, equally provided a sobering medical analysis. “We are talking about complex post-traumatic stress disorder here,” he said. “Not just the occasional nightmare or anxiety, but a deeply embedded trauma that can impair brain development, emotional regulation, and relational capacity. For children, the brain is still forming. When it is saturated with terror, the amygdala, the part of the brain that governs fear, can become overactive. This leads to hypervigilance, chronic anxiety, and in extreme cases, dissociative disorders,” he said.
Osaro stressed that, when a child, like Josiah, relives the image of his father being stabbed and set ablaze, “He is not just remembering. He is re-experiencing. His body goes back into that moment. The heart races, the pupils dilate, the breath shortens. It’s as though time freezes in that exact second of horror, and his brain refuses to believe it has passed.”
The consequences can spiral into adolescence and adulthood: disordered attachment, difficulty in school, distrust of authority, suicidal ideation, substance dependency, and, perhaps most tragically, an inherited numbness to violence. “Such a child often becomes emotionally stunted. And unless there is a structured therapeutic intervention, which most never get,” he said, “he may grow up physically but remain stuck emotionally at the moment of his father’s murder.”
Osaro warned of the generational cost of unaddressed trauma, stressing that children, if not healed, may become adults who are either consumed by fear or hardened by rage. “They might reproduce the violence, or collapse into themselves. Either way, the society pays,” he said. Yet, there is a glimmer of hope, however faint. Children, though fragile, are also incredibly resilient. “If they are given the tools, space, and support to process their grief…Community-based trauma therapy, consistent caregiving, storytelling therapy, art and play therapy can help. But it takes time and investment. It takes commitment, too. You cannot just throw a bag of rice at a traumatised child and hope they heal.”
No doubt, the children of Hurti need more than food rations, tents and tearful prayers. They need their humanity restored. They need counselling centres, trained trauma specialists, and safe environments to unlearn the screams that now live in their psyches. They need a government and a society that understands that when a child watches his father burn, a part of the future burns with him.
During a panel discussion on ‘banditry, kidnapping and the psychological impact of violence in Nigeria’ at the Kaduna Books and Arts Festival (KABAFEST), the Medical Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the State’s Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Prof. Aishatu Yusha’u Armiya’u, pointed out that food is often provided for victims of violence without considering the fact that health does not just involve the physical and social but also the mental well-being of an individual. “It does not make sense to take traumatised victims to Abuja,” she said, adding that greater attention must be paid to their mental health.
Recent initiatives and expert insights shed light on the mental health challenges faced by children in conflict-affected areas of Nigeria. For instance, the North Central Transitional Aid in Nigeria (NoCTRAiN) project, implemented by the Gede Foundation, aimed to address mental health needs in crisis-ridden communities like Hurti, in Plateau State. The project has trained healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, and Community Health Extension Workers, to provide mental health services using the WHO’s mhGAP intervention guides. This initiative focused on five local government areas: Riyom, Barkin Ladi, Bassa, Bokkos, and Mangu. While the project primarily targeted the general population affected by conflicts between farmers and herders, there is a need for a greater focus on the impact on children in these communities.
Clinical studies confirm that children’s exposure to extreme violence increases risks of long-term mental health disorders: depression that robs colour from their world; PTSD that rewinds the moment of death over and over again in their sleep and waking hours. Some begin to exhibit signs of behavioural disorders, lashing out, becoming withdrawn, and unable to learn in class. Others simply go numb, emotionally paralysed by their loss. Some children stop sleeping and lose their appetites. A few begin wetting themselves again, long after they had learned to stay dry.
For some, the trauma takes subtler shape, like a sudden silence, an inability to play, or a blank stare that lasts too long. It is not only the trauma of what they saw, but also what they can no longer trust. They cannot trust footsteps and are alarmed by the running feet of their neighbours. They cannot even trust the sun; for it, too, was shining when their worlds collapsed.
Fatima dreads the sound of running feet as it reminds her of their neighbours’ footfalls in flight, urging her to “Run!” and seek shelter from their attackers, moments before the killings began. Josiah despises the smell of firewood because it reminds him of the stench of his father’s burnt corpse. And yet, perhaps the cruellest irony is that they are still children. And so, sometimes, they’d be tempted to smile. A stone skips the right way across a puddle. A songbird lands near the church shelter where they now live, temporarily. In those moments, a semblance of joy returns, but only for a flicker, like a candle in the wind.
Across Bokkos, these maimed minors roam in search of relief; orphans of butchered families, robbed of peace, estranged from faith, and all the small certainties that once grounded them.
A history of bloodletting
To understand the anguish of the young survivors is to confront the seething backdrop from which their tragedy emerged. For more than 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. The crisis over indigene rights and political representation in Jos, the state’s capital, first exploded in 2001, when a major riot disrupted more than thirty years of tenuous peace. That single incident claimed at least 1,000 lives, according to Human Rights Watch, and marked the beginning of a protracted cycle of bloodletting that would spill beyond the capital into the state’s rural heartlands.
Since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999, over 53,000 people have been killed in communal conflicts across the country. Plateau State, nestled within the Middle Belt, bears a disproportionate share of that loss. The state has been gripped by successive waves of violence: 700 killed in Yelwa in 2004; another 700 slaughtered in 2008; over 1,000 massacred in 2010. Each year features a fresh chapter that reads like a dirge.
Several years later, Plateau has not known peace. In April 2023, for instance, a brutal conflict between Mwaghavul farmers and Fulani herders erupted in Mangu. More than 300 people were killed, and entire communities were decimated. Houses were torched, schools closed, and farmlands rendered unusable. Warring parties accused each other of ethnic cleansing, forceful eviction, and deployment of foreign mercenaries. And this was only a prelude.
From December 2023 through February 2024, Plateau bled afresh. Coordinated attacks across Bokkos, Mangu, and Barkin Ladi left 1,336 people dead and nearly 30,000 displaced, according to Amnesty International. In December alone, at least 200 were killed in seventeen rural communities. These were not faceless statistics but a diary of civilian deaths comprising children, mothers, fathers, grannies and neighbours. The very landscape of conflict and survival has since been aggravated.
On April 2, the Hurti massacre erupted, claiming at least 46 lives on a single afternoon; a few days later Zike community in Bassa Local Government lost at least 40 lives in a single night to suspected Fulani herdsmen. In the same period, 56 more were killed in the Ukum and Logo districts, even as residents allege that the casualties are much higher.
Since 2005, over 2,100 deaths have been recorded in 279 attacks linked specifically to the farmer-herder crisis in Plateau State. It is no longer a question of isolated clashes but a slow war that has warped the State into a tarnished tomb for both the dead and the living.
What began in Jos has spread to towns, hamlets, and the very farms where children like Fatima and Josiah once ran barefoot behind their fathers. The casualty figures point to a humanitarian crisis and the cumulative psychological catastrophe that now unfolds in the minds of victims, children, in particular, who survive each massacre but never truly leave it behind.
It is quite easy to see the pain of grieving kids like Fatima, Josiah, among other child survivors, manifest in their gaze. The same may be said of bereaved parents. Julia’s eyes, for instance, aren’t angry; they are tired. When she saw what was left of her boys, there was nothing left to bury. “Just pieces.”
If she had her way, she would swathe them in silk and sit talking to them for a while. She would apologise and hopefully earn their understanding as to why she could not save them. But the dead do not reply. And Hurti elders would permit no such irreverence, at least for the bereaved parent’s sake. No mother should cradle her children’s corpses, however deep her grief and awry the circumstance.
Until justice is done and healing arrives, neither the most stirring homily nor gift of relief materials will pacify bereaved mothers like Julia and the child survivors of Hurti. Nothing could bring back Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven. Lest we forget Bright Ephraim, one, Enoch Jabarang, nine, Isaac Michael, 13, and Orji Tobias, seven. These poor kids will remain ghosts in Hurti’s memory. And memory, when drenched in blood and betrayal, may become a torturous inheritance.
The ghosts of Hurti loiter beyond the graveyards. They are in Fatima’s laughter that hasn’t returned, in Josiah’s stares that linger too long, and in the silence of their once boisterous playgrounds.
Hurti was not an anomaly but the manifestation of a history too often ignored. Until that history is reckoned with and land disputes are resolved with fairness, political representation reimagined with justice, and identity politics deconstructed with empathy, Hurti will not be the last place to burn the Nigerian child.
