Tag: Hurti

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.

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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.

Even vultures do not feast on their young. Yet in Hurti, Nigeria nourished on the blood of her children. The narrative is bloodcurdling: severed throats of innocent children, salty tears of sorrowing mothers, and decapitated fathers who bled out.

The victims’ fates invoke the mindless grief of a nation too brutalised to feel empathy. Yet Hurti’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back. The horror that befell the hamlet on April 2nd is no accident of history. It is a grim parable; a ghastly rite of our clustered miscreation. That ill-fated Wednesday, Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven, had their throats slit by an ethnic militia. Subsequently, their bodies were flung into their burning home.

That any human hand could press a blade against a child’s neck and pull—without scruples or remorse—is the ultimate indictment of a nation adrift. Yet this savagery is rarely singular. It mirrors a familiar rite of vengeance that has been around for a long time. At the same time, plagued warring communities pitted in a never-ending tussle dubbed the indigene-settler crisis, ethno-religious conflict, across Plateau, Benue and other States.

From Riyom to Barkin Ladi, Bokkos to Mangu, the narrative is the same: a festering grievance, a retaliatory attack, and a government that responds with lofty speeches and body bags. This is not justice. This is the ritualisation of horror.

Hurti did not burn in isolation. It burned as part of Nigeria’s slow, daily immolation. What remains after the carnage isn’t simply the ash of houses or the charred corpses of the slain occupants. What remains is eight-year-old Josiah’s scream: “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” as he watched his father get butchered to death. What remains is nine-year-old Fatima Yusuf’s barefoot sprint from death, and her fragile, prayerful chants above the crack of gunfire.

Hurti’s tragedy is not new, but its pain is freshly grotesque. Around 3:35 pm, the soft murmur of rural life ruptured to the hum of motorcycles, three slayers in each seat, their guns and machetes slung across their backs like casual accessories. Within moments, the air turned metallic with the stench of blood. Julia, 48, watched from the bush as her sons got slaughtered, paralysed by the knowledge that a step toward them was a step toward certain death. Her children died without her arms around them. Their last thoughts, zoned into the absence of a mother torn between love and survival. That is the real death. Yet Julia suffers another kind of death; the one that stalks a mother, long after she witnessed her sons’ murder and burial in a mass grave.

The Mangut boys, like several of their peers, were soullessly erased from the nation’s moral register. Their killers are products of our moral void. The disfigurement of the soul that afflicts them drives hundreds of youths in several Plateau communities to bear machetes into neighbouring settlements, retaliating for past wrongs with future atrocities. The cycle is cruel and complete: blood for blood, sin for sin, horror for horror. And while the dead pile up, those still breathing shuffle forward, desensitised and forever maimed.

No tribe or tongue owns this cruelty. What we are dealing with surpasses ethnic violence; it is moral atrophy cloaked as gall. Amid this cultural flop of empathy, Nigeria suffers a descent to pitilessness; a deadening of our national conscience. From the rostrums of leadership to the ramshackle dwellings of the poor, compassion is vanishing. In its place is a perverse exaltation of vengeance and rage.

This malady is canonised in real time; it is what makes a government send relief materials instead of trauma therapists. It is what drives citizens to turn every tragedy into a statistic and every loss into a familiar tragedy. Pitilessness thus defines the Nigerian system. It flows through the corridors of power into the minds of everyday Nigerians who scroll past photographs of massacred children and civil deaths as if they were yesterday’s football scores. What kind of society is this, that a child’s charred remains invoke no rallying cry?

The cost of unhealed wounds is profound. Josiah’s eyes, now vacant, tell a story we refuse to hear. Laughter has deserted his innocent heart, and he wakes up screaming from persistent nightmares. His father is dead, but Josiah dies a little every night. If we do nothing, he will grow up among us as a wounded shell. Like Josiah, hundreds of children across Bokkos LGA and beyond have witnessed similar horrors, and in their experiences, you begin to see a generational crisis of unfathomable scope.

As trauma specialist Dr. Osaro warns, Josiah may grow up physically but remain stuck emotionally at the moment of his father’s slaying. And such children, unhealed, become adults unable to give or receive love. Some will harden into new agents of violence. Others will collapse inward, swallowed by fear or shame or addiction. Either way, society pays.

The costs are steep: broken homes, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and violent crime. But worst of all is the silent inheritance: the rage, suspicion and grief that the living pass on to the unborn.

It’s about time we halted the transmission of this transgenerational hatred. We must draw a line. There must be justice, not just for Hurti, but for every village whose earth has been darkened by blood. The perpetrators of the April 2 massacre must be hunted, tried, and punished. No more euphemisms. No more “unknown gunmen.”

There must be healing, the type that surpasses food rations, sanitary pads, and temporary tents. I speak of structured trauma therapy and community-based interventions funded by the government. Art therapy, storytelling sessions, and safe houses for child survivors must become part of our emergency response. Healing cannot be outsourced to God. It must be planned, funded, and executed by men.

There must be dialogue. It’s about time the government, traditional rulers, faith leaders, and local communities sat at a common table, not to relitigate old grievances, but to chart a pathway to sustainable peace. We must neuter the culture of reprisal and the myth of ethnic supremacy. We must cultivate mutual respect as a survival strategy far from the culture of utopia.

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We must also address land use conflicts with transparent legal reforms. Set up conflict-resolution commissions that include all stakeholders: settlers, herders, indigenes, and imbue them with real authority. We must remove the bureaucratic bottlenecks that delay intervention and create safe zones where displaced people can live and rebuild without fear.

And lastly, we must re-teach ourselves to feel. Our social and religious institutions must preach compassion louder than conquest. Our schools must teach empathy, not just arithmetic. Our homes must nurture kindness, not vengeance. Only then can we ensure that Saltifat and Justice did not die in vain.

What Hurti demands of us is not pity but a covenant. We owe it to Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven. We owe it to Enoch Jabarang, nine, and Bright Ephraim, one. We owe it to nine-year-olds: Fatima and Josiah, who still wake up screaming from a horrid relive of their fathers’ murder. Shall we unlearn the barbarism of our past, and rework compassion, from a convenient slogan into a national policy and culture of co-existence?

If we do not, then Hurti is prophecy; its flames will leap into other hamlets and other homes. And the fires may stay burning in our hearts.