In Hitch 22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens recalls his conversation with a genocide survivor in Rwanda. She lamented to him that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood, early mischief and family lore; no sibling or companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, friendships, kinships, gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar.
I remember this every time I read or hear of the sobbing earth in Benue and Plateau States; how entire communities are being erased in blood and memory; every time I hear how lives are being razed and buried under dust stirred by stampeding feet of fleeing mothers clutching their babies under a pitiless hail of bullets.
In recent weeks alone, about 150 lives have been claimed in Plateau and Benue States in a series of coordinated massacres. The attacks bear the bloody signature of a familiar horror: armed bandits, herders, and foreign mercenaries.
Amnesty says that between December 2023 and February 2024, 1,336 people were killed in Plateau State, and Benue continues to bleed as villages in Ukum, Logo, and Katsina-Ala mourn their dead, amid smouldering ashes of their homesteads.
Yet, some dare to call this “conflict.” No. This is not a conflict. This is a genocide. And no veil of ambiguity can soften its cruelty. The Plateau and Benue massacres are well-orchestrated campaigns of human erasure, driven by greed, emboldened by impunity, and justified by a macabre theology of land, ethnicity, and dominion.
There is no justification for taking human lives under any pretext. No faith, farm, or grievance warrants the annihilation of children in their sleep, or the decapitation of fathers shielding their families with their chests.
Even more horrifying is the revelation that some of these atrocities are perpetrated by Nigerians acting in concert with foreign mercenaries. Intelligence reports and eyewitness testimonies reveal that captured terrorists often confess to collaborations that span borders and ideologies. But let us not allow the temptation of foreign scapegoating blind us to the truth: Nigerians are killing Nigerians.
To ascribe these killings solely to foreign influence is to miss the deeper malaise at the root of the crisis. What drives this beastly bloodlust is a feral hunger for land, resources, and power. The fields of Benue and the hills of Plateau are not just beautiful, they are bountiful. Beneath their topsoil lie fertile treasures: water bodies, arable land, and minerals. Thus, the vultures who mastermind carnage in the states do so to conquer and dispossess.
And here, we must tread carefully. It is dangerously reductionist to script this as a Fulani versus Christian battle. Such a narrative, while seductive to the angry and grieving, is fatally flawed. When Boko Haram terrorists massacred Zabarmari’s Muslim farmers in Borno, the same influencers chanting “religious genocide” in Plateau were mute. When bandits razed entire Muslim communities in Sokoto and Zamfara, there was no outrage or candlelight vigil, there were no threads linking it to an agenda to Islamize the north.
What is unfolding in Benue and Plateau is not a religious war but a siege of interest, waged by profiteers who see land as conquest and human lives as collateral. Yes, viral posts abound with conspiracy theories and recycled fear. They say the Fulanis plan to march over the south and “dip the Quran in the Lagos Lagoon.” They warn of stealthy invasions and grand replacement agendas. And it hits differently, doesn’t it? When the genocide we rationalised abroad seethes at our doorstep?
A childhood friend, a Christian and proud son of Bokkos, once defended Israel’s siege on Gaza. “It’s security,” he said, “self-defence.” Until his village was set ablaze and his cousin’s children were murdered and burned to ashes. “This is too much. Will no one arrest the culprits? There is no justice,” he cried. And I had no heart to say what I thought; that “Nobody savours the taste of the bitter herbs we season for others.”
To applaud genocide anywhere is to plant its seed at home. This is not to draw false equivalence. It is to appeal to our common humanity. Whether the victim be Jew or Muslim, Tiv or Hausa, Igbo or Kanuri, blood is blood, and the earth does not discriminate. Genocide is not just about mass killing; it is mass forgetting, mass silence, mass complicity. It is the deliberate wiping of memory, the snuffing out of lineage, the razing of every song and story that binds a people to the world.
Today, Benue and Plateau are bleeding into dust. In the same way, Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Sokoto, Kaduna and Gaza bled and still bleed.
The onslaught has decimated once-thriving agroeconomies, turning farming communities into famine zones and IDP camps. Granaries lie empty, irrigation channels clogged with ash and bones. Markets are ghost towns. The youth flee to cities, and the old pray to die easily. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must approach this as a national emergency. As he grapples with inflation and economic dislocation, he must crush this hydra of terrorism and banditry. The institution of a nationwide ranching policy must move from paper to pasture. The Land Use Act must be refined to protect communal lands from predatory acquisition masked as modernisation.
The National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, must root out terror, whether it comes masked as herdsmen, insurgents, or communal warlords. Nigeria needs intelligence fusion centres, community policing frameworks, and rapid deployment squads trained in both combat and cultural nuance. And above all, we need justice: swift, spirited and blind.
Yes, this administration made commendable moves, deploying special forces, reviving the Civilian Joint Task Force, and improving aerial surveillance in flashpoint areas. And for a time, there was hope. Attacks waned. Farmers returned to the fields. Children to schools. But that dawn has dimmed to a blood-soaked tide of terror.
The federal, state, and local governments must stop operating as silos, and approach security as a choir, not a dissonance. Intelligence should be shared, responses must be swift. Issues of poverty, land disputes, and marginalisation must be addressed with greater sincerity and less artifice.
And let us, the people, look inwards. We must resist the siren call of profiling. To label all Fulani as murderers is as absurd as calling all Tiv men violent. No ethnic group owns virtue or vice. There are killers and victims in every tongue. We must quit homogenising guilt and start amplifying the voices that root for peace.
Religious groups must preach restraint. And the Nigerian press must quit magnifying hate. Let us tell the whole story, not just the parts that flatter our biases and wordplay. A genocide is not an abstraction. It is not history. It is not just Rwanda, Bosnia, or Gaza. It is here in Logo, Ukum, Bokkos, Katsina Ala. And if we do not rise to stop it, it will consume us all, first in flames, then in forgetting.
Benue and Plateau are reminders that the arc of the moral universe does not, on its own, bend, but by the trembling hands of those who choose courage over comfort, truth over tribalism, and life over land tracts.
