On his Facebook page, on 28 March, 2025, a popular United-States-based Professor of Communication, Farooq Kperogi, stated and asked in exasperation: “Several people have sent me unwatchably bloodcurdling videos of northerners being burned alive in what is said to be Edo State. What exactly is going on? I am despondent as I am confused. Edo has no history of hostile relations with the North. Can someone explain to me what’s going on? None of the people who shared the videos with me was able to answer my questions satisfactorily. That’s why I am asking publicly.”
In a 29 March, 2025 article, Kperogi noted: “My inquiry has led me to understand that the Uromi community has been gripped by abductions for ransom, which sometimes result in deaths. Seething with rage and vengeance over the incessancy of deadly kidnapping by ‘Fulani herdsmen,’ the community was primed for jungle justice. When local vigilantes accosted a bus traveling northward through the town, they found Hausa hunters armed with hunting guns and machetes aboard. In the bigoted, know-nothing estimation of the Uromi vigilantes, Hausa hunters were one and the same as Fulani kidnappers. So, they burned the innocent Hausa hunters for the crimes of anonymous Fulani bandits.”
Kperogi noted further: “I honestly couldn’t bring myself to watch the dreadfully nightmarish videos to the end. I broke down at the point when one of the hunters was thrown into a flaming fire from a wheelbarrow and he exclaimed “Wayyo Allah!” in anguish. It was too much for my fragile heart to handle. These sorts of savage slaughters of innocents persist in Nigeria not just because of a progressive loss of faith in formal institutions for the redress of communal grievance, heightened anxieties about safety, and increasing faith in the efficacy of jungle justice but also because of the absence of consequences for them.”
According to Abubakar Adam Ibrahim in a 3 April, 2025 article on “Grieving in a time of feast,” in Daily Trust, “They had been travelling to celebrate [Eid] with their own loved ones before they were intercepted at Uromi, beaten, clubbed, hacked, and torched in the most inhumane way possible. The suspicion that they could possibly be a kidnapping gang that had terrorised Uromi of late has been given as a justification – they were, after all, travelling with locally made guns and hunting dogs because they were hunters.”
As Ibrahim further notes, “On the part of their murderers, there are three possible motivations – not vindications – for the barbarism that resulted in these lynchings. One might be fear, the other might be hate, and the third might just be sheer savagery. Fear because, according to reports, kidnapping gangs have besieged Uromi recently, and in response, the community had set up a vigilante group to secure the lives of the locals. Fear has made people do the most awful things in the name of self-preservation. The possibility of hate being a motive cannot be ruled out entirely, considering the ethnic hues that have coloured these killings. If it is neither of these two, then it has to be just the intrinsic savagery of the masterminds, who simply could not pass up the chance to spill the blood of others. None of these is good or even acceptable.”
Furthermore, Ibrahim observed: “The Edo State Governor, Monday Okpebholo, has, to a large extent, made a significant effort in damage control. Already, the killings were poised to draw retaliation from the North. The statement of the Edo State Government regarding the lynching was reassuring, or at least it sounded reassuring, and his visit to Kano, where most of the victims were from, to pay condolences and appeal for calm, was a great work of interstate diplomacy. Only God knows the number of lives that have been saved as a result. This does not discountenance the fact that the lives that were lost should never have been lost to begin with.”
Ibrahim said in this regard: “The failure of our security systems has meant that individuals, groups, and communities are taking security into their unprofessional and unregulated hands. The consequence is the democratisation of violence, whereby those with the greater capacity for violence fare better. Violence is something that the state must retain a monopoly of and not be made accessible or normalised under any circumstance. Until this monopoly is restored, and until criminal groups are obliterated from the Nigerian system, incidents like the one at Uromi will recur where innocent travellers and non-native locals are murdered in cold blood.”
As Emeka Omeihe stated, in this regard, in his column in The Nation on 7 April, 2025, “The killing of 16 travellers of northern extraction by a vigilante group in Uromi, Esan North East Local Government Area of Edo State, has exposed the dangers in the quasi security outfits that emerged in response to the festering insecurity in the country. More than anything, the chilling incident highlights scant regard to law and order, due process and sanctity of the human life. In it can also be located a culture of violence that is increasingly enveloping this country and increasingly threatening its social fabric. If this culture of violence, mistrust and easy resort to self-help is not urgently stemmed, it may soon begin to define us as a people.”
Possibly in response to the view that illegal vigilante groups like the one which perpetuated the Uromi murders were operating due to the absence of optimal security cover by authorised security forces, the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) organised a webinar on 8 April, 2025 on “Preventing Extrajudicial killings in Nigeria: The role of the security agencies.” The presenter at the webinar was CP Adewale Saka Ajao, Commissioner of Police, Federal Capital Territory Command.
In his remarkably dispassionate and highly intellectual presentation, CP Ajao noted that extrajudicial killings, whether perpetrated by conventional security agencies or unrecognised or illegal persons or groups, were killings not authorised by the court. He also distinguished between extrajudicial killing and loss of life in the process of self-defence. According to him, going ahead to kill a person as an act of retaliation after the person has been effectively restrained and arrested is not self-defence, but a case of extrajudicial killing.
Moreover, CP Ajao identified the causes of extrajudicial killings as weak and inefficient judicial system and delay in or undue lengthening of the trial process, perception of the security agencies and the judiciary as corrupt, resulting in lack of confidence in both the security agencies and the judiciary. He also identified lack of human rights training by the personnel of security agencies, the use of violence as an electoral strategy by politicians, the political, ethnic and religious partisanship by security personnel, drug addiction and undiagnosed mental health issues.
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As is usual with social media reactions, comments on Kperogi’s post at the beginning of this article seeking to verify the gory videos ranged from the measured to the reckless. One deeply reflective commentator sought to know why about twenty-four hours after the dastardly act, information about it was still scanty on the mainstream media. The same kind of question was raised in a more rigorous manner by Yushau A. Shuaib in The Guardian of 31 March, 2025. Specifically, he stated: “In school, we are taught that the media – often described as the Fourth Estate – exists to educate, inform, and serve as a watchdog for society. Yet behind this noble ideal lies a troubling reality: media narratives are frequently shaped by the interests of their proprietors, patrons, and editors. Even on deeply sensitive national issues, editorial direction can be swayed by commercial gain, political allegiance, or ethnic loyalties.”
He further observed: “A … recent and … distressing case underscores this troubling trend: the lynching of Northern hunters—predominantly Hausa-speaking Muslims – in Uromi, Edo State, on Thursday, March 28, 2025. The victims, reportedly en route to Kano for Eid al-Fitr celebrations, were travelling in a truck when local vigilantes intercepted them and allegedly found dane guns. This sparked a mob attack. A harrowing video showed the men pleading for mercy as they were beaten and burned alive, while onlookers stood by with chilling indifference. … Despite the horror captured on video, most national newspapers downplayed the incident. Shockingly, the atrocity was eclipsed by frivolous matters that received more prominent coverage.”
Shuaib then said: “Several factors fuel this persistent media bias, including ownership influence, where proprietors and sponsors shape narratives to align with their interests; lack of diversity, as many newsrooms are dominated by personnel from a single region, leading to skewed perspectives; and commercial priorities, where advertising revenue and political patronage often outweigh the public interest – as evident in the prioritisation of birthday tributes over national tragedies.”
This view tallies with the following admonition from Lawanti: “History has shown us how societies unravel – not all at once, but step by step, lie by lie, silence by silence. Hausa and Fulani have weathered invasions, colonialism, and political exclusion – together. What must not happen now is for digital agitators to succeed where imperial powers failed.
The whole saga indicates the increasing significance of the social media in the collection and dissemination of information. Unfortunately, the social media is largely unrestrained, and the consequences of social media exuberance could be dire. As Kabiru Danladi Lawanti notes in the 11 April, 2025 edition of Daily Trust, “Genocide never begins with violence. It begins with language – systematically crafted to dehumanise, divide, and desensitise. Rwanda and Yugoslavia were not failed states; they were fractured societies, where identity was weaponised through the media until violence felt logical. Northern Nigeria today is not Rwanda. But some of the same psychological architecture is quietly forming – this time, across the digital landscape.”
The largely unsatisfactory performance of the mainstream media in the Uromi murders brings to the fore the skepticism about the existence of ‘a free press’. What this situation underscores is the fact that communities or segments of a community underserved in the existing media ecology need to consider the establishment of a variety of media outfits, targeted at different audiences (local, state, regional and national) and the intensive training of requisite personnel, as a matter of urgent strategic investment to avoid the kind of media silence or blackout or media de-prioritisation that was witnessed in the reportage of the Uromi murders.
