Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
USAfrica: The familiar and horrific bloody trails of destruction and death in the area known as the middle belt of Nigeria left the area in anguish and sorrow.
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) issued a statement late on Sunday that “gunmen carried out a brutal assault” in the Bokkos Local Government Area.
In one of his reactions to the events, Caleb Manasseh Mutfwang, the elected Governor of Nigeria’s Plateau State, described the latest killings of 52 persons and displacement of more than 2500, as an “act of genocide and a deliberate effort to impoverish the community and displace them from their ancestral lands…. I would say it unapologetically: what happened in the last two weeks in Bokkos is genocide. I say it unreservedly.”
Mutfwang, a lawyer, said on Arise TV that “these were unprovoked attacks on innocent people, vulnerable people. “And there has been a pattern over the years, that we discovered that the onset of the farming season, these attacks normally come in, and then there’s a respite when people manage to go to the farm and farm the little farmlands that remain and then when the harvest is about to come in, there’s another wave of attacks. So, it suggests to us that this is a well-coordinated plan to keep the people in those areas in perpetual poverty.”
He noted that: “The interesting thing you will know on the Plateau is that many families are inter-religious, and so religion is not so much the issue. I think that here we are dealing with some powerful forces who mobilise these faceless people and come and unleash it on these natives…. And at the end of the day, the natives are left defenseless.”
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has extended “his condolences to the families of the victims in Ruwi, Hurti, and Tadai communities in Bokkos Local Government and those from Manguna and Dafo villages, where the gunmen launched brutal attacks, resulting in the loss of lives and the destruction of properties.”
In a statement issued by Bayo Onanuga, his Special Adviser (Information and Strategy): “The report of another violent attack in communities in Plateau State by mindless gunmen saddens me. The latest attacks on defenceless citizens are unacceptable. I have directed security agencies to hunt down the attackers, and they will face severe punishment when apprehended. These intermittent attacks should have no place in our country at a time when we are working so hard to restore peace and order in all parts of our country. This unfortunate incident will never dampen and slow us down in our duty to protect every Nigerian citizen. Instead, we will work harder to exterminate forces of evil wherever they are lurking in our country.”
Many indigenous people and victims, especially in the middle belt geo-political zone, as reported and quoted previously in USAfricaonline.com and USAfrica magazine, indicate that there are anti-Christian violence and targeted ethnic attacks against several communities.
