Amarike Akpoke is a Contributing Analyst to USAfricaonline.com
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
President Bola Tinubu is in Benue State meeting today (June 18, 2025) with community leaders and victims of the recent massacre in the area.
On June 14, 2025, the rural communities of Yelwata and Daudu in Benue State were visited with unspeakable violence. In a coordinated and highly lethal attack, over 200 citizens, including entire families, were massacred in their sleep. Among them were 23 members of a single extended household`—an atrocity that speaks not only to the scale of the violence but also to its systematic, intentional nature. This event, which has gone viral across digital platforms, has become emblematic of a larger crisis confronting the Nigerian state, a crisis of protection, response, and moral responsibility. The subsequent dispersal of peaceful protesters in Makurdi by security forces, using teargas, further underscores the inverted logic of state power: one that is absent during actual violence, but active and coercive when citizens engage in lawful civic expressions of grief and protest.
To understand the full significance of these events, one must unpack them across multiple, intersecting dimensions: the structural failure of security institutions, the tragic irony of selective security deployment, symbolic governance and the ritual of condemnation, politicization of national tragedy, crisis of citizenship and public trust, and the rise of symbolic substitutes for policy. The killings in Yelwata and Daudu did not occur in isolation; they are part of a well-documented pattern of attacks across the Middle Belt, especially in Benue State in recent times. Despite years of recurring violence involving alleged herdsmen militias and bandit elements, the Nigerian state has consistently failed to anticipate, prevent, or adequately respond to such atrocities. The repeated inability of security agencies to act proactively, despite intelligence warnings, community alerts, and patterns of attacks, speaks to a deeper structural incapacity and possible complicity.
The fact that attackers could execute such a large-scale massacre and retreat without confrontation or immediate pursuit calls into question the operational readiness and neutrality of the security architecture. Perhaps more telling than the massacre itself is what followed: peaceful protesters, many of them young citizens in Makurdi, came out to mourn their dead and demand accountability. Their demonstration was neither violent nor unlawful. Yet, the same security apparatus that failed to prevent or halt the massacre of innocent and harmless children, women, and aged parents in their sleep was swiftly mobilized to disrupt their assembly using teargas and brute force.
This creates a tragic irony: the state is largely absent when lives are under threat, but immediately present when voices of outrage are raised. This reflects an inversion of the fundamental purpose of governance, which is to protect citizens, not suppress them. In the wake of the killings, the national and international community issued the now-familiar statements of condemnation. The Pope condemned the attack, shortly before the president of the Nigerian state, President Bola Tinubu followed up, in his own words, noting “enough is enough.” However, these condemnations, however well-intentioned, have become ritualistic, functioning as perfunctory acts of empathy rather than catalysts for real change. Without corresponding enforcement actions, investigations, justice mechanisms, or policy recalibrations, these statements deepen public cynicism and normalize impunity.
The Nigerian state, in particular, seems to have adopted condemnation as a substitute for governance, offering powerful rhetoric but no tangible protection or recourse for affected communities. Compounding the outrage was the concurrent political development within the APC North-East zonal caucus, which, on the same weekend of the Benue massacre, convened to endorse President Tinubu for a second term in 2027. This endorsement took place without the Vice President, Kashim Shettima, whose exclusion led to open disagreements at the venue. The juxtaposition is deeply unsettling: while citizens in Benue were burying their dead, national political actors were engaging in premature campaigns and self-serving political consolidation. This dissonance signals a moral disconnect between governance and the governed, where political survival takes precedence over human survival. When the state fails to protect life, punishes lawful dissent, and seems more responsive to elite political interests than grassroots suffering, it breeds not only disillusionment but civil disobedience and alienation.
A state that teargasses grief and condones murder by omission risks losing the moral legitimacy upon which its sovereignty is premised. Benue has become a metaphor for a broader crisis of citizenship, inclusion, and justice in Nigeria. What does it mean to be a citizen in a country where your death is met with silence, and your protest is met with force? What is the utility of a state that can discipline the weak but not defend the vulnerable? The circular issued by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, calling for staff fasting and prayers on three consecutive Mondays, though dated before the massacre, reflects a dangerous trend in Nigeria’s bureaucratic and political institutions, that is, the substitution of spiritualism for governance. While prayer and moral introspection have their place in public life, their institutionalization as a substitute for strategic planning reveals a governance vacuum. A ministry responsible for national food security should be mobilizing data-driven interventions, rural security measures, and sustainable agricultural policies, not engaging in puerile and shallow religiosity. The Benue massacre is not just a security lapse but an existential indictment of the Nigerian state.
The response of security agencies, the ritualized condemnation by political actors, and the juxtaposition of political celebration with mass death paint a portrait of a country in moral crisis. In such a state, the social contract is frayed. The legitimacy of authority is weakened. And the governed are left to mourn, protest, and survive alone—often in fear not just of non-state actors, but of the very forces meant to protect them. A serious rethinking of Nigeria’s security architecture, civic space management, and moral compass is long overdue.
Anything short of a paradigm shift in how Nigeria values human life, responds to tragedy, and governs diversity will only produce more Yelwatas, more Daudus, more grief and perhaps one day, a breaking point. It is not yet too late in the day to pull the leash and stop the ship of the Nigerian state from tipping over and down the precipice.
