After speaking with residents and perusing documents in the aftermath of a massacre, FIJ’s EMMANUEL UTI found that the Benue State Government had a decade to nip the recurring attacks in the bud.
On May 25, Emmanuel Uzeh, a Yelewata resident in his mid 40s, returned home to learn that his father’s older brother had died. His uncle and three of his children were on their way to the town when armed herders attacked and killed them.
There was tension in Yelewata in the days that followed. Uzeh recalled a visit by Fulani elders, who met with villagers in what seemed like an attempt at reconciliation. They apologised for the killings and blamed it on what they described as the “arrogance” of a few unruly young herders.
“They admitted it. They said they were sorry and asked for peace,” Uzeh told FIJ.
But the peace was short-lived. On June 13, barely three weeks later, armed Fulani herders stormed the community again. That night, Uzeh’s younger brother was killed. In the coming days, more villagers were attacked and killed in their farms.
This occurred despite a promise by Kayode Egbetokun, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), to stop the killings in Benue and bring the perpetrators to book.
READ MORE: Benue Massacre Survivors Share What Survival Cost Them
PEACE AND PROBLEMS
In the months leading up to the devastating June 13–14 attacks, Yelewata was already on edge, gripped by rising violence. Warning signs were everywhere. Residents told FIJ of repeated clashes: farmers injured in the fields after confronting young Fulani herders who drove cattle through their crops, sporadic gunfire echoing at night, and villagers killed before the police could intervene.
One February evening, danger struck closer to home. A woman returning from the market was stranded when her commercial vehicle ran out of fuel near the community. While the driver went in search of petrol, armed men emerged from the bush. The passengers fled in panic, but the attackers seized the woman.
She remained in captivity until the people of Yelewata managed to pay her ransom. At first, the men called her husband and demanded a N10 million ransom, but they later lowered their demand. The husband, according to resident Michael Ajah, tried to raise the money but couldn’t. Frustrated by the constant calls, he told them they could kill her if they wanted and that she wouldn’t be the first to die.
“But they didn’t kill her. They eventually released her,” Ajah told FIJ. “This was after people in the village came together to help. The Fulani men contacted some villagers, and we pleaded with them to accept what we had. They asked us to bring harvested crops along with the N300,000 we raised as ransom.”
With incidents like this continuing into April, anxiety deepened among the people of Yelewata. The youths approached the local chief, who, according to Ajah, reported the situation to the local government chairman. But little changed.
In May, following the killing of Uzeh’s family, the community reached a breaking point. A group of men travelled to the State House in Makurdi to inform the government of the worsening crisis.
OUR COMMANDER DID NOT GIVE US AN ORDER
Days before the incident, many Yelewata residents heard rumours that Fulani herders were planning attacks on their community and others nearby. Those who believed the warnings moved their families out of the area. But many ignored them. Some of those who stayed behind paid with their lives.
For survivors, that night would forever change how they saw the army and the police. Some lost what little faith they had left in the military. Others spoke highly of the police. For some, the attack only confirmed what they had long suspected: when the killing started, they would be on their own.
As gunfire tore through the community, many women fled barefoot in the dark, heading towards the Roman Catholic Mission school, where soldiers from the Nigerian Army’s 72nd Special Forces Battalion were stationed. The school was untouched that night, but the nearby Catholic Church — less than 50 metres away — would have been burnt down if not for the police, who repelled the attackers.
A woman in the community (name withheld for security reasons) told FIJ that during the chaos, those who reached the school pleaded with the soldiers to intervene, but they refused.
“We begged them. We kept calling on the army to help, but they told us their oga — their commandant — hadn’t given an order. Only the police tried. They faced the attackers head-on and bought time for some people to escape. But when their bullets ran out and they were outnumbered, even they had to retreat,” she said.
She’s not the only one with this account. At the camp for the Internal Displaced Persons (IDP) in Makurdi’s New International Market, two women told FIJ they also heard soldiers at the Roman Catholic Mission Primary School say they couldn’t act without orders from their commandant.
INACTION SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS
After the massacre in June, the Nigerian Mobile Police (MOPOL) were deployed to Yelewata. FIJ saw them on the ground during a visit to the community. But the killings didn’t stop. They returned to the rhythm of sporadic, relentless violence that had plagued the area long before the June attack. With each fresh incident, the gulf of distrust between villagers and the army widened.
Around 2 pm on July 29, three young men were cooking at home when they spotted armed Fulani herders approaching. The one tending the pot sensed danger and beckoned to the other two, who were inside, to run.
They abandoned their food and sprinted towards the expressway, where the Yelewata police post stood. Gunshots rang out as they ran. The men alerted the police, and two officers gave chase, briefly exchanging fire with the attackers. The policemen soon retreated because the attackers outmatched them.
And the soldiers? They simply watched.
“The soldiers just stood by until the Fulani men chased the police. When the police ran back, they saw the soldiers but the soldiers didn’t fire a single shot until the Fulani attackers had already left. What they did made me regret ever having them in Yelewata. The Fulani were exchanging bullets with the police at close range, and the soldiers did nothing,” Ajah told FIJ.
FIJ contacted a soldier whom residents said was stationed at the Yelewata Primary School during the June 13 massacre. He denied being present and refused to confirm whether troops had been ordered not to intervene.
When asked directly whether soldiers had received any orders to repel the attackers, he said, “I cannot answer that.”
READ MORE: BLOODBATH IN BENUE (1): How Armed Herdsmen Laid Siege Before Bathing Yelewata in Blood
THE DSS KNEW BUT THE ARMY IGNORED INTEL
The massacre in Yelewata was not a sudden storm. It was a slow-moving cloud of dread that many people, especially those who are inured to the persistent violence in the state, could think of.
On May 13, exactly one month before the attack, the Department of State Services (DSS) sent a confidential memo to Moses Gara, commander of Operation Whirl Stroke (OPWS), warning of “suspected Fulani militias” plotting coordinated assaults on communities in Benue and Nasarawa. The memo, which was later leaked to TheCable, explicitly named Yelewata as one of the targets.
The DSS had mapped out the threat in detail: militants holding meetings in Doma LGA, armed men gathering in forests near Yelewata, and plans to unleash violence on Tiv settlements along the Benue-Nasarawa border.
Their motive? Retaliation over the seizure of cattle.
“The militias are currently hibernating…and are planning to attack Agatu, Gwer West/East, Makurdi, Guma, and Loko communities,” the memo read.
The DSS analysis aligned with what many locals already believed. A man who insisted on anonymity told FIJ that Fulani mercenaries had a series of meetings before they attacked. He knew because a Fulani cattle owner tells him when an attack is about to occur.
“That day, he (the Fulani man) called me. He asked where I was. I said I wasn’t around, and he just said ‘okay’. He would usually call to give a hint when trouble was coming. But on June 12, all he said was ‘okay’. The next day was a bloodbath,” the man told FIJ.
When FIJ called the Fulani man who had briefed our source, he said nothing about the attack, but warned the journalist to stay away from Yelewata.
“If anything happens, I’ll let you know. But stay away from that place for now,” he said.
THE ATTACK FEELS COORDINATED
Given the frequency of the attacks, their brutal consistency over the years, and the utter absence of consequences for the perpetrators, many in Yelewata are convinced this is no mere cycle of violence. To them, it is calculated, deliberate and part of a broader push to drive the Tiv from their ancestral land.
Jacob Anya, a farmer from Yelewata, is one of those voices. He believes the bloodshed of June 13–14 was not random. It was, he insists, the latest stage in a long-running and coordinated campaign. He argues that if it were not so, both the federal and state governments, as well as the military, would have taken massive and determined action to rid their land of this recurring problem.
“Right now, as I speak to you, more than half of the local government area has been displaced from their ancestral homes. Many are living in refugee camps or with relatives in the cities. Some have even fled as far as Yorubaland. In fact, I myself am preparing to leave soon because the situation has become unbearable,” Anya told FIJ.
Anya is not alone. Many residents echo the same sentiment: that what is unfolding in Benue is no accident but a slow, orchestrated dispossession. Even senior officials have voiced similar concerns. Joyce Ramnap and Matthew Abo, commissioners for information in Plateau and Benue states respectively, have both described the violence as part of a “coordinated, genocidal plot” aimed at seizing ancestral lands, crippling rural economies and pushing survivors into perpetual poverty.
The statistics bear this out. Over 615,000 people are displaced in Benue. Most of them have lost the farms they depend on, the same farms they are too afraid to till and are now losing to grazing.
“Every year, it worsens,” Anya said bitterly. “You plant, you harvest, you store what little you have and then, overnight, it’s gone. Burnt and looted. You’re left with nothing. If this isn’t a deliberate plan to erase us from our land, then what is it?”
Anya started thinking this way after a relative of his was killed on the farm. Prior to his relative’s death, Anya said, a Fulani herder had asked him if the Tiv people wanted to “finish the land” because they were clearing the uncultivated area.
“Now, we can’t even go one kilometre outside of town without fear of being attacked,” he said.
Anya believes that the army shields the Fulani herders and may be colluding with them. According to Anya, every time soldiers from Giza in Nasarawa visit their area, trouble follows.
“It’s almost as if their presence signals the herders to strike,” he said.
“Whenever the army sees someone from our tribe, even with something as simple as a small knife, they’ll question us. But the Fulani walk freely, armed and dressed in military jackets that hide their weapons. They’ve been doing this for years.”
THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PROBLEM
Research and news archives trace the roots of Benue’s farmer-herder conflict back over a decade, though locals disagree on exactly when it began. Some insist it started in 2009, others point to 2011, while a few mark 2014 as the year it spiralled beyond control. What they all agree on, however, is that it has been simmering far too long.
A point-of-sale agent in Yelewata said that when the herders attacked them in the past, they did not sit back helplessly as they now appear to do. He recalled that in 2014, the Fulani herders, whom many residents say take cover in Kadarko and Giza in Nasarawa, attacked Yelewata. But they did not go unpunished.
“We made some plans on how to attack them and we attacked them. That ended the problems we now experience for some time,” the agent said.
Peter Ishor, a resident of Daudu, a community close to Yelewata, offered a similar tale of that turbulent year. When herders attacked his community on March 7, 2014, he said, it was the youths who rallied to defend their homes.
“We had no choice,” Ishor said.
“If someone storms your house and tries to slaughter your family, will you simply sit there and sleep comfortably? No! You rise and fight back. We only ever defended ourselves, never attacked first. But they pushed us to the edge.”
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A DECADE OF WARNING IGNORED
In 2014, Gabriel Suswam, who was governor of Benue at the time, narrowly escaped death when Fulani herdsmen ambushed his convoy in Guma Local Government Area during an on-the-ground visit to assess the aftermath of previous violent attacks.
Just before the ambush, 64 villages had been sacked and at least 37 people killed. Soldiers who had initially accompanied the governor pulled out midway, claiming they were not asked to continue, leaving Suswam vulnerable.
The attackers opened fire from nearby bushes while the governor was inspecting destroyed homes. The exchange of gunfire lasted nearly an hour. That a sitting governor could be so exposed, and the attackers that bold, was a glaring sign that the crisis had already spiralled out of control. Even then, no fundamental shift followed.
According to the Nigeria Watch Project’s 2017 report on Benue State, Benue’s violent trajectory dates back well before any grazing law was passed or herder militia armed themselves with assault rifles. “Conflicts between farmers and herders have been recurrent in the region since at least 2007,” the report states
The pattern was visible even then. By 2014, over 400 people had died in a series of communal and herder-related conflicts. Border local government areas such as Gwer West, Guma, Agatu and Logo (neighbours of Yelewata) were already flagged as hotspots.
“Violence frequently occurs in border LGAs such as Gwer West, Guma, Agatu, and Logo,” the researchers noted
But the most damning part of that report wasn’t just the death toll. It was what the government didn’t do about it.
“The state government has repeatedly failed to provide adequate response or security reinforcements,” the report warned in 2017.
That same year, Benue passed the Anti-Open Grazing Law, a move that offered symbolic resolve but little practical change. The state’s security condition barely changed and the vulnerable indigenes were left alone.
The authors of the report added that “the cyclical nature of these clashes… suggests an absence of effective conflict resolution mechanisms and weak security presence in affected areas”.
Yelewata was one of those areas. By 2025, the pattern had simply repeated but with deadlier consequences.
RESPONSES
On Thursday, FIJ emailed the Benue State Government for comments on the recent happenings in Yelewata but they had not responded at press time.
FIJ also called Lieutenant Colonel Anele Dir, the Army Public Relations Officer (PRO), on August 6. She refused to comment. The army official asked FIJ to contact the spokesperson of the Operation Whirl Stroke. She then promised to send the phone number of Operation Whirl Stroke’s PRO. At press time, she had yet to do so.
This is the third part of a four-part series. Read the second past, Benue Massacre Survivors Share What Survival Cost Them, here.
The post BLOODBATH IN BENUE (3): State Negligent in Not Protecting Yelewata. Soldiers Stood by as June, July Attacks Occurred appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.