By Newspad team
The flash of sirens and ceremonial handshakes during President Tinubu’s June 18, 2025 condolence visit to Benue State, following the massacre of over 200 residents in Yelwata Community, Guma Local Government Area, by suspected herdsmen, were a spectacle.
But they brought no tangible relief to the scorched fields and shattered homes of the grieving Community where fever, dehydration, and post-traumatic stress are already spreading like wildfire especially in the evacuation zone.
Humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), have issued early warnings.
They are predicting the imminent risk of cholera, malaria, and Lassa fever outbreaks. Yet, their calls for vaccines, mobile clinics, and medical personnel remain unanswered.
Although more than 2,000 displaced persons, mostly women and children, have been relocated to the temporary camp at Makurdi International Market, many of the homeless, particularly men, are still sleeping under trees in the rain, abandoned by government authorities.
According to them, leaving the land would mean surrendering it to the Fulani herdsmen who still graze nearby.
While over one hundred injured survivors are receiving treatment at the Moses Orshio Adasu University (formerly Benue State University) Teaching Hospital, Makurdi at the expense of the State government, many have slim chances of survival due to the severity of their injuries.
Those at the temporary camp continue to suffer without proper medication, with people reportedly collapsing daily, according to investigation.
“We are just waiting for death to come,” a mother of three whispered, her toddler listless in her arms. Her husband, she said, had been missing since the attack—presumed either dead or still hiding in the forest.
To complicate matters, Communities have reported large-scale “bush combing” operations, military patrols launched to scour the forests where both survivors and attackers fled. Helicopters hover overhead. Boots pound the earth. But results remain negligible.
Many residents question the timing and purpose of these operations. Are they informed by credible intelligence and local collaboration? Or are they merely political theatre, staged to appease public outrage and deflect media scrutiny?
Several survivors claim they saw uniformed soldiers standing by as gunshots rang out nearby. “They said they were waiting for orders,” a young man recounted bitterly. “But our families were dying right in front of them.”
These ungoverned pockets; where attackers roam, soldiers stand idle, and families dig graves by moonlight, are the breeding grounds of violence. They nurture fear and disorder, where state presence vanishes and lawlessness thrives.
In such spaces, children grow up fluent in trauma before they ever learn to read. Boys mimic gunfire with sticks. Girls play hide-and-seek among ruins. Their innocence, like their homes, is shattered by the silence of those in power.
Benue’s tragedy is not solely about the gunmen or security lapses. It reflects a deeper, more insidious breakdown: no mass burial, no forensic identification, no epidemic prevention, and certainly no judicial inquiry.
Grieving families recount horrific scenes of hurried burials. Some dug graves with bare hands. Others dragged bodies using old bedsheets. There were no coffins, no prayers, no dignity, just the desperate need to bury loved ones before the next wave of violence.
“We buried them like animals,” said an elderly man who had lost his wife and two grandchildren. “I couldn’t even mark their graves. The soil was too hard. The night too dark.”
Government officials, however, appear deaf to these cries. Days pass without any meaningful statement. When words finally come, they are filled with platitudes, not action. Concern seems reserved for camera lenses, not the suffering survivors.
There is no state-funded trauma counselling. No emergency deployment of health workers. No DNA teams to identify the dead. These aren’t mere oversights, they are policy failures that deepen an already unbearable human toll.
Yelwata has become a classroom for systemic failure. Its ruins teach a bitter lesson: that neglect, sustained over time, becomes a form of violence. And that institutional silence eventually turns into complicity.
The absence of forensic response after mass killings is particularly troubling. Without identification, families are denied closure. Justice becomes a ghost, and the mourning process is left unfinished.
The government’s delay in declaring a state of emergency in the affected area has only intensified the humanitarian crisis. Aid workers are overstretched. Volunteers are exhausted. Yet bodies continue to be discovered in shallow graves, and stentch from decomposing bodies in bushes still persists.
As disease threatens and armed attackers regroup, the window for decisive intervention continues to close. But still, the machinery of the state hesitates — caught in the snare of bureaucracy, politics, and inertia.
Until protocols for mass burials, forensic identification, rapid medical response, and transparent investigations become standard, Yelwata will remain not only a tragedy but a warning, a name that may echo in other ungoverned spaces to come.
For the survivors, the future remains uncertain. Their wounds are fresh. Their voices, still ignored. And unless there is a radical shift in both policy and empathy, they will remain abandoned — not only by their attackers, but by the very state meant to protect them.
As victims violent attacks ponder on their ordeals, Nigerians are obsessed daily in battling for survival, time will tell when President Tinubu’s federal government-led commands to the Armed Forces to halt the killings will translate to a a nation where no Nigerian is oppressed.
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