As at yesterday, December 28, 2023, media reports put the death toll of the Plateau Christmas Eve attack at 195. Specifically, 148 people were killed in Bokkos Local Government Area, 19 in Mangu LGA, and 27 in Barkin Ladi, while 88 persons with severe injuries are being hospitalised.

In addition to the massacre, about 1,300 houses were razed and over 10, 000 persons displaced. The well-coordinated attacks which took place simultaneously in 25 communities across three LGAs went on without restraint till Monday morning on Christmas day.

The prime solution to the incessant massacre of indigenous people of Plateau and other states in the Middle Belt is sincerity of purpose on the part of the Federal Government, not condolences, condemnations, relief materials and endless lame orders to security agents to “fish out the culprits” – orders that have never produced any result.

Nigerians were fed up with the immediate past administration in dishing out those impotent platitudes. The present government would do well to spare the people the agony of being taken through that route again.

What Nigerians expect from Tinubu’s administration on the Middle Belt massacre and killings in other parts of the country is action whose results will be visible to the people. That action and the concomitant results will never come, so long as the Federal Government continues to play politics with the killings, feign ignorance of the real motive behind the killings, and pretend that the solution is rocket science.

We join the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar III who has military experience, to ask, “what happened to our intelligence-gathering mechanism”, how it was possible “nobody knew that those attacks were coming up” and why the security agencies were not proactive to stop such attacks before they happen?” We also share the Sultan’s view that these “things (security and insecurity) are politicised” and that the problem is “the issue of leadership.” 

The Plateau killings and other cases of insecurity across Nigeria have both short-term and long-term solutions. For the short-term, non-state actors can never be more powerful than the country’s army and police, except the state security agencies are sympathetic to the criminals as the Middle Belt Forum, MBF, allege. The Federal Government has a large war chest available to it in terms of resources, arms and intelligence, which the criminals can never match.  

Moreover, the MBF, the church and members of the communities that are frequently attacked, have offered some information on the locations like Mahanga and other enclaves from where the criminals operate, their sources of funding and modus operandi, which they claim “are common knowledge to the general populace and the security agencies”. If they are authentic, the information should help a neutral state security agency, to flush out the criminals and end their operations.

For a long-term solution, the Federal Government, the National Assembly and all stakeholders must join hands to give Nigerians the much-talked-about state police. Nigeria is too big, too diverse and too complicated for all parts of it to be policed from Abuja.  

Just in case the government has forgotten, we wish to remind it once again that the primary purpose it exists, according to Section 14 (2)(b) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), is to secure the lives and property of the people and to see to their welfare.