President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will be arriving Makurdi, the Benue State capital, sometime today on a condolence visit to a people who have suffered under terror groups that have massacred families and sacked communities across the state and the wider territories of the North- Central region. Given how long the attacks have continued and the degree of devastation they have engendered, this visit is a bit late.

It does not convey the sense of urgency that should be brought to such matters of grave security concern, especially where human lives are involved. Hundreds have, indeed, been killed in this year alone. The latest of these killings occurred in the small hours of June 13 in the Yelewata Community in Guma Local Government Area, where more than 200 people were murdered in the most gruesome way in their sleep. These types of attacks are not new in any part of the North-Central states or other parts of the South or North where the terrorists masquerading as pastoralists steal into communities on motorcycles, usually in the dead of night with the premeditated intention to burn, maim and engage in the mass murder of people whose ancestral lands they thereafter proceed to occupy and rename.

They also take possession of their victims’ property, sometimes keeping their wives and children. These are clear cases of ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and possibly slavery.
The situation went on for so long under what looked like tacit state support during the Muhammadu Buhari administration. The victims of the attacks were more or less handed stern warnings to make room for their attackers or risk annihilation. This has apparently emboldened the culprits whose atrocities have been euphemised as a struggle between herders and farmers. While one can understand the struggle for natural resources that is fuelling genuine cases of farmers and herders clash, resources that have been made scarce by climate change and human misadventure, that fact however does not explain the easy resort to often beastly and gruesome violence and the determination to steal other people’s patrimony.

Only hard-boiled plunderers and colonialists behave in this manner. That they would continue in their criminal entreprise with the state appearing to be helpless or unconcerned is not acceptable. Being aware of all of this, the President cannot appear to be shiftless no matter what he might be doing behind the door. It does not show the right kind of empathy even if in this instance the Benue State Governor, Hyacinth Alia, has attested to the concern of the President and his show of support. In matters such as this, it is not enough for the President to act or issue directives, he should be seen in action. One knows that no matter what he and the Yoruba people do, they can never get anything right before most of their bigoted critics who are always the first to point accusing fingers at others, they like to call bigots and tribalists, blinkered by bigotry as they line up behind their political messiah.

This category of Nigerians who are mostly members of the so-called Obidient movement are a cantankerous minority who exist mostly online and do not constitute a significant part of the region they are from. Their principal, like most members of the disgruntled opposition, snatch at any trivia, make a meal of any real or perceived error of Abuja and hurl his jaundiced barb at his political nemesis not sure of which of them will stick. It’s a losing game for which he and his frustrated supporters are now getting appropriate pushback when they are not straining to grab at one another’s throat. One of the most loudmouthed of their ineffectual group has again called out his principal, labelling him a betrayer and a man without conviction. His damning testimonial spells out in stark details his principal’s inappropriateness to occupy the position his highly polarising identity politics continues to crave but, so far, in vain.

To the rest of the group, the renegade member has suddenly become the ruling party’s mole, a jaded accusation, like the charge of bigotry they are quick to hang on anyone not in support of their ways. While genuine critics are speaking up about deserving individuals that have been overlooked in the award of national honours to June 12 activists, they pretend to see absolutely nothing good about the awards and seek to gaslight the rest of us with names of some of their members they claimed were awarded national honours for God-knows- what. And the pretenders too rush out to claim they would have been ashamed of being awarded honours they didn’t earn. How can so-called Chibok girls’ activists expect an award for June 12 activism?

President Tinubu must be attentive to genuine criticisms and even when they are echoed for political reasons by his opponents, he must act on them with dispatch. Nigeria is not where it should be but we are not where we were two years ago. There have been a few significant improvements and he can only rest on his oars at his government’s own peril. He, like the rest of Nigerians, must register this in his mind: no amount of condolence visits to Benue or any other troubled parts of the country will stem the tide of bloodshed perpetrated by criminal elements and terrorists, be they insurgents, bandits and so-called herders, where there is no genuine attempt to change the fundamental structure of our malformed federation and its outmoded security architecture.

Each community must develop its own security network, managed and sustained by the locals while the centre manages those aspects of our commonly shared security concerns. Nobody should depend on outsiders for their security. That many parts of Nigeria have been turned into killing fields is as a result of the refusal/reluctance of those benefiting from the present system or are afraid to change it to embrace a police system at the state and local government levels. This includes, ironically, some of the people most affected by it like Governor Babagana Zulum. They continue to pacify mass murderers they claim are now repentant in the face of a compromised military industrial complex that has become a money-making machine.

Months after governors agreed to a state police system, why is the matter still on the drawing board? Why are local governments funds still being paid to governors? Why are the effects of the savings made from the stoppage of oil subsidy or the harmonisation of the foreign exchange not being felt at the micro economic level? Nigerians struggle to eat and keep up with their bills. Why is food inflation still high? These are the questions a responsible opposition should be asking not fighting to grab power in order to sustain a failed system.