Dr. Bulama Bukarti is a Senior Analyst on Conflict and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa, based in London. In an interview with Channels TV, he examined the recent surge in deadly attacks across Benue State—where 33 people were killed in Apa, 72 in Orokam, and others in Otukpo and Yelwata—events that have once again brought Nigeria’s North-central security crisis into sharp focus.
Despite high-profile visits by top government officials, including the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and the National Security Adviser (NSA), who described the attacks using terms like ‘land grabbing’, ‘full-scale terrorism’, and ‘genocidal attacks’, uncertainty continues to cloud the situation. To provide clarity and context, Channels TV spoke to Dr. Bukarti, a legal scholar and expert on extremism and insecurity in the region.
Dr Bukarti, we’ve heard officials refer to these killings as terrorism, and the Tiv communities have echoed that sentiment. Yet questions linger – who exactly are these attackers? Are we dealing with new extremist factions, or are these older groups evolving? What do we know about their identity, networks, and intent?
What we are witnessing in Benue today goes far beyond that. And I think what we are witnessing in Benue today is terrorism. It goes beyond the farmer-herder crisis. And therefore, it is terrorism. Look at the frequency of the attacks. Look at the scale of the attack. Look at the sophistication of the attack and look at the coordination.
From April, May, and June – over the past three months, reports suggest that at least 400 people have been killed in Benue state. That’s not a farmer-herder crisis. That’s not communal clashes. And look at the GPL level coordination of the attackers and how they raid and raise whole villages and how they target civilian infrastructure. They destroy markets. They destroy schools. They destroy anything they see on their way.
And so when you look at the nature of the attacks, when you look at the frequency of the attacks, when you look at the sophistication of the attacks, and when you look at the number of fatalities, you will be left with no other conclusion than to say this is not a farmer-herder crisis.
It is not communal clashes. It has become terrorism in the real sense of the word. And I think it is high time that the federal government declared the situation in Benue and other parts of North Central Nigeria as terrorism and treat it as such.
And that means deploying specialised security forces, more intelligence capacity, and more plans to protect civilians. This situation is getting out of hand, and the longer it lasts, the more difficult it will become to reverse.
As to your question, who are the actors? One of the shames in this crisis in Benue State is that we are still unable to define with precision and certainty who the attackers are.
Some people will say they are armed bandits or armed herders, as others will say they are local criminal groups involved, while some victims interviewed by the media say they see people with foreign sounding languages attacking them. And I think it is a shame that the Nigerian security and intelligence forces still have not defined the actors. They have not handed them down because if you’re, if you don’t even know who they are, then it is impossible for you to tackle them or to arrest them or to engage them in terms of military confrontation.
And it is also a shame that even our researchers have been unable to pin down who the attackers or the actors are. And until and unless we define this crisis properly as the terrorism that it is, and until and unless Nigerian security and intelligence forces have invested enough resources to pin down who the actors are and where they are operating from, then we are not going to get a handle on the situation. And I think that’s what we should do right now. It is time for the federal government to declare this situation as terrorism and declare operations in Benue and neighbouring states as an anti-terrorism operation, deploying more security and intelligence capacity.
And I think just leaving the police or asking the police as the president did to, I mean, to arrest offenders is not enough. We know the capacity of the Nigerian Police Force, and we know how lethal these attackers are. And we know that the Nigerian Police Force does not have the capacity to hunt them down, to engage them militarily, or to even arrest and investigate them. And therefore, we need a specialised force to do that.
I know we have ISIS West Africa, we have the ISWAP, we have the Ansaru, the Boko Haram wing. We have different classes and groups of terrorist groups in Nigeria.
If you look at all of the forms and the patterns of all these groups, who do these, in terms of their modus operandi, who do they look more like? These guys who have operated in Benue State in the last two or three months, their pattern of attack, who do they look like? Let us diagnose, let us identify what they could look like.
Yeah, so the first thing to say is that they look like terrorists and therefore they are a terrorist group, whoever they may be. But a few years ago, when I was at the Tony Blair Institute, I did write an article on the situation in North Central Nigeria. And at the time, some of the evidence I was able to gather revealed that there was a Boko Haram faction that was making incursions into North Central Nigeria. And it is the Al-Qaeda affiliated faction of Boko Haram called Ansaru.
At the time, the federal government, including the Presidency, denied my report. But they later admitted, and we later saw the Niger State governor, Nasarawa State government, complaining about Boko Haram factions incursion or other violent extremist groups claiming to fight in the name of Islam.
Now, at the time, part of my reporting, part of my article, discusses how Ansaru was strategically planning to attack Christian communities in particular and refused to claim the attacks in order to steer the ethno-religious crisis in Nigeria.
Their plan is to attack and then never claim the attack, and people will then start pointing fingers at each other. And then, their hope is that there would be an ethno-religious crisis in the country. I am not saying this is what is happening right now, because like I said, this article was written, I think maybe about five years ago, and I have not continued to follow or monitor the situation as closely as I would have wanted to, especially in North Central Nigeria, since then.
So, I don’t know whether any of the Boko Haram factions or another violent extremist group has a hand in this. And if they did, then it could be that they are refusing to claim attacks because number one, they want it to be claimed as communal clashes, and therefore one community will attack another, and one community will hate, and division will continue against all communities in Benue and North Central Nigeria.
And also maybe they would refuse to attack because they don’t want to attract the attention of the security forces. And so they want to continue to operate below the radar. And the way to do that is to attack, then run back to enclaves and never claim the attack. And so no one would know who the actual attacker is.
And so, but what I am saying is that it is possible that one of the terrorist organisations, and remember, that these terrorist groups now, it is established that they have cells in Kogi State, in Nasarawa State, in Niger State. I don’t know how close or far this particular community or communities that are being attacked in Benue are. I don’t know how close they are to these states and whether it is possible to use motorcycles to travel from camps to commit these attacks and come back.
But remember that both Ansaru and ISWAP have a clearly defined public policy of targeting Christian communities. And Ansaru in particular says it wants to target the Nigerian government and Christian communities, even though they kill Muslims; that is what their policy says. And I think there should be candidates that should be investigated to see if they have a hand in this. But like I said, I don’t know for sure.
And I’m not making any policy, a certain policy prescription here. These are possibilities that our security and intelligence forces must investigate.
So let’s look at it carefully again for what we know. The activities of this terror cell that is operating because it has been established by the state that, this is a terror group terrorising that region. Now, if you look at what has been happening in the North Central, the victims in the North West region of the country would tell you that, especially in part of North Central Plateau, they will tell you that some of these people come into their community, chase the community people out, hold onto the land, stay in the land. Part of what the Tor Tiv said, if we were to diagnose what is happening, it talks about land grabbing. It talks about genocide, which is similar to what is happening in Plateau is like an intentional act to wipe away a group of people.
Look, I mean, I don’t know about the use of the word genocide, because genocide is a specific concept clearly defined under international law. And it requires evidence to prove genocide.
But I think what we can say for sure is that this has become terrorism. And I think there may be some territorial interest in that. But then the problem is that these people who are attacking by accounts, it’s not like they attack villages.
They raise the villages and then they occupy the villages in terms of, I mean, making the villages their homes or taking over the farms in order to start farming. Because if that’s it, I mean, if it is land grabbing, they should be taking the villages, and now we should be seeing them occupying the villages. But these are people who attack and then retreat into their enclaves, wherever they are coming from.
And therefore, I think it’s a classic case of terrorism in terms of its modus operandi, that’s the mode of operation, but also in terms of the people that are being targeted. And if you have territorial motivation, land grabbing as part of that motivation or that equation, then it becomes classic terrorism.
But then, what is failing these narratives? What is failing these narratives is the failure of governments and security agencies to investigate, pin down, identify, and publicly define the actors and go after them.
And where there is this information void from the government, where there is an information void from research organisations that are on the ground, then in the end, you will get different narratives. Unfortunately, if you get the narrative wrong, if you define the problem wrongly, then you are going to apply the wrong prescription, the wrong medication. And therefore, that is only going to make the situation worse.
So like I said, I am not sure this is genocide. I mean, we can go and come back, but I don’t want us to get lost in definition. The most important thing is that human lives in multiples are being lost in Benue State.
Human livelihoods are destroyed. Farms, homes, markets, schools, and other places of civilian infrastructure are being destroyed, and that cannot be allowed to continue. This is a stain on our national conscience. It is more than tragic or horrific. It is terrorism that the federal government has to define as such and treat as such. And what I hope the federal government will do in the coming weeks is to declare this situation as terrorism and deploy special terrorism forces to go and hunt down whoever is responsible for these heinous crimes and bring them to justice.
Now, there’s something that should interest everyone, and I’ll take you through a bit of geography. So this area, they’re being affected in Benue State. Yelwata, for example, is in the Guma Local Government.
Guma Local Government borders Doma Local Government of Nasarawa State. And there is also Keana Local Government on the North western side of Benue State. And also on this side, you have the Awe Local Government Area, and on the extreme side, you have Taraba State.
And look at what the president said. The president is asking for reconciliation. They’re those who are saying reconciliation with who? Is it an ethnic clash? Are they fighting? The president has set up a committee of former governors and leaders to come together for reconciliation.
The president has a security report. Is that something that we do not know? If the president is setting up a committee for reconciliation, it means something, isn’t it?
Yeah, it does. And it’s not just the president. You also saw the Chief of Army Staff recently talking about how it is a farmer-herder crisis and how it is impossible for them as the Nigerian military to tackle that. The narrative of the farmer-herder crisis has been the traditional conventional wisdom in that part of the world.
And there were times when there were clashes. And it is not just North Central, even in the North West today, even in places like Jigawa State, Kano State, some villages in Kano, even in my state, Yobe State, there are areas where you will see traditional farmer-herder clashes, where you will see farmers encroaching into land that is designated as farm and is being cultivated as farms. And then, now the farm owners respond.
And in the process, they clash, and one or two people get killed on both sides. But this is not what we are seeing in Benue State today. Over the past two years, when you look at ECLID data, Armed Conflict and Location Monitor data, which is the most reliable data when it comes to conflicts across the world, their data shows that around 1,080 people were killed in Benue over the past two years, since the 29th of May 2023. That’s since President Tinubu took over power, 1,086 people or so.
Now, over the past three months, over 400 people have been killed. This tells you that over the past three months, almost an equal number of people that were killed in the first year of President Tinubu’s administration have been killed in just Benue State. That’s horrific.
And then, we talk about farmer-herder clashes. Now that we have 100, 150 people killed amongst the villages we are talking about, then we also need to see the other side for you to say it’s a clash. And so, I think the president’s call may have some place when it comes to addressing the farmer-herder elements of the violence we see in North Central Nigeria.
And that is still going on. But it is not the one that is taking the number of lives we are talking about in Benue State. This is well coordinated. This is very lethal. This is a campaign that looks like terrorism, and therefore, we have to treat it as one. And therefore, what I think the federal government should do, our military and intelligence agencies should do, is to treat this specific issue as an anti-terror operation, while the committee the president was talking about can work on community relations.
Because yeah, there is a farmer-herder crisis traditionally, or there was. Maybe there are still some remnants of that. And we know that community relations in North Central Nigeria in many parts are still not very good. And therefore, there is a place for a reconciliation committee. But we cannot say the reconciliation committee can work or be effective on this terrorist group or terrorist cell that is killing people. And we should not give terrorist organisations the recognition to be negotiating with the government.
No. We have to use heavy military force on them and make sure that they are decimated and that they do not continue to kill Nigerians.
