Benue killings: New Tears as Federal Government Exhumes Yelwata’s 105

By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

TEARS have been normalised in Benue for years. People are killed, butchered, burnt and buried at intervals as bandits, mainly Fulani herders, attack communities with an ease that governments’ inactions keep enabling.
Sometimes the frequency of the attacks demands that tears are rolled over from one funeral to the other. That too is becoming normal. There are also times that the people run out of tears; their sorrow too suffocating to afford tears.
What is not normal is for them to cry twice for the same dead, watch the dead being exhumed in states that assault what is left of their humanity.
Memories they have been fighting to blot out of their minds returning as the putrid remains of their relations are raked up to confirm that they were really killed.
The search for the truth, more evidence, proof that people were killed in Yelewata in June 2025 took a bizarre turn with the exhumation that began on Tuesday 24 February 2026.
Could the exercise also be used to confirm if enough people were killed to provoke governments’ reaction?
The exhumation was conducted by a federal forensic team in connection with the 13 June 2025 attack on Yelewata.
During proceedings at the Federal High Court in Abuja, Justice Joyce Abdulmalik said forensic evidence was necessary to ensure a fair trial for nine suspects arraigned on 2 February 2026.
Prof. Saad Ahmed from the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, led the team. The Intelligence Response Team, the Presidential Medical Delegation, and the Benue State Emergency Management Agency, BENSEMA, provided support for the operation which doused the IDPs camp, near the new international market in Makurdi, in new sorrows.
When hints got to the camp on Monday, the sorrows of the IDPs knew no bounds. They thought it was a proposal that required their opinion. They opposed it as they could, with all they had – their tears running a full course.
We thought they would allow them rest in peace. Some wondered aloud. What purpose will exhuming them serve? Justice? What justice?
Yelewata is under 10 kilometres outside Makurdi, the Benue capital. Its IDPs are so close to their devastated homes, the sites where the blood of their relations were spilled without consequences.
Their chilling stories detail how soldiers camped in their village offered no assistance during the attack, and policemen who tried to repel the attackers but ran out of bullets. The soldiers refused to be involved. They claimed they had no “orders” to save Yelewata.
“No orders to act” or “orders to withdraw” are not new. The latest one facilitated the abduction of schoolgirls in Maga, Kebbi State in November 2025. The orders do not respect personalities too.
Gabriel Suswan, was on a visit to Yelewata in 2014 as Governor of Benue to assess an attack on the village. He almost lost his life when his convoy came under attack.
Soldiers accompanying him to Yelewata pulled out moments before he was attacked. They said they were acting on instructions to withdraw. Policemen saved the day. Who ordered the withdrawal? The same question, which has become rhetorical, is still being asked today.
IDPs who braved it to Yelewata to witness the exhumation of their relations were appalled by the operation. Benue State Emergency Management Agency, BENSEMA, which cannot feed IDPs, that has no medical facilities even at the IDP camps in Makurdi, and cannot provide water or toilets at the camps, was fully at work in Yelewata with an enthusiasm that suggested that exhuming bodies in Yelewata was its major mandate.
Uncaring governments in Abuja and Makurdi fail to react to intelligence that preceed these attacks. Yelewata indigenes took their worries to their Governor in 2025 when the usual signals of an attack on their village – strange faces, armed youth in the forests – appeared. Their government did nothing or filed the complaints away.
Former Governor of Benue State George Akume, former Minister, current Secretary to Government of the Federation, and Senator for eight years, represented Benue North-West, which includes Yelemata.
Have his positions and prominence helped Yelewata? He visited on 17 June, four days after the 2025 attack. Has he spoken about Yelewata since then?
Here is an account of a man who made it to Yelewata while they were exhuming bodies-
“I want to Yelewata yesterday, those people went and removed the bodies of my children and wife,” said the survivor of the June 2025 attack, in a phone message to a friend
“Yes, I was there with them, they give me things to cover my face and my nose. Since I came back yesterday, I have never gone outside. I am indoors.
“Yes, I saw the bodies of my family, they first removed my first son Samson, before the other one,” he trailed into incoherence.
As you read this and move to other stories, Yelewata is about human beings, the living, the dead. Yelewata is about people whose lives have been truncated by those who live above the law.
Yelewata represents the negligence of our peoples by those in Abuja and Makurdi, in this instance.
The blessings of a federal appointment with Akume in the centre of power is meaningless. Proximity to Makurdi is a curse as it offers no protection or supports for Yelewata people to return to their homes soon.
When Akume and Governor Hyacinth Alia fight over control of Benue State, their concerns are not for Yelewata and other communities in Benue that bandit attacks have reduced to rubbles.
They fight to get a second term or decide who becomes Governor in 2027. More importantly, they fight to be in the good books of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is sequestrated in Abuja painting the picture of the genocide in Yelewata as a communal clash.
Since they want to make the President happy, how dare they suggest by any action that more than a few people were killed in Yelewata? Would even a whimper from either of them not upset the President?
The happiness of a hapless President is more important than the postponement of normalcy in the lives of the people of Yelewata who tell the story of Benue in the putrescence that the exhumation poignantly made public.
When will the living from Yelewata know peace if we cannot allow their dead to rest in peace?

Finally…
MASTERS of what game? People are playing with our lives, present and future, by manipulating elections and we reward them with titles like “master of the game”, and “strategist”? Is anything more hopeless than the oppressed admiring the methods of their oppressors?

PETER Obi was shot at in Benin City and some of the remarks I have heard indicate that we are gone too far in a blindness to issue. The remarks – What was he doing in Benin City? Can’t he stay in one place? He doesn’t use a bullet-proof bus. The questions should have been, Who shot at Peter Obi’s vehicle and who sent them? When will the police arrest them?

UNEXPECTED chaos has become part of the permutations about which officers would be retired following the unexpected stepping aside of Dr. Kayode Egbetokun as the Inspector-General of Police. The records of The Nigerian Police seem unclear about seniority of its officers. Some, making cases for who should not be in the retirement gale that can sweep away 29 officers, have paved different routes to retirement of officers.

ISIGUZ0 is a major commentator on minor issues