Local officials and the police in Benue State, which is located in the middle of Nigeria’s northern region, have reported that at least 74 people were killed this week as a result of two separate attacks carried out by gunmen. As a result of population development leading to an expansion in the area allocated to farming, there is less ground available for open grazing by the cattle herds of nomads. This has led to an increase in the rate of violent crime in the region in recent years.
Catherine Anene, a spokeswoman for the Benue state police, said that between Friday night and Saturday morning, 28 bodies were found at a camp in the Mgban local government area, where people who had been forced to leave their homes were staying. It wasn’t clear right away what started the incident, but witnesses said that people with guns came out of nowhere and started shooting, killing several people.
Bako Eje, the chairman for Otukpo, told Reuters that the attack came in the wake of a different event that occurred in the same state on Wednesday in the remote Umogidi hamlet of Otukpo’s local government area. In that instance, suspected herdsmen slaughtered residents while they were attending a burial. Following the incident that took place on Wednesday, Paul Hemba, a security assistant to the governor of Benue state, reported that 46 dead were found.
In a statement that he released on Saturday, President Muhammadu Buhari decried “the recent bout of killings in Benue State, in which tens of people were killed in the Umogidi community.” He also told the security forces to pay more attention to the areas where the violence was happening. Many attacks in Nigeria’s more remote areas don’t get reported because the country’s security services, which already don’t have enough people, often get to the communities’ calls for help too late.
One of the states that make up Nigeria’s Middle Belt, Benue, is located at the point where the country’s mostly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south meet. In the Middle Belt, the conflict over land use is especially hard to solve because the differences between farmers and herders often line up with ethnic and religious differences. This makes the competition extremely difficult to resolve.
Benue has been one of the states that has been hardest hit by years of confrontations between nomadic herders and pastoral farmers, who blame herdsmen for destroying farmland with their cow grazing. Pastoral farmers blame herdsmen for ruining farmland with their cattle grazing.
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Most of the time, these fights have turned into bigger crimes and retaliatory attacks between unofficial armed groups that were originally formed to protect competing neighborhoods. This week, a representative for the National Herders Association told the police that they shouldn’t automatically blame herders for any attack before doing a thorough investigation.
At least 80 people were taken hostage by gunmen on Saturday in the state of Zamfara, which is known for being a hotspot for kidnappings for ransom carried out by armed gangs that target isolated areas.
