Foolish and insecure governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi state was championing cattle colonies even before cattle colonies were proposed. When Agriculture Minister Audu Ogbe released a formal proposal for cattle colonies, Governor Bello became its chief salesman, shuttling between Aso Rock and the office of the minister to play boy-boy on the issue while abandoning his remit in Lokoja.
Then he mocked and laughed at Governor Ortom when Benue was at the receiving end of herdsmen violence as the armed marauders sacked villages in Logo and Guma LGs.
Instead of commiserating with the people of the state, Bello shamelessly used the occasion of our grief to try to prostitute and ingratiate himself to Aso Rock by blaming the Benue people’s elected representatives (and by extension the people of the state who elected them) for passing an anti-open grazing law.
The law was a desperate response to the incessant murder of innocents in the state by armed herdsmen, a recent history of massacres that culminated in the decimation of Agatu.
Governor Bello even announced glibly, per published stories, that he had warned Governor Ortom not to sign the anti-open grazing law.
Today, the armed herdsmen have visited their bloodlust on Kogi State. The latest gory figure is 25 killed, tens injured, and thousands displaced.
We in Benue know and feel the pain of our Kogi cousins. We urge them to stand firm against this threat, against this expanding theatre of an undeclared war on farming communities in central Nigeria.
The Igala area attacked used to be part of Benue State, and the Igala are ancestral cousins of the Idoma. Like us, they were part of the great Kwararafa migrations of medieval times, a migration which resulted in the peopling of and new kingdoms and states emerging across the Middle Belt.
Moreover, the herdsmen struck again in Okpokwu Local Government of Idomaland two weeks ago, the mass burial for the 26 victims occurring earlier this week. We’ve just been through what they’re going through.
We stand with our Kogi/Igala brothers and sisters. We commiserate with them and we hope that God will deliver them from a governor who plays political kalo-kalo with their lives as he struggles for legitimacy and acceptance.
– Moses Ochonu
