GOV ALIA’S DENIAL OF GENOCIDE IN BENUE CONFIRMS HIS COMPLICITY
…He must apologize to Benue people
Benue State Governor, Hyacinth Alia’s declaration that “there is no religious genocide in Benue State” is not merely a bad statement, it is a moral collapse, a catastrophic dereliction of leadership, and one of the most disgraceful utterances ever made by a leader.
Governor Alia has confirmed once more that indeed Fulani people raised N7 billion and supported his campaign in 2023 so he could give them Benue lands to conquer and occupy. He took an oath before they gave him the money and he is doing exactly what the jihadists want.
Alia’s words are an insult to the dead, a slap across the faces of survivors, and an unforgivable betrayal of the very people whose trust he swore an oath to defend. In one careless breath, he attempted to rewrite years of trauma, bury mountains of evidence, and wipe clean the blood that cries from the soil of Benue every single day.
While the governor enjoys safety behind podiums in Abuja, the people he claims to represent are being hunted down, village by village. His denial of genocide does not merely distort reality, it mocks the memory of fathers butchered in front of their families, mothers burned alive in their homes, and children whose bodies were recovered in pieces after midnight raids. It is a grotesque trivialization of pain so deep that words barely suffice to describe it.
One question that Governor Alia and his Fulani conspirators have refused to answer is; if the Benue attacks do not qualify as genocide, why do the Jihadist invaders occupy the communities after sacking the original inhabitants of such communities?
The truth Governor Alia is running from is brutal and undeniable. In June 2025, Yelewata was turned into a deathscape; at least 200 human beings slaughtered in a single night, with many bodies so charred that relatives could not even identify them. Church-based monitors counted as many as 200 Christians murdered, their blood soaking the land that once fed them. More than 6,500 people scrambled out of that inferno barefoot, carrying nothing but their terror. Even Pope Leo XIV in far away Vatican condemned the killings and gave the exact casualty figure, but Governor Alia came out quickly to counter the Pope and announced that only 59 people were killed in Yelewata.
Between June 13 and July 13, 2025, more than 330 Christians were murdered across Guma and neighboring local governments of Benue, with over 280 butchered in just 48 hours. This is not insecurity. This is not “conflict.” This is calculated annihilation, a deliberate, repeated, systematic targeting of Christian farming communities. Yet the governor, in astonishing detachment, insists that nothing about this resembles genocide.
The horror did not begin yesterday. In 2023 alone, Benue endured 119 herder attacks, with more than 400 lives extinguished and entire communities sent running into the wilderness. The Guma and Logo genocide of January 2018, and the Agatu massacres of 2016 remain etched in global memory: between 300 and 500 souls ended in some of the most savage onslaughts in Nigerian history.
Benue State is 99% Christian. The victims are overwhelmingly Christian. The pattern is so clear that only a willful blindness, or something far more troubling could lead a sitting governor to deny it.
Governor Alia’s posture in Abuja yesterday when he denied the ongoing genocide was not that of a leader defending his battered state. It was the posture of a man more concerned with political optics than with the charred bodies and mass graves in the state. His tone carried no grief, no outrage, no recognition of the scale of devastation his people endure. Instead, he stood before the nation and offered a cold, antiseptic dismissal of a tragedy that has shattered hundreds of thousands of lives. He spoke not like the governor of a wounded state, but like someone auditioning for approval from those eager to downplay or erase the religious dimension of these atrocities.
What exactly does Governor Alia call the razing of entire Christian communities? What does he call attackers chanting religious slogans as they burn homes and slaughter families? What does he call the seizure of fertile farmlands after their Christian owners have been murdered or chased away? If this is not genocide in intent and pattern, then what monstrous threshold must be crossed before the governor acknowledges the obvious?
Alia’s denial is not merely wrong, it is dangerous. It emboldens the killers. It demoralizes the survivors. It signals to the world that the suffering of Benue’s Christian communities is disposable, negotiable, or irrelevant. A governor who cannot recognize the wounds of his people is unworthy of the trust their blood has paid for.
We reject Governor Alia’s whitewash with every fiber of moral clarity available. We refuse to let him banish truth from public discourse. We refuse to let him speak over the graves of those whose only crime was farming their ancestral land. And we refuse, absolutely refuse, to allow his words to become the official narrative of a state drenched in unburied grief.
Governor Alia must apologize publicly to the victims, their families, and the tens of thousands languishing in IDP camps. An independent investigation must expose the full scale of the religious and ethnic targeting he pretends not to see. Humanitarian support must reach those abandoned in makeshift shelters. Security must return to villages that once thrived in peace. And because the Alia administration has demonstrated a dangerous eagerness to sanitize reality, national and international bodies must now pay close attention to Benue’s unfolding tragedy.
Governor Hyacinth Alia may hide behind denial, but we will not. He may choose silence, but we will speak. He may try to bury the truth, but we will defend it with a relentlessness equal to the suffering of those who have lost everything. As long as IDP camps overflow with broken families, as long as unmarked graves mar our land, as long as nightfall brings fear instead of rest, we will continue to raise our voices, fierce, unyielding, and impossible to ignore.
Signed:
Dennis Agema
President
Network For Transparent Governance (NTG)
Oliver Omenka
Secretary General
