By; LUKA BINNIYAT
The Middle Belt Forum read and listen with shock the words and pronouncements of Gov Hyacinth Alia of Benue State denying that there is no religious genocide in Benue State.
While anyone might be forgiven for saying so, the governor of Benue state who had in a viral video on 20th April, 2025 unequivocally asserted that Benue State was under, “well targeted, well planned and religiously being executed by terrorists.”
This is an insult and an affront to the thousands of innocent Benue citizens killed. It is also an incitement to the millions of bereaved persons and crude distortion of truth.
The MBF finds his position as a grave disservice to survivors who wake every morning under the shadow of slaughter in the hands of Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM) who the governor’s timid approach seeks to defend.
The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — including killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.
This is the international yardstick by which crimes against whole peoples are measured. Is that not the pattern of attacks in Benue and other communities of the Middle Belt that are predominantly Christian farming communities?
The MBF affirms that there is systematic destruction of citizens, their villages, widespread burning and looting, rape and atrocities against law abiding ethnic people of Benue State who are basically Christians.
The world cannot be lectured by a man who prefers soothing euphemisms to the hard job of naming and stopping crimes as grave as the ongoing genocide.
To call these deliberate and recurrent massacres mere “clashes” or ordinary “conflict” is to sanitize brutality. “Clashes” implies parity — a two-sided fight.
What we see in Benue and across the Middle Belt are communities attacked in their homes and markets, entire villages razed, children and the elderly butchered in their sleep, and hundreds of thousands forced into squalid camps.
Labeling this carnage a “clash” is a rhetorical convenience that protects perpetrators and damn the victims.
It is very unfortunate that a priest who is also an elected political leader of a state would stand against the truth at a time his constituents are facing existential threat.
The MBF suspects that Governor Aliya is deliberately used to scuttle the international pressure mounted on the Nigerian state to tackle the ongoing genocide in Nigeria.
Especially now that the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa on Thursday an open hearing on President Donald Trump’s redesignation of Nigeria as “Country of Particular Concern” over Christian genocide that we have been harping on.
Official and independent counts lay bare the scale of the evil in Benue state. In fact, Benue State authorities themselves reported 5,138 people killed in attacks between 2015 and March 2023 — a figure admitted by state emergency officials — and more killings have followed since. Independent human-rights organisations and UN agencies record repeated mass-casualty attacks in 2024–2025, including nights when scores to hundreds were slaughtered in single operations. These are not isolated incidents: they are an escalating pattern.
The human displacement is staggering. Amnesty International and UN partners have documented that by the end of 2024 some 500,000 people from Benue had been forced from their homes; humanitarian tracking and response updates in 2025 place the number of displaced well into the hundreds of thousands and rising, with relief platforms reporting over half a million IDPs in Benue and related figures edging even higher as new attacks continue.
These numbers speak: whole communities have been uprooted; livelihoods destroyed; schools and clinics emptied. To deny the reality behind these statistics is to deny the visible suffering of mothers, fathers and children living in camps.
Governor Alia invoked his priesthood as if moral standing absolves political responsibility. Faith is not a cloak for denial. If he stands by his words, let him also stand by duties his office demands: secure communities, prosecute perpetrators, allow impartial international monitoring, and stop euphemisms that help the killers.
The victims of Benue deserve truth, protection and justice not cowardly abdication of responsibility.
We demand that the Governor: (1) stop trivialising mass killing with euphemisms, (2) accept independent investigations into whether acts committed in Benue meet the elements of international crimes, (3) call for robust humanitarian access and protection measures, and (4) desist from language that misleads the nation and world. History will not remember those who used faith to hide failure.
Luka Binniyat is the Spokesman, Middle Belt Forum