Yelwata must not be forgotten – Ozekhome cites constitutional betrayal as Catholics mark final Day of National Prayer
As the final Day of National Prayer echoed across Nigeria, the blood-soaked soil of Yelwata in Benue State cried louder than hymns. In a searing indictment, constitutional lawyer Mike Ozekhome, SAN, condemned the June 13 massacre and the state’s complicity in silence. Citing constitutional betrayal and chronic insecurity, he warned that forgetting Yelwata would be an unforgivable moral failure for a nation bleeding from its unattended wounds.
A cry of anguish rose this week not just from the smouldering ruins of Yelwata in Benue State, but from the conscience of one of Nigeria’s most prominent legal minds. In a fiery statement titled “Benue: Weeping for Beleaguered Nigeria,” constitutional lawyer and human rights advocate, Professor Mike Ozekhome, SAN, articulated a vehement condemnation of the carnage, the complicit silence that enabled it, and the political apathy that followed.
Yelwata, a serene farming community in Guma Local Government Area, was reduced to a graveyard on the night of June 13, 2025. Armed assailants, suspected to be Fulani terrorist herdsmen, descended on the sleeping village, unleashing a coordinated attack that left over 200 people dead, leaving behind smouldering ruins, mass graves, and shattered families. Some reports suggest the toll may be closer to 300.
Among the victims were children, pregnant women, and the elderly. But as the cries of mourning rose, the response from Nigeria’s political establishment was a familiar echo: silence, delay, deflection. In Ozekhome’s view, this wasn’t mere incompetence; it was betrayal. Ozekhome drawing parallels to genocidal patterns and referencing his own book “Blood on the Niger and Benue” launched last year, warned that this attack is not an isolated tragedy, but part of a chilling and familiar script. “This was not a clash,” he wrote. “It was a massacre! A premeditated act of mass violence executed with impunity. The village has been painted over with the sorrow of the grieving and the brushstrokes of trauma.”
A village turned graveyard
Survivors recounted horrific tales: of homes doused in petrol, entire families burned alive in their sleep, and children hacked to death. At Benue State University Teaching Hospital, doctors worked tirelessly, overwhelmed by the wounded, while bloodsoaked survivors searched for loved ones amid the ruins. Livelihoods were destroyed, bodies littered the crimson soil, and an entire community was left in tatters. Recalling the warning he issued in his book about Nigeria’s worsening security, Ozekhome described Yelwata as yet another tragic proof of his prediction. “In a land where yam festivals should flourish,” Ozekhome lamented, “The earth has instead flourished with drunk blood.”
Where was the State? Deafening silence from the presidency!
Ozekhome castigated Benue Governor Hyacinth Alia, for his muted and belated response to the tragedy; accusing him of minimising the scale of the massacre and failing to show up when his people needed him most. “Governor Alia offered the nation a figure of 59. What even if it were one?” Ozekhome thundered. President Bola Tinubu fared no better.
Ozekhome described the President’s eventual visit as “a grotesque display of political theatre,” complete with placards and school children soaked in rain, forced to cheer while the earth still steamed with the blood of the dead. “What should have been a moment of solemnity turned into an unofficial 2027 re-election rally,” he wrote. “This was not condolence. This was campaign optics.”
Echoes of the bloody past; not new, not isolated
Ozekhome connected the massacre to a long, bloody lineage. From New Year’s Day 2017 to Christmas Day 2024, Benue has seen repeated invasions, killings, and displacements. Yet, time and again, government responses remain the same following a predictable cycle: condemnations, empty investigations, inaction and impunity. “This is terrorism. Pure and simple,” he declared. “Dialogue with whom? With the men who crept through the rain to burn babies alive?” Indeed, many voices from Benue echoed Ozekhome’s outrage.
Fr. Remigius Ihyula, a priest long involved in humanitarian relief in Benue, reiterated this sentiment, describing the violence as targeted ethnic cleansing. Others accused the government of sanitising the horror with euphemisms like “herder-farmer clashes.” “This is what the Nazis did to the Jews,” said David Onyillokwu Idah of the International Human Rights Commission. “Step by step.”
Governance on trial
For Ozekhome, the crisis is no longer just about security lapses, it is a failure of governance and a betrayal of constitutional promises. “If Nigeria still believes in its own laws, in its own humanity, then Yelwata must not be forgotten,” he declared, citing sections 14, 33 and 34 of the Constitution which guarantee the right to life, security, and dignity. Perhaps most damning is Ozekhome’s charge that Nigeria has become a “lie” for many of its citizens.
He called to question the moral integrity of both state and federal leadership, decrying what he termed the normalisation of mass death in Nigeria’s rural communities. “Amnesty International has catalogued the horrors,” he noted. “Yet, the state treats Yelwata like expendable surplus.”
A path forward
In charting a path forward, Professor Ozekhome laid out a bold, structured blueprint for national response. At the heart of his proposal is an urgent call for the immediate deployment of welltrained, fully equipped security forces to the affected regions. But this, he insisted, must go beyond routine presence. It must involve coordinated intelligence, unified military operations, and joint accountability across all relevant agencies.
Anything less, he argued, would amount to a betrayal of those already left unprotected. He further called for the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency in the most devastated areas. Invoking Section 305 of the Nigerian Constitution, he emphasised that this was not a matter of politics but of constitutional necessity. Such a declaration, he maintained, would allow for a faster, more cohesive security and humanitarian response, cutting through the red tape that has cost too many lives.
Justice, Ozekhome argued, must not be symbolic. It must be institutional and unrelenting. To that end, he urged the establishment of a truly independent Judicial Commission of Inquiry, with a mandate not only to identify the foot soldiers of terror, but also to expose those who sponsored, enabled, or ignored the violence. Only by shining a light on the full chain of culpability, he warned, can the cycle of impunity be broken. Beyond security and accountability, he called for compassion backed by action. Survivors, he said, must not be abandoned to grief.
The government must extend urgent and sustained relief to those affected, covering medical treatment, temporary shelter, food, financial compensation, relocation support, and crucial psychosocial services. This, he stressed, is not charity, it is the state fulfilling its obligation to its citizens. But short-term fixes, he warned, will not prevent future carnage. The root causes must be addressed. Chief among them is the unchecked spread of armed herders displacing indigenous communities and occupying ancestral lands.
In addition, the deepening poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy that breed despair and fuel recruitment into violent militias must be confronted through bold, inclusive development policies. Lastly, Ozekhome called for genuine dialogue, not the politically choreographed kind, but one rooted in the lived realities of the people. He urged the government to bring traditional rulers, faith leaders, youth groups, and other grassroots stakeholders into the security conversation. Their voices, he said, carry a legitimacy that cannot be replaced by officialdom.
A call for national reckoning
In a cautionary note, Ozekhome warned that Nigeria is dangerously close to becoming a state where some lives are valued less than others, where rural deaths are quietly buried with the ash, unacknowledged and unavenged. “Each delayed response, each muted condemnation, adds one more body to the pile,” he wrote. “The dead of Yelwata are not numbers to scroll past, they are names, families, futures.” In a final appeal, he urged Nigerians not to allow their outrage to fade, calling for urgent and unrelenting pursuit of justice.
A verdict of conscience
Mike Ozekhome’s “Benue: Weeping for Beleaguered Nigeria” is more than a legal critique, it is a moral reckoning. A demand for justice in a nation where terror has become commonplace and accountability elusive. It is a document of record. Of witness. And of warning. And in its final question, it delivers a challenge to a nation teetering on the edge: “If not now, when?”
