The scale of killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt has surpassed that of internationally recognized war zones such as Gaza and Ukraine, according to Emmanuel Ogebe, a US-based Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist.
Appearing on Inside Sources with Laolu Akande on Channels Television, Ogebe painted a grim picture of the unrelenting violence in Benue and Plateau States, which he said has reached genocidal proportions.
“In a space of about two weeks, in Benue and Plateau alone, 250 people were killed,” Ogebe revealed. “And this was more than the fatalities in Gaza and more than the fatalities in Ukraine – the two most prominent ongoing civil conflicts in the world. So, we had a situation where there were more deaths in peacetime Nigeria than there were in wartime Gaza and Ukraine. And that should be a concern to us all.”
He emphasized the alarming reality that these massacres, often carried out in broad daylight, have continued with little or no meaningful intervention from security forces. He narrated how in some communities, attackers went hut to hut, targeting the elderly and children while the young men were away on farms. In one instance, a mere ambulance siren disrupted the onslaught.
“The saving grace in one of those communities was that an ambulance with a siren was returning with a corpse. The attackers heard the siren, thought it was military reinforcement, and fled. My point is, if an ambulance could chase away terrorists, what would have happened if the actual military had responded?” he asked rhetorically.
Joining Ogebe on the programme was Dr. William Devlin, a US-based international human rights advocate who has spent time on the ground in the affected communities. He recounted a particularly gruesome attack that took place on Palm Sunday 2025, when 54 people were slaughtered overnight by suspected Fulani militants.
“In a hospital, I met a 34-year-old woman named Alice,” Devlin recalled emotionally. “The Fulani came in the middle of the night with impunity. She had a 10-month-old baby, a 3-year-old, and a 7-year-old. As she was holding the 10-month-old, they sliced off the ears of the child, slit her throat, and killed her right there. They did the same to her three-year-old. Then they slashed her seven-year-old across the stomach.”
Devlin said the attackers killed Alice’s husband, her mother-in-law, father-in-law, and two of her children before turning their machetes on her, attempting to split her skull. She managed to raise her hand to shield herself and lost her right hand in the process.
Both Ogebe and Devlin decried the lack of urgency, outrage, and meaningful response from both Nigerian authorities and the international community. They warned that the situation in central Nigeria fits the pattern of ethno-religious cleansing, if not outright genocide, and urged the Nigerian government to stop treating the killings as isolated farmer-herder clashes.
Ogebe echoed this sentiment, calling on both national and international actors to acknowledge the severity of the crisis. “What we are seeing is not communal violence – it is systematic, it is targeted, and it is ignored. If Nigeria cannot protect its citizens in Benue, Plateau, Kaduna, and other hotspots, then the world must not remain silent.”
Their comments come amid renewed calls for a national security overhaul, improved intelligence response, and a special tribunal or commission of inquiry to investigate the atrocities and bring perpetrators to justice.
