What did we do wrong? Why are our people being slaughtered so mindlessly and so ceaselessly?-Hon Kester Kyenge (Member BNHA Logo Consti)

"What did we do wrong? Why are they killing us?"

Those are the questions in the hearts and on the lips of my people. Many of them, women, children and the old, must have died with those unanswered questions on their parched lips. They must have uttered those words in cries of agony at the moments of their gruesome deaths.

What did we do wrong? Why are our people being slaughtered so mindlessly and so ceaselessly?

Is there no one to save us? Is there no law to shield us? Or are our killers above the law?

From one end of Benue to the other the carnage has become a regular beat, a carnival of sort, a bazaar of death.

Its rhythm has become premeditated and predictable, bringing together the season of harvest on our farms with the visiting harvest of blood and tears;


The season of the herdsmen's harvest.

This time the drum beat has struck a stanza in Guma and Logo local government areas, drawing rivers of blood and a harvest of corpses. Women, children, the aged and youths alike are now lying in mortuary vaults like sheaves staked in barns after the harvest. The very soul and essence of our survival as a people so boorishly butchered in cold blood.

This is the herdsmen's harvest.

Today I stand before the God who created all living and I speak to the human community inhabiting this earthly realm. I speak to the conscience resident in every human soul, both the highly and the lowly. We are all united by a common humanity, and I make bold to call on all men and women of good conscience and particularly the international community to hearken to our cries in the face of organized silence before we are completely annihilated as a nationality.

And I say this for the present times and for posterity;


That we the people of Logo Local Government Area who are being killed so wantonly and so brazenly by suspected Fulani herdsmen have done no wrong to our assailants to deserve paying with our dear lives;

That we have all along been resident in our humble rural abodes content with pursuing a simple agrarian means of livelihood which largely consists in tilling the land for food and economic exchange;

That my people of Logo do not have any issues with those herdsmen invading our land, killing at will and leaving irreparable destruction in their wake. We have continued to engage in constructive dialogue and obedience to the dictates of enabling laws and statutes while our killers have continued their systematic and organized pogrom with flagrant disregard to the laws of the land.


We have a right to life, same as all humans, including those who take it away from us so cruelly and inexplicably.

This is a right guaranteed under the laws of our land and the universal charter of human rights, and it is that right we call on the global human community to rise to guarantee for us now.

We will from this day not hold our peace and die in silence any longer, but will tell to the whole world our agony and the terror visited on us by a force propelled solely towards our destruction.

Reason and justice may not appeal to the herdsmen hacking our people to death with such wanton abandon, but we will cry out to the world and show our wounds for all to see. Then, perhaps, then will the blood of our fallen loved ones and our tears not flow in vain.

We are in deed in a State of Emergency and I demand that the Benue State and Federal governments declare 2 days of national mourning and move decisively and with utmost dispatch as directed by President Muhammadu Buhari to deploy sufficient security personnel in the effected areas to forestall any repeat of these attacks and for once arrest and bring perpetrators to justice.

We also demand that the Federal Government declare Fulani herdsmen perpetrating violence against farmers across the country as terrorists and treat them as such.

These are undeniably very trying times for us as a people and inasmuch as my heart is drenched in blood I ensue for calm and restrain. I urge us not to seize the laws into our hands. Truly, I share your conviction and particularly your anguish. I also thank you most profoundly for your concern and brave show of courage and solidarity.

Much as I have called for sustained collectivity I take personal loss and responsibility not only because I have lost relations directly but the more because I am involved in government, irrespective of my continued frustrations and obvious limitations.

As the people's Representative I fully appreciate that every single death of one of us diminishes us collectively. I am impoverished and have never felt this damned and unsettled as continuously hapless constituents are hounded, villages razed and ancestral farm lands sacked while government gropes endlessly for solutions.


From Tse Akenawe, to Tse Verinumbe, to Tse Orveren, to Jootar, to Tyogbenda Anyiin communities in Gambe-Tiev, Logo to Tomatar near Tse Abi, Nongov in Guma Local Government Areas, it has been sustained attacks and killings as the statistics swell with daily harvest of tons of corpses from surrounding environs. These settlements have been reduced to ghost habitations with huge numbers of displaced old, women and children trekking aimlessly with neither food, water nor shelter.


This is in deed one invasion too many, and the deafening silence hovering over it from the top must be broken now and for good.

Once again, as I commiserate with HE Samuel Ortom and the government and peace loving people of Benue State and particularly helpless Logo State Constituents in our season of collective grief and great loss, I pledge on my oath that I will not relent in my resolve to fight to get justice for my constituents. I will continue to collaborate with agencies and actors of government to bring lasting peace and succor to my people.


May the blood of our murdered loved ones and our tears flowing in agony not be in vain.


We stand together; God with us.

Hon. Terna-Kester Kyenge PhD,Member, BNHA (Logo State Constituency).