By Joseph Adom Kyaagba, Ph.D., FNIA, mni
On the last day of August, the New Banquet Hall of the Benue State Government House in Makurdi filled with the familiar choreography of a Nigerian security summit: a minister’s opening remarks, a Secretary to the Government of the Federation reading the President’s message, governors offering their solidarity, and a promise, President Tinubu’s own words, that this time the outcome would not be “filed away and forgotten.” I have sat through enough of these gatherings, as a security scholar and as a son of Benue who once helped design and run this state’s own amnesty and disarmament programme, to know how much weight that promise has to carry, and how little weight it has carried before.
Let me be clear about what the summit got right. Framing Benue’s crisis in economic as well as security terms is overdue, the state anchors roughly eight per cent of national GDP through agriculture, and a security failure here is a food-security failure for the whole country. The call for an early-warning network, for restored trust between citizens and security agencies, and for a dual-track response combining military presence with civic reconciliation, all describe the right destination. My concern is not with where the summit says it wants to go. It is with the distance between that language and the record on the ground, and with what happens if that distance is allowed to close only on paper.
Start with the people the summit was, in principle, convened to protect. Amnesty International’s own count put more than 500,000 Benue residents in displacement camps as of December 2024, not a historical figure from some earlier, worse phase of the crisis, but a standing population living in that condition as the summit convened. The International Organisation for Migration recorded 215 new arrivals into camps in a single week this past January. Displacement in Benue is not an aftershock we are recovering from. It is current and it is ongoing, and any communiqué that speaks of it in the past tense misdescribes the state I am writing from.
Then there is the question of accountability, which is where the summit’s own promise will be tested most directly. In June 2025, an attack on Yelwata killed, by credible estimate, somewhere between one and two hundred people. Fourteen months later, by Amnesty International’s own documentation, there have been zero prosecutions. Amnesty’s word for the pattern is “impunity,” and it is hard to argue with the description. A summit that wants to be remembered as different from its predecessors has, in Yelwata, a specific, checkable, and already overdue test of that difference. I would rather see one prosecution announced in the next twelve months than another paragraph of resolve.
A summit that wants to be remembered as different has, in Yelwata, a specific, checkable, and already overdue test of that difference.
The gap between stated intent and delivered capacity shows up again in the emergency response itself. In Apa Local Government Area this April, it took security forces more than two hours to reach an attack in progress, a delay the Senate itself found serious enough to demand permanent police and military bases for Apa and Agatu, bases which, at the time of that demand, still did not exist.
An early-warning network is only as good as what answers the warning. Announcing the network before fixing the response time it depends on gets the sequence backwards, and residents of Apa, Agatu, Guma, Logo, Gwer West and Kwande; the local government areas carrying the weight of this crisis, will notice the difference between a plan and a base that is actually staffed and reachable in minutes rather than hours.
I would also ask the summit’s conveners to look again at the federal government’s “Reclaiming the Ungoverned Space” initiative, which proposes returning conflict-vacated land to productive economic use. The instinct is not wrong, land lying idle behind a security vacuum helps no one. But land in Benue is rarely simply vacant; it is land that families were driven off, often violently, and the initiative as presented does not yet say how or when those original occupants are restored to it once it is “reclaimed.” Reclamation without restitution risks quietly ratifying displacement rather than reversing it, and that distinction will matter enormously to the people whose farms are in question.
A newer strand of the same story is unfolding in Kwande and Logo local government areas, where real gold, lithium and lead-ore deposits are now drawing illegal mining alongside displaced residents turned artisanal miners. Earlier this year, the Turan Development Association suspended local mining activity outright over licences issued without the community agreements the law requires, and it alleged, without independent verification, a link between mining interests and the violence that has displaced the surrounding population.
I do not present that allegation as an established fact. I present it as a claim serious enough, and specific enough, to deserve formal, independent inquiry rather than either repetition or silence. A summit genuinely interested in the sources of Benue’s insecurity cannot treat its emerging mineral wealth as a footnote.
Finally, a word on representation, because a zonal consensus is only as strong as the zone that actually shows up to build it. Half of North-Central’s most crisis-affected states: Kogi, Niger and Kwara, were not represented by their governors at a summit convened, in part, in their name. A framework built on partial attendance risks becoming a Benue-and-Plateau document wearing a zonal label, which weakens rather than strengthens the case for federal follow-through everywhere it is needed.
None of this is an argument against the summit. It is an argument for holding it to its own stated terms. As someone who has worked inside Benue’s own security response, through the state’s amnesty and disarmament programme and through physical-security-design work grounded in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design principles, I know that frameworks fail less often for lack of good language than for lack of follow-through that ordinary people can see and verify.
So here is what I am asking for, concretely: publish the draft action matrix for stakeholder comment before it goes to the President, not after; name the Yelwata prosecution count as the yardstick by which this summit’s seriousness will be judged a year from now; fund and staff the security bases the Senate has already demanded, on a published timeline; attach an explicit restitution mechanism to any land-reclamation programme; and open an independent inquiry into the Kwande mining allegations rather than letting them sit unexamined.
Benue has hosted this conversation before, in one form or another, and buried its dead in between. The measure of this summit will not be the eloquence of its communiqué. It will be whether, a year from now, the casualty list has grown shorter and the prosecution list has grown longer. I will be watching both, as will the half-million people still living in camps who cannot afford to wait for the next one.
Joseph Adom Kyaagba is an architect and security scholar with a Ph.D. in Security and Strategic Studies, focused on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. He is a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Architects (FNIA) and a member of the National Institute (mni), and has served within Benue State’s own security and disarmament initiatives, including the Benue Amnesty Programme.
