Fr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Ãmos.
If there is anyone who would ordinarily feel reluctant to respond publicly to a priest, I should be one of such. Yet, on the vexed question of “genocide or no genocide,” my instinct had been silence. Some Bishops had already spoken; Bishop Kukah admitted there is mass killing, Bishop Anaegbe said it is directional and targeted. They, more than anyone else, stand daily within the vortex of the grief, the funerals, the displacements, the thunder of gunfire and the quiet collapse of farmlands. Their voices carry the weight of pastoral witness and the authority of the Cross; prudence demanded that I let their judgment stand. But the recent public declaration of Governor Hyacinth Alia, asserting that the horrors in Benue should not be described as genocide, struck a discord so jarring, so morally disfiguring, that silence became an abdication. His statement compelled a response rooted in truth, conscience and the dignity of the dead.
To speak at all, especially as a priest, is to accept the duty of truth. The collar is not ornament; it is a reminder that one represents an institution that predates all states, outlasts empires, and is anchored in moral memory. To speak falsely while bearing such a symbol is to wound a trust older than any Republic. In the same way, to govern is to carry one’s people; the governor’s tongue is not personal property but public instrument. When such a voice calls reality false and treats documented suffering as exaggeration, it signals a conscience that has suffered grave erosion. The Church, in her wisdom, keeps her role advisory and moral, but when public leadership muddles truth and trivialises deaths, she cannot and should not retreat.
Before one pronounces on whether what is happening in Benue is genocide, the starting point must be clarity. Genocide, according to the 1948 Convention, is not a poetic term; it is a juridical one. It refers to acts: killing, causing grievous bodily or mental harm, destroying the conditions of life of a group, and so forth, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic, national, racial or religious group. This definition is the world’s agreed compass, not a political toy. If one wishes to deny genocide, one must deny the acts, deny the scale, deny the patterns, or deny the intent. One must prove that corpses do not exist, that widows fabricate their tears, that villages razed themselves, that farms burnt spontaneously, that victims buried their kin merely to attract pity. Anything less is a retreat from honesty.
Those who insist that genocide is unfolding in Nigeria, with Benue as a principal epicentre, point to series of facts too solid to be wished away. First, there have been repeated massacres of Christian communities. Not isolated killings, but attacks that leave dozens dead in a single sweep, repeated with chilling regularity across months and years. These are not bandit-style opportunistic raids; they are coordinated assaults on communities identifiable by faith, land occupation and ethnic composition. Second, the cumulative death toll in Benue is enormous by any standard of internal conflict, running into thousands and accompanied by mass displacement. Villages once alive with yam barns and harvest chants have become graveyards or deserted ruins.
Third, the pattern has a grim consistency: villages are attacked in the dead of night or at dawn, worshippers ambushed in churches, farmers slain on their land, markets set ablaze, homes emptied and burnt to the frame. The victims are overwhelmingly members of Christian communities. This is not speculative; it is testified by priests who buried entire families, by bishops who documented names, by human-rights monitors who verified sites, by survivors who still bear machete scars. Fourth, the impunity is suffocating. Perpetrators vanish into the landscape while the state responds with statements instead of arrests. Without justice, repetition is guaranteed.
Governor Alia’s categorical assertion that there is “no genocide” therefore sits awkwardly against the weight of these established facts. A leader may insist that legal determination of genocidal intent lies beyond his capacity, but to dismiss outright what both evidence and witness suggest is to prioritise political comfort over human suffering. He who has the mandate to protect the poor and weak, should not be a stooge to power. Truth requires courage, and few things disfigure public life more than leaders who find mental ease in denial while graves multiply.
What then is the honest inference? One may concede that definitive legal labeling requires an independent investigation capable of probing intent, chain of command, and systemic facilitation. But even without waiting for tribunal verdicts, the lived reality in Benue bears the unmistakable features of an atrocity aimed at uprooting communities and erasing their capacity to exist on their ancestral land. When killings are sustained, victims identifiable, displacement massive, and the destruction of livelihoods systematic, the practical effect mirrors precisely what international law defines as genocidal conduct. In human terms, the communities do not experience semantics; they experience death.
Therefore, the duty before all men of conscience: clergy, laity, leaders, scholars, is to resist convenient denial and insist on truth. This truth must lead to action: independent investigation, immediate protection of vulnerable communities, arrest and prosecution of perpetrators, and public transparency from those in office. The governor’s statement does not overturn graves, cannot erase the testimony of the bereaved, and has no power to cancel out the moral insight of the Church’s shepherds. What is happening in Benue demands the seriousness reserved for crimes against a people. Anything less is betrayal.
At the end, the real scandal is not the debate over terminology but the attempt to mute reality. A people have been battered. Their dead deserve truth; their living deserve protection. No conscience anchored in justice will deny them this.
Fr. Okhueleigbe is a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Uromi and a Lecturer at CIWA, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
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