Prominent civil society organization, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has lamented that the current federal government pays mere lip service to the issue of the persistent killings of plateau state natives because the victims are neither Hausa nor Fulani.

HURIWA said that over 300 Plateau State natives have been killed since December 24, 2023 till date by mostly armed Fulani terrorists allegedly paid by herders seeking to take over the lurch rich agricultural landed assets of Plateau State natives.

The rights group also condemned “the conspiracy of silence of the northern governors and political elites who stoutly protested the lynching to death of 16 suspected kidnappers from Kano mobbed in Uromi, Edo State by a crowd that mistook the ‘travelling HAUSA/FULANI hunters’ for kidnappers, unleashing violence on an industrial scale in Edo State.”

“The hypocrisy of Northern Muslim political and military elites to the constant killings of mostly Christian natives of Plateau State is deeply troubling just as the normalisation of these intermittent killings by the security forces and the political authority in Abuja is highly hypocritical and paints a picture of a government that is on the same page with the armed killers unleashing devastating violence on Plateau State citizens.

“The fact is that even after the Plateau state governor made a categorical statement confirming the serial killings as genocide, everyone of the important military and civilian officials and officers in the current administration pretended like the governor was speaking in tongue. If it was the Kano state governor that made assertion that HAUSA/FULANIS of Kano state are victims of genocide, the entirety of the service chiefs and the National Assembly leadership including officials in the presidency would have adopted immediate and far-reaching mechanisms to get to the roots of the allegation. But because it is the Christian governor of the Christian state in the North that made the assertion, everyone is pretending to be deaf and dumb. This is injustice at a highly sophisticated and industrial scale,” HURIWA said in a media statement by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko.

It carpeted the key functionaries of the central government “for merely paying ordinary lip service to the blood lettings in plateau state only because the victims are evidently not from the politically connected ethnicity.”

“We know that these persistent killings, going on in plateau state and exacerbated since the Christmas Eve genocide of 2023, were to happen in Kastina, Kano or Adamawa, either the vice president, Kashim Shettima, or the national security adviser, Nuhu Ribadu would have relocated to the crime scenes to lead the counter attack. But the victims dying in their tens are Christian from minority ethnic communities in the North, they are politically marginalised and even their complaints of genocide is looked upon as the talk of some very few and powerless people who should be overlooked,” HURIWA said.

It recalled that the Plateau State Governor, Caleb Muftwang, had recently decried the attacks in some communities in his state, saying bandits have taken over 64 communities.