JUST when you think the worst is over, Plateau reminds you that in Nigeria, the worst is always warming up for an encore. On Sunday night, gunmen stormed the Angwan Rukuba community in Jos, killing at least 30 people. Thirty human beings. Not combatants, not soldiers on a battlefield ordinary citizens going about their lives in a university community that should be a place of learning and aspiration.
Instead it became another killing field. And if you are wondering why this keeps happening, the answer is painfully simple: because nobody pays for it. Nobody ever pays for it.
Governor Caleb Mutfwang flew to Abuja on Wednesday to brief President Tinubu and described the attack as “barbaric” and “an act of terrorism.” The President, for his part, issued the kind of statement we have heard so many times it could be a template saved on somebody’s desktop at the State House. He condemned the “barbaric and cowardly attacks,” directed security agencies to “intensify all efforts,” and assured Nigerians the acts “will not go unpunished.” We have been hearing this assurance since 2001.
Over 12,000 people have been killed in Plateau State violence across two decades, according to a 10-man fact-finding committee that presented its report to the governor in November 2025. Twelve thousand. That is not a crisis. That is a slow-motion genocide that we have all learned to live with, and that is the real scandal.
To be fair to President Tinubu, he said the right things. He cautioned the media against framing the attacks as religiously motivated. He urged security agencies to act on early warning intelligence. He even hinted at acquiring more sophisticated equipment for real-time tracking of criminals. All fine and good. But here is the question nobody in Abuja seems willing to answer: after 25 years of killings, fact-finding committees, presidential condemnations, and security council meetings, why does Plateau keep burying its dead? The 10-man committee documented violence across 13 local government areas, with over 450 villages destroyed and more than 25,000 households displaced. These numbers should shake any sitting president to his bones. And yet the cycle continues attack, condemnation, curfew, burial, repeat.
Governor Mutfwang told journalists that he and the President have “agreed on certain steps that need to be taken.” He spoke of a “decisive turning point” and promised more “proactive actions.” I want to believe him. I genuinely do. But Plateau has had so many “decisive turning points” that the phrase has lost all meaning. Every governor since 2001 has promised a turning point. Every president has directed security agencies to do something. And every year, the funerals keep coming. The governor also admitted that security agencies are yet to apprehend a single attacker. Not one. They don’t know who did it, they don’t know their identities, and they don’t know their motives.
After 25 years of cyclical violence in the same state, in the same local government areas, following the same patterns, our security apparatus still cannot anticipate, prevent, or even identify the killers after the fact. That is not just failure. That is institutional surrender.
Let me say what many are thinking but few will put in print. The reason the killings in Plateau refuse to stop is that there is zero consequence for mass murder. Zero. You can walk into a community at night, kill 30 people, and walk away into the darkness from which you came. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. The next morning, the governor issues a statement, the president condemns it, a curfew is imposed, and the dead are buried.
Then we all move on until the next attack. Name me one person who has been convicted and sentenced for any of the major killings in Plateau State since 2001. Just one. I will wait. This is not a security problem alone ,it is a justice problem. It is a system that has communicated clearly to every potential killer that there is no price to pay. When you reward impunity with inaction, you get more violence. That is not political science. That is common sense.
The Plateau crisis is complicated, no doubt. The governor himself acknowledged that it cannot be “reduced to one reason” it is a cocktail of farmer-herder conflicts, communal tensions, ethno-religious fault lines, and criminal opportunism.
But complexity is not an excuse for paralysis. Every crisis has layers. The job of leadership is to cut through the layers and deliver results. And the most basic result any government can deliver is that if you kill people, you will be caught and punished. We don’t even have that. Between December 2023 and February 2024, over 1,300 people were killed in Plateau in just three months. That is more than 14 people dying every single day for 90 days straight. And the collective response of our security architecture was what exactly? More condemnations? More “intensified efforts”?
With all due respect, Mr. President, the people of Plateau don’t need commiseration.They have been commiserated with for a quarter of a century. What they need is a radical overhaul of the security strategy in the state. They need a permanent, well-equipped military and police presence in the flashpoint local government areas Bokkos, Barkin Ladi, Mangu, Jos North not the kind that arrives after the killing is done but the kind that prevents the killing from starting. They need a special tribunal dedicated to prosecuting perpetrators of communal violence in the state, because our regular justice system has clearly failed them. And they need to see people go to jail. Actual human beings, arrested, prosecuted, and locked up for killing their neighbours. Not faceless “bandits” or “unknown gunmen” that appear in press statements and vanish into bureaucratic oblivion.
Real people, with names and faces, standing in the dock. Until that happens, every condemnation from Abuja is just noise. And while we are at it, this is yet another argument for state police. A centralised security architecture that cannot prevent the same attacks in the same local government areas for 25 consecutive years is not working. That is not an opinion. That is a fact staring us all in the face.
I must also address the media and the broader public. There is a dangerous tendency to frame every act of violence in Plateau through a religious lens, and both the President and the governor have rightly cautioned against this. The reality is more complicated than Muslim versus Christian, and reducing it to that binary does two things: it obscures the real drivers of the conflict, and it makes it easier for politicians and criminal elements to weaponize the narrative for their own purposes. We have seen this playbook before stoke the fire, blame the other side, and while everyone is shouting, the killers walk free. Some of the misinformation flying around on social media after Sunday’s attack was clearly designed to inflame, not inform.
People who have never set foot in Plateau were suddenly experts on who attacked whom and why, posting incendiary content from the comfort of their phones. We must be smarter than that. Plateau needs justice, not propaganda. And it certainly does not need keyboard warriors turning a tragedy into a tribal or religious football.
The hard truth is that Plateau State is a microcosm of Nigeria’s larger security failure. What is happening there mirrors what is happening in southern Kaduna, in parts of Benue, in the northwest banditry corridor, and in the northeast insurgency belt. The common thread is impunity. Nobody is punished. Nobody is deterred. And so the killing continues. We have spent billions on security budgets, acquired equipment, set up committees, and issued statements. But we have not done the one thing that actually stops violence: make the killers face consequences. Until we do, no amount of condemnation, no presidential visit, no “decisive turning point” will change a thing.
Governor Mutfwang has shown commendable urgency in responding to this latest crisis and in briefing the President directly. But urgency after the fact is not the same as prevention before the fact. The real test of his leadership will not be how well he manages the aftermath of Sunday’s attack but whether the next attack is prevented altogether. And the real test of President Tinubu’s commitment to Plateau will not be measured in statements or visits but in arrests, prosecutions, and convictions.
The people of Plateau have been patient beyond what any population should endure. Over 12,000 dead, 450 communities destroyed, 25,000 households scattered and still they are told to cooperate with security agencies and comply with evacuation orders. At some point, the government must recognise that the burden of ending this violence does not rest on the shoulders of the victims. It rests on the state. That is what government is for. You cannot keep telling people to evacuate their homes and comply with processes while the killers roam free. That is not governance. That is abdication.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.