Hyacinth Alia, the governor of Benue State, has raised the alarm over the evolving tactics used by bandits and terrorists, stating that their adoption of guerrilla warfare methods has made it increasingly challenging for security forces to trace or apprehend them.
Speaking on Focus Nigeria, a current affairs programme on African Independent Television (AIT) on Tuesday, Alia addressed the ongoing violence and persistent killings across several communities in the state.
He explained that the situation has grown more complex due to the unpredictable nature of the attacks.
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“We’re talking about the bandits and the terrorists who have come to a very mystifying frame of guerrilla warfare. They come, hit, and go back. So we cannot identify them,” he said.
The governor acknowledged that efforts to combat the threat have received a significant boost through assistance from the federal government, especially in intelligence operations.
“With the federal government’s continued support now through intelligence finding and searching, I think, we are going to do even some more,” he said.
“We will identify those people, apprehend them, and create a new narrative for our three local governments and, in fact, the state.”
In addition to external threats, Alia also pointed to internal political tensions as a factor complicating the state’s security landscape. He attributed some of the setbacks in responding to the crisis to disunity within the state chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
“There is another layer to the challenges we have in the state here. The non-cooperation of some so-called major stakeholders, the disunity and disharmony within the ruling APC camp in the state, is quite unfortunate,” he said.
“There are some people who have been disgruntled and are yet to get back into the fold.”
He further revealed that President Bola Tinubu had urged party leaders in Benue to put aside their differences in order to restore peace and drive development.
The governor described Tinubu’s intervention as coming at a crucial moment, especially considering the enduring conflict between herders and farmers in the region.
Meanwhile, a civil society group, the North Central Peace Advocates, has issued a statement condemning the surge in violence, describing it as a deliberate and politically motivated assault on the state. The group disputed the narrative that frames the attacks as herder-farmer clashes.
In the statement released Monday, the group’s coordinator, Frank Utor, suggested that external forces were behind the violence, which has left many dead and entire communities displaced.
“The killings in Benue are not herder-farmer clashes. That narrative is false and dangerously misleading,” Utor said.
“A systematic effort to destabilise Benue and other parts of the north-central” is underway, he added, stressing that those responsible are not herders but “foreign-backed terrorists.”
