Nigeria Abandoned Binnari, and 48 Villagers Paid With Their Lives

Forty-eight people went to the mosque, the market, or their fields on a Friday afternoon in Binnari, Taraba State, and did not come home. Some of them drowned trying to flee. Others were cut down in the bush while they ran from men who had come on about fifty motorcycles. Some were still missing when the police began counting. How many people died is still disputed, which tells you how little the Nigerian state has bothered to find out.

Here is what we know. Gunmen rode into the village just after midday prayers. They looted shops, took cash, food, and provisions, carried off the motorcycles that frightened residents had abandoned, and set houses on fire. The rampage lasted up to four hours. When police responded to a distress call, the attackers were gone, and officers recovered ten bodies with gunshot wounds. Days later the toll climbed to at least 48, according to the state police. Amnesty International, citing people on the ground and families of the bereaved, puts it at 52. One survivor told AFP that he had personally counted at least twenty dead. Amnesty's Nigeria director said one initial funeral alone had 37 bodies. Think about that. A community buried thirty-seven of its own before the state had finished counting.

Ask yourself what kind of country cannot tell you, within a few days, how many of its citizens were slaughtered in one village on one afternoon. This is not a question of distant geography or limited resources. Taraba is a Nigerian state with a governor, a state police command, a federal police presence, and a military. Binnari is not a remote outpost on a foreign frontier. It is a place where people pray, trade, and raise children, and where the state's representatives arrived too late to save anyone.

Let us be precise about what we do not know. The police describe the attackers as unidentified gunmen. They have not publicly established who sent them, whether they belong to a jihadist network, an armed criminal gang, or a kidnap-for-ransom syndicate that has learned to hold whole villages hostage. Nigeria's north-east has endured years of jihadist violence. Its north-west and central belt have been ravaged by bandit gangs who raid communities, abduct residents, and demand ransoms. Many of these groups overlap, feed off one another, and exploit the same ungoverned spaces. What they share is a state that has failed to occupy those spaces with the one thing that makes a government legitimate: the capacity to protect its people.

The police spokesman's own words should trouble every Nigerian. He said officers had "dispersed" the gunmen, but there were no casualties on either side because "the terrain is difficult and they're used to the terrain." Read that again. The men who slaughtered dozens of civilians were not hunted down. They were allowed to melt into the bush, and the official explanation is geography. Geography did not decide that police would arrive after the killing ended. Geography did not decide that no one would be arrested. Those were choices, made by people whose salaries are paid by the same taxpayers now burying their dead.

Amnesty International has called for an impartial investigation and accused the authorities of leaving rural communities "at the mercy of gunmen that repeatedly commit atrocities with impunity." We endorse that call, but we want to go further. Impunity is the real weapon here. Every massacre that ends without prosecutions teaches the next gang that the cost of killing is zero. Every governor who promises a probe and then lets it die in a file cabinet tells rural Nigerians that their lives are a line item. Every election cycle in which politicians campaign on security and then vanish from the countryside is another betrayal that the people of Binnari will pay for, not the politicians.

This is not new, and that is what makes it unforgivable. Nigeria's north has been bleeding for over a decade. Schoolchildren have been abducted. Farming communities have been emptied. Religious leaders, traders, and herders have all been caught in cycles of revenge that the state has never managed to end. Each time, the response has followed a familiar script: condolences, promises, a few arrests of foot soldiers, and then silence until the next massacre. The pattern does not persuade anyone that the state is in control. It persuades the gunmen that they are not going to be stopped.

So what must change? We are not interested in slogans. We want institutions that work.

First, Nigeria must finally build a credible, locally rooted police service. The national debate on constitutional amendments to create state police has dragged on because powerful politicians fear losing control of security forces they use for their own ends. The answer is not to leave the matter to whoever holds the state house. It is to devolve policing to states and communities under strict civilian oversight, with independent complaint mechanisms, published crime data, and clear career incentives for officers who serve in the most dangerous districts. Other democracies facing similar pressures have shown that accountable local policing works better than a distant, underfunded federal force that arrives after the killing is done.

Second, the federal and state governments must publish the findings of any investigation into Binnari, name the attackers and their sponsors where they can be identified, and prosecute them in open court. Amnesty's call for impartiality should be treated as a minimum standard, not a favour. A special, independent panel with judicial oversight, and with the power to publish its findings, would be a start. Botswana and Mauritius, whatever their own challenges, have shown across decades that rule of law and transparent institutions are the foundation on which investment, public trust, and security are built. Nigeria has the talent, the courts, and the civil society to do the same. What it lacks is political will.

Third, the private sector and civil society have a role to play that governments have too long ignored. Local chambers of commerce, traders' associations, and community policing forums can share early warning information, document abuses, and hold officials to their promises. Free markets cannot function in a village where shops are looted and the only economic activity is flight. Property rights mean nothing when a man's motorcycle can be stolen by a gunman and his neighbours cannot even bury their dead in peace. Protecting the economic life of rural Nigeria is a security task, not a charity project.

And citizens must demand, loudly and repeatedly, that every candidate in the 2027 elections answer specific questions. What is your plan for state policing? How will you guarantee that no massacre goes unpunished? Which police commanders will you remove for failing to respond? Where will you fund rural patrols, and how will you audit them? A politician who cannot answer these questions has no business asking for your vote.

We are not writing this because Binnari is exceptional. We are writing because it is ordinary, and that is the scandal. Forty-eight people is a number that gets buried under the weight of the next headline. Their names deserve better. Every one of them had a family, a routine, a future the gunmen took in an afternoon. If the state will not protect them, then the rest of us must refuse to let their deaths become just another statistic. Demand the investigation. Demand the arrests. Demand the police who arrive on time. Binnari should be the last village that burns while the government counts the bodies.

Based on reporting by BBC