A Night of Terror in Plateau – Echoes of a Bloodstained Past
The quiet village of Zike Kimakpa in Plateau State’s Bassa Local Government Area was shattered in the dead of night on Sunday as armed assailants descended upon its helpless residents. By dawn, at least 45 lives had been extinguished, dozens lay grievously wounded, and over 30 homes were reduced to smoldering ruins. The attack, meticulously coordinated, bore the hallmarks of a well-planned massacre—swift, brutal, and merciless.
Eyewitnesses recounted scenes of sheer horror: gunfire piercing the darkness, panicked screams, and flames engulfing houses as families fled for their lives. “They came in shooting, and everywhere was chaos,” a traumatized survivor told Leadership newspaper. The Irigwe Development Association (IDA), through its Secretary General Danjuma Dickson Auta, confirmed the staggering death toll, warning that the numbers could rise as search teams combed through the wreckage.
For the people of Plateau, this was not an isolated tragedy but another chapter in a relentless cycle of violence—one that has claimed countless lives over decades. But for one man, retired General Yakubu Gowon, the former Nigerian head of state, this massacre struck painfully close to home. Reports say he was moved to tears upon hearing of the bloodshed in his own community.
The Irony of History – Gowon’s Tears and the Ghosts of 1966
While the human heart cannot help but ache for the bereaved, there is a bitter irony in Gowon’s grief—one that dredges up Nigeria’s darkest history. Between 1966 and 1970, as Nigeria’s leader, Gowon presided over a genocidal campaign against the Igbo people, a slaughter that claimed over three million lives in what history remembers as the Biafran War. Back then, Gowon stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a Fulani-dominated northern hegemony, unleashing unspeakable horrors upon the Igbo nation under the guise of war.
Today, the same Fulani militias—now metastasized into a hydra-headed monster of banditry and terrorism—have turned their swords on Gowon’s own kin. The wheel of vengeance, it seems, has come full circle.
What is most galling is that, 55 years later, Gowon has never mustered the courage to apologize for the atrocities committed under his command. Not a word of remorse. Not a gesture of reconciliation. Even as recently as two months ago, former military ruler Ibrahim Babangida, in the quiet of his book launch, admitted a long-suppressed truth: the 1966 coup, which triggered the anti-Igbo pogroms, was not an Igbo coup. Yet, Gowon—who was married to an Igbo woman, no less—remains silent, his conscience seemingly untroubled by the mountains of corpses left in his wake.
Nigeria’s Unending War Against Ndigbo: From 1966 to 2023
The tragedy of Nigeria is that the ghosts of 1966 still walk among us. The Igbo people, despite being integral to Nigeria’s fabric, remain treated as a conquered people—systematically excluded from power, marginalized in governance, and denied even the most basic acknowledgment of their suffering.
The 2023 presidential election was the latest insult in this long history of injustice. Peter Obi, an Igbo man, won that election by every credible measure. Yet, in a brazen act of electoral robbery, the powers that be conspired to overturn the people’s will. The judiciary, complicit in this grand theft, rubber-stamped a fraudulent result, handing power to Bola Tinubu—a decision that has since plunged Nigeria deeper into economic ruin and governmental paralysis.
Why? Because Obi is Igbo. And in Nigeria’s twisted political calculus, an Igbo man must never be allowed to lead, no matter how capable.
The Blood Cries Out – A Land Cursed by Unatoned Sins
No land can endure such rivers of blood without consequence. Nigeria is a nation built on unhealed wounds, on mass graves left unmourned, on injustices left unaddressed. The blood of the Biafran dead still cries out from the soil, and until Nigeria confronts its past with honesty and atonement, peace will remain a fleeting illusion.
Gowon’s tears today are a grim reminder: the evil that men do does not die with them. It lingers, festers, and returns—sometimes in ways they never imagined. The same forces he once enabled have now turned on his people. History, it seems, has a cruel sense of justice.
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