According to Punch, amid escalating violence in Benue State, former governor Samuel Ortom has sharply criticised his successor, Governor Hyacinth Alia, for allegedly mishandling the worsening security crisis and trivialising the scale of the killings. In a strongly worded response, Ortom accused Alia of making inconsistent claims and distorting facts about the true nature of the bloodshed ravaging the state.…KINDLY READ THE FULL STORY HERE▶
The controversy was reignited after Governor Alia, through his media aide Kula Tersoo, claimed that Benue experienced its worst humanitarian crisis under Ortom, with over four million people displaced from their ancestral homes during his administration. The statement blamed Ortom’s tenure for a failure to provide strategic security solutions, branding his approach as reactive and ineffective.
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But Ortom swiftly fired back, describing the figure as inflated and misleading. According to him, the actual data handed over to Alia in 2023 stood at 1.5 million internally displaced persons — a number, he claims, the current administration continues to cite without updating. He criticised Alia for allegedly downplaying the killings by characterising them as minor communal clashes rather than organised attacks by armed herdsmen.
In Ortom’s view, the governor has failed to adopt a consistent or truthful stance on the killings. He accused Alia of floating contradictory explanations, sometimes attributing the violence to foreign mercenaries, at other times calling it retaliation for alleged cattle rustling, or even blaming unnamed politicians in Abuja and religious leaders whom he allegedly labelled “religious bandits.”…KINDLY READ THE FULL STORY HERE▶
