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Suspected armed herders opened fire on farmers harvesting cashew nuts in three communities in Benue State‘s Apa Local Government Area on Friday, killing a confirmed minimum of six people and leaving an undetermined number missing, as security forces launched a joint search operation across surrounding forests while community sources put the true death toll considerably higher than the official count.
The attack struck the communities of Asaba, Ojantele, and Okpette, lying along the Abuja-Otukpo Road in Apa LGA, in the early afternoon when residents, described by witnesses as predominantly women, youths, and children, had gone to nearby farmland to collect cashew nuts following overnight rainfall.
According to the Benue State Police Command, the assault occurred in the early hours of March 13 when the armed herders stormed the cashew farms while farmers were at work. Witnesses placed the time at Friday afternoon, a discrepancy that may reflect the sequential reporting of an attack that unfolded across multiple communities at different points. A community member in Ojantele who spoke to journalists on condition of anonymity said the attackers arrived driving large herds of cattle, giving no advance warning before opening fire.
“It was an unprovoked attack. They saw some women and children who had gone to their cashew farms to collect cashew nuts. On their way back home, the armed herdsmen opened fire and started shooting innocent people and overran the community,” the source said.
Police spokesperson DSP Udeme Edet confirmed in a statement on Saturday that a joint response team comprising the Nigeria Police Force, the military, and local community youths mobilised into the surrounding forest immediately after the attack was reported.
“At the end of the initial operation, six lifeless bodies were recovered,” Edet said. The statement added that operations were “ongoing to ensure the safety of residents in the affected communities” and that the Benue State Commissioner of Police, Ifeanyi Emenari, had dispatched reinforcements to the area to expand the search. Patrols have been intensified across Apa LGA and extended statewide.
Community accounts diverge sharply from the official confirmed figure. Witnesses told journalists that the assailants opened fire on villagers returning from the Ogbaulu area near the farms, killing at least fifteen people and injuring several others. A source who identified himself as Abu Abel confirmed the attack and described the community as “completely deserted” by Saturday morning.
“Our community is now completely deserted. We are calling on government to come to our aid. There is no security in the whole area. These are innocent people who went to look for their daily bread that were killed unjustifiably,” he said. Another community source said eleven injured persons had been evacuated to a hospital in Ugbokpo, the Apa LGA headquarters. Daily Post’s initial reporting, citing witnesses, placed the death toll at over twenty. The disparity between the official six-body count and community estimates reflects a pattern common in the immediate aftermath of Benue attacks, where security forces frequently acknowledge a lower confirmed figure while search operations continue to locate the missing.
Chairman of Apa Local Government Area Adams Ogwola confirmed the attack in a statement on Friday afternoon but said authorities could not immediately verify the casualty figures. He said assessment was ongoing.
The Ojantele-Okpette attack is the second mass killing in Benue State within a week. Barely a week before Friday’s assault, suspected armed herders attacked communities in Kwande Local Government Area in the state’s northwest, killing sixteen people in an incident that prompted Governor Hyacinth Alia to publicly condemn the killings and vow to bring the perpetrators to book. The burial of thirteen of the Kwande victims, planned for March 12, had to be postponed when families were unable to retrieve corpses from the mortuary after a mortuary attendant went missing, leaving grieving relatives unable to proceed with the ceremony. The two attacks within a single week represent a surge in farmer-herder violence that has persisted in Benue State across successive administrations without a sustainable resolution.
Read Also: Seven Killed In Separate Attacks Across Benue State
The Benue and Taraba state governors had convened a joint stakeholders’ meeting in Wukari on March 2, attended by traditional rulers, government officials, and community leaders, to address the security challenges along the Benue-Taraba border. At the meeting, both governors pledged to strengthen intelligence-sharing arrangements and enhance security agency coordination to track the perpetrators of persistent violence. A subsequent attack in Taraba killed two internally displaced persons on their way home from farms, further evidence that the meeting had not immediately altered conditions on the ground.
Apa LGA occupies a stretch of Benue State’s southern borderlands with Kogi State and is among the most persistently attacked areas in a state that has recorded some of Nigeria’s highest rates of farmer-herder violence over the past decade. The LGA’s largely agrarian Tiv farming communities share overlapping land with herding routes used by Fulani cattle herders, a demographic reality compounded by climate-driven southward migration of herding populations from the Sahel, the displacement of herders from northern states with active Boko Haram or banditry operations, and the proliferation of small arms across Nigeria’s Middle Belt. The pattern of attacks — typically timed to when farmers are at work in their fields and therefore most vulnerable and isolated — has been documented extensively by civil society organisations including the International Crisis Group, which in previous years estimated that farmer-herder conflicts had killed more people in Nigeria than the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East during comparable periods.
Read Also: Herdsmen: Gov Alia Reacts To Call For State Of Emergency In Benue
Benue State adopted an Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law in 2017 — one of the first states in Nigeria to do so — banning open-range cattle grazing across all land classifications in the state and requiring ranching as the sole permitted form of livestock management. Implementation has been irregular and contested, and successive governors have struggled to enforce the law against well-armed herder groups operating across poorly policed territory. The federal government has not enacted a national equivalent of Benue’s grazing prohibition law, and the policy question of how to manage the structural driver of the violence — the collision of farming and herding land-use rights across Nigeria’s Middle Belt — remains unresolved.
No arrests have been reported in connection with the Ojantele-Okpette attack. The joint security operation in the surrounding forest was ongoing as of Saturday morning, according to the police statement, with the primary objectives being the recovery of missing persons and the identification and apprehension of those responsible for the attack. No timeline for the completion of search operations has been given.
