The Contrast Nobody Wants to Admit

The Sultan of Sokoto’s swift condemnation of the killing of Ardo Risku triggered pointed questions among victims of decades of mass killings across the Middle Belt. To many, the timing and tone raised a hard question: whose grief counts?

That question has an Idoma dimension that we must be honest enough to examine ourselves.

The Fulani mourned Ardo loudly, institutionally, and with political consequence. The Sultan spoke. MACBAN spoke. A Senior Advocate wrote to the president. Ten suspects were arrested almost immediately. The federal government was put on notice. The national conversation shifted. Reprisal threats — however dangerous and wrong — at least demonstrated that someone’s death had weight.

Compare that to the reaction to Prof. Salifu’s murder. As of the time of multiple reports on July 3, 2026, the Benue State Police Public Relations Officer did not answer calls, and authorities had yet to issue an official statement on the attack. No SAN has written to the president about it. No traditional ruler has issued a statement demanding justice. And the Idoma community in Abuja was in a hall somewhere, celebrating.

This is not an argument against Idoma Day. Cultural identity matters. Celebration matters. The Och’Idoma himself, in his New Year broadcast, honoured the memory of Idoma sons and daughters who passed on, describing their lives as meaningful contributions to the collective journey of the nation, and said: “Your pain is known, your tears are seen.”

But your tears are only truly seen when you first sit with them. When you pause. When you say to the world — and to yourself — that this death matters enough for us to stop.

A People Who Have Forgotten How to Demand

The deeper crisis the Idoma Day drama reveals is not insensitivity. It is a crisis of political and communal consciousness that has been years in the making.

We have watched herdsmen attack community after community in Benue South. We have buried farmers, teachers, local government workers, and traditional rulers. Fulani militia have killed traditional monarchs, their wives, their children, in overnight raids across Agatu and surrounding areas. We have attended too many funerals. And somewhere along the line – in the fatigue, in the exhaustion, in the political helplessness -we stopped treating each death as a political event that demands political response, and started treating it as simply another tragedy to be absorbed and forgotten.

This is the rat race our writer speaks of. Not a rat race toward progress, but a rat race toward the next gathering, the next event, the next occasion to feel normal -while the land burns around us and our best people die on the roads.

Not everyone relates to loss the same way, and that can lead to tension about how to grieve appropriately. But there is a difference between processing grief differently and not processing it at all. There is a difference between moving through tragedy and running from it.

When a people lose a distinguished professor, a former SSG, an elder statesman -a man who served with distinction as Secretary to the Government of Benue State, shaped the lives of countless students through decades of teaching and mentorship, and whose scholarship on governance, public policy, rural development, peacebuilding, and conflict management enriched national discourse — and the community’s response is to put on the red and black and dance… something has broken. Something deep.

Solidarity Is Not Silence. Postponement Would Have Been Power.

The simple postponement of Idoma Day, even by two weeks -would have been a statement. It would have said: we see our dead. We honour them before we honour ourselves. It would have been covered by every newspaper in Nigeria. It would have forced the political class of Benue South to take notice. It would have given the Idoma people a moment of genuine collective mourning that, as community bereavement traditions show, reaffirms connection and mutual reliance, and strengthens the social bonds that make a people resilient in crisis.

Instead, we chose performance over protest. We chose the hall over the street. We chose red and black dancing over red and black mourning.

Security meetings, as this writer rightly observes, are not discussed in the open. But public grief is not a security meeting. Public grief is a political act. It is how peoples communicate to power that they count, that they notice, that they will not be silenced, that they refuse to disappear quietly.

The Fulani know this. They have always known this. When one of theirs falls, the full weight of their institutional structures, religious, traditional, political -comes to bear. There is no dancing in the week that a leader dies.

What do the Idoma do? We gather to celebrate. And we wonder why nobody takes our losses seriously.

The Final Word

The disregard being expressed here is not for the dead. Prof. David Onu Salifu has gone beyond where our parties can reach him. The disregard is for the living  -for every Idoma person who must navigate those roads, who must face those gunmen, who must survive in communities where the state offers no protection and the community offers no solidarity.

When we celebrate in the shadow of our fallen, we tell the surviving Idoma that their lives are background noise. We tell the gunmen and the bandits that the roads they control can produce a body on Thursday and a party on Saturday without consequence.

We tell ourselves, and here is the deepest wound -that we are a people without the discipline to pause, to demand, to insist that our dead matter.

A people that cannot mourn cannot fight. A people that cannot pause cannot protest. A people that dances while its scholars bleed on the roads is a people that has quietly accepted the terms of its own diminishment.

That is the Tufiakwa state of mind.

And until we cure it, no Idoma Day, no matter how well attended, no matter how colourful the aso-ebi -will move us one inch closer to justice.

The author writes as a Son of Abakwu and opinion contributor to YelloPageNews. Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily represent the editorial position of the platform.