Impunity, Not Just Insecurity: What Plateau’s Repeat Attacks Reveal About Accountability

Twenty-three bodies were buried this week in a village in Plateau’s Mangu council area, after gunmen spent the early hours of August 18 moving door to door with machetes. The Commissioner of Police showed up, toured the wreckage, and promised the killers would be “identified, arrested, and prosecuted.” If that sentence sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same sentence Plateau’s police command has offered after Kanam and Wase in 2022, after Boko Haram and after every mass killing this decade. At some point a promise repeated that many times without result stops being a planned action and starts being a mundane ritual.

Plateau is not short on security architecture, it has a standing military task force. It also has a state Peace Building Agency. And yet the reflex after every attack is still to reach for more of the same medicine — more patrols, more task forces, more surveillance — as though the problem were a shortage of boots on the ground rather than a shortage of consequences.

Plateau’s actual disease is that violence there is free. Nobody who has carried out one of these raids in the last several years has had to reckon with a courtroom. Arrests get announced for the cameras and then quietly dissapear somewhere between the police report and a prosecution that never surfaces. Communities have sat through this cycle so many times they can now recite the choreography themselves: attack, condolence visit, arrest pledge, silence, repeat. That silence is doing more work than any gunman. It’s what tells the next armed group that the cost of a night raid is, at most, a few days of unfavorable headlines.

There’s a genuinely instructive data point buried in all this, and it’s one officials would rather not advertise: a retired commander of Operation Safe Haven has said that compensating villagers for stolen cattle and burned crops actually worked, for a while, as a way of interrupting the retaliation cycle — and then fell apart the moment the officials administering it were replaced. Read that carefully. It means Plateau found something that functioned, and let it die of an administrative reshuffle rather than a lack of ideas. That is not a security failure. That is a governance failure, and a fairly ordinary one — a state that cannot make an institution outlive the person who built it. This is also why I’m skeptical of the current fashion for reframing every attack as either “banditry” or “political sabotage.” Governor Mutfwang’s recent line may well contain some truth. But notice what that framing conveniently does: it moves the explanation for the violence outside the state government’s own house and onto shadowy political rivals, at exactly the moment public patience with the state’s security performance is thinnest. Whether or not any individual attack has a political sponsor, “someone paid for this” is not an alibi for justice that still can’t produce a conviction.

None of the four dominant explanations for Plateau’s violence are mutually exclusive, and all four probably describe some real slice of what’s happening across different attacks. But they share a convenient property: each one gives officials a reason the killing isn’t fundamentally about their own institutions. Land pressure is a demographic problem. Banditry is a national problem. Political sabotage is someone else’s plot. Ethnic cleansing, in the state’s telling, is at least being fought. What almost none of these framings force anyone to say out loud is the plainer sentence: people keep killing their neighbors in Plateau because doing so has essentially no cost. Fix that, and you don’t need to resolve, once and for all, whether this is about grazing routes or ethnic hatred or political sponsorship. You need courts that finish cases. You need compensation systems that survive a change of governor. You need security personnel who face consequences when a credible warning goes unactioned and Bin-Per, like most of these attacks, had warnings. Until an attack in Plateau produces a sentence with the same reliability it currently produces a commissioner’s photo-op, the state will keep having this exact week, with a different village’s name attached, on a schedule that has become sickeningly predictable.