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Da Gyang Dahoro, the Gwom Rim, in Riyom Local Government area of Plateau State, speaks on the plight of his people in this interview:
Why is there still tension in your domain?
I am the Chief of Rim with 10 villages. Some communities have been destroyed such as Janda 1 and 2, and Goon, but I thank God some of the people have started returning. I want to appreciate the Federal and Plateau State governments under Governor Simon Lalong; we have enjoyed relative peace during his tenure. At the moment, our people farm within the surroundings of their homes. Rim people are a lovely and hard working people; we inherited hunting and farming, but we cannot farm now due to insecurity. We are only enjoying relative peace now because the people cannot go to their farmlands; the people were driven from their land and the terrorists are saying they have won the war, that the farms belonged to them.
Since I came on board as the Chief of Rim, it has not been easy; I am living in the village because I see people living here. Before now, we hear gunshots at night and when you ask, they will say some people were hunting, but I don’t know what they are hunting in that period of the night because we no longer go out to hunt, but who are those people hunting? It is now that I can sleep a little; before I can’t sleep because of heavy gunshots. People are saying that the heavy attacks come from a place where they chased my people from their lands.
Now, we have relative peace; the Fulani come around our communities and we farm close to them, but we cannot exceed where they are living, even though we have farmlands beyond where they live. They come to our villages and do their business; they go for mining with our youth, but there are areas that my people cannot go. They have access to our villages, but my people can’t go to their territory. We are having cases of rape, but you can’t hear of a Berom man raping a Fulani woman.
We still have a guerilla war, but peace is in the hands of the Fulani; they have everything. My people have never attacked them, but in this part of the country, there is animal right, we don’t have human right. If an animal is attacked or missing, the whole state will react, but when a human being is killed, nobody says anything because nobody takes the report serious.
Can you put a figure to the number of casualties so far?
Recently, four of our princes were ambushed and killed close to Rim. We have widows in hundreds in this community, and I wish you will come here on a day widows hold their meetings; you will weep. Imagine young women becoming widows, they are in dozens and more than 200. Among the princes killed, are Suntuwa, son of my elder brother, and Danjuma Damuna; all of them are from the royal family, and my house was burnt; the palace was also burnt. There were houses behind this place, but none is standing now; most of the tents used by the military have all been burnt. The herdsmen overran the military and they fled. There was a well furnished bungalow here belonging to my brother, Engineer Dahoro, who was a director in the Federal Ministry of Works; it was leveled, and he died of frustration.
How does government restore peace here?
If government wants to achieve permanent and sustainable peace in the country, people who have forcibly taken over our lands must relinquish them. My fear is that our children, whose parents had been gruesomely murdered, would grow to become terrorists; they would want to avenge what was done to their parents, they would want to fight back. The Federal Government has forgotten Plateau and just concentrating on the Northeast; we have no quarrel with that, but we in Plateau are also part of Nigeria; we should be considered because our people are dying.
We have one of the biggest camps for tin mining in Nigeria; most developed communities in the country were built with resources from tin mining. We had foreign nationals here, in Rim, who bought tin in tons; we have devastated land as a result of tin mining, but government has forgotten that people are living here; the only compensation for our benevolence is allowing terrorists to wipe us out. Currently, there is hunger in the community because we have been deprived of proper farming, and nobody is taking care of the people; the children need school fees, the widows are everywhere with nobody to assist them and those who are farming behind their houses, cattle are busy destroying the crops.
This community is under siege; we sleep with one eye closed. We had STF in the community, but today, we don’t have a single soldier. The youths had a problem with one of the officers and since December 2016, soldiers were redeployed from the community. I have been working round the clock to put an end to this issue; I have met with the sector commander and the overall commander in Jos, on the need to give us security. Also, we had a police outpost, but because of the crisis, they all ran away and the station was shut. So, at the moment, we don’t have any security in this community.
I cannot give an estimate of people living here before the crises, but all I know is that we had people from outside the country who were living here; people from Niger Republic, Chad and Mali, among others. We had Urhobos from Delta, Igbos and Yorubas, who came with the white men for mining; we had people from various states, but they’ve all gone because they couldn’t withstand 15 years of battle. If the securitymen ran away, who do you expect to stay?
