TARABA AT 35: AN ANNIVERSARY WE CANNOT CELEBRATE IN GOOD CONSCIENCE
By Vincent Tortsugh, Esq.
On 27 August 1991, Taraba was carved out of the old Gongola State. Thirty-five years later, the anniversary speeches have come and gone — the tributes to unity, the pledges of progress, the customary parade of banners. I read the tribute marking this milestone with real sympathy for its author, because the question underneath it is one I have been asking in my own way for years, in courtrooms and in petitions rather than in newspaper columns: thirty-five years on, what exactly has the state done with the lives entrusted to it? It is not a rhetorical question. It has a body count.
A STATE DEFINED BY WHO IS MISSING
Ask a farmer in the Wukari axis, or a displaced family from Donga, or a widow in Takum, what statehood has meant to them, and you will not hear about local government autonomy or revenue allocation. You will hear about the year they buried a husband. The year the farm went fallow because it was too dangerous to plant. The year the children stopped going to school because the school became a displacement camp for someone else’s children first.
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I have sat with clients in Wukari LGA facing eviction from land their families have held for generations — not because a court found against them, but because a military barracks was proposed on top of an unresolved dispute nobody in government had the patience to actually resolve. I have drafted petitions on behalf of citizens assaulted by the very officers meant to protect them, and watched those petitions join a queue of others describing the same pattern in different names. This is not a state under construction. In too many local government areas, it is a state in retreat — present enough to issue statements of condemnation, absent when it comes to the slower, harder work of preventing the next atrocity.
THE GAP BETWEEN THE COMMUNIQUÉ AND THE COMPOUND
Every attack in Taraba is followed by the same choreography: a government delegation visits, a condolence statement is issued, security votes are quietly increased, and a promise is made that “those responsible will be brought to justice.” I have yet to see the justice. What I have seen is a pattern where victims — Tiv, Jukun, Fulani, whoever the community of the week happens to be — are asked to bury their dead and then wait for a peace committee whose recommendations rarely survive contact with the next election cycle.
Thirty-five years is long enough to know the difference between governing and managing appearances. A government that wanted to change the trajectory of insecurity in Wukari, Takum, Donga, Ussa, and Gassol would have done what every serious government does with a recurring problem: fund the security architecture properly, prosecute perpetrators regardless of ethnic or political cover, and resolve the underlying land and grazing disputes through a transparent, documented process rather than through whichever traditional or political intermediary happens to have the ear of the moment. None of that requires 35 years. It requires will.
DEVELOPMENT ON PAPER, DANGER ON THE GROUND
I do not dispute that roads have been built and certificates of anniversaries duly issued. But a state cannot claim development while its farmers are afraid to reach their farms, and it cannot claim unity while entire communities remain internally displaced within their own state, sometimes for years, waiting for a resettlement policy that exists mostly as a line item. The National Ranching Policy now being rolled out federally will make this worse, not better, for communities in Taraba already carrying the weight of unresolved displacement — it proposes to solve a land conflict by intensifying the very land pressure that caused it, without first securing the rights of those already dispossessed.
WHAT THIRTY-FIVE YEARS SHOULD HAVE TAUGHT US
A state is not measured by how loudly it speaks at its own anniversary. It is measured by whether its citizens can plant a farm, send a child to school, and bury a natural death rather than a violent one, without asking government’s permission first. On the balance of that measure, Taraba at 35 has more mourning to do than celebrating.
This is not a call for despair. It is a call for the government of Taraba State to treat the next year differently from the last thirty-five: to prosecute rather than merely condemn, to resettle rather than merely count the displaced, to consult communities on land policy before imposing it on them, and to remember that a state’s legitimacy is renewed not by its founding date but by what it does for the people who never asked to be counted among its statistics.
Taraba deserves a government that wants something more for its people’s lives than survival until the next anniversary.
— Vincent Tortsugh, Esq.
