My heart is heavy, and my spirit is shaken.
What we are reading and hearing from Gidado, between Ndu and Ntumbaw, is not a clash, not a reprisal, and not an unfortunate consequence of war. It is the deliberate hunting down and extermination of a family. Women. Children. Elderly people. Even a baby,killed simply because of who they are.This is not resistance. This is not struggle. It is cruelty stripped of all justification after ngarbuh, we said never again. We said it with grief and with hope that such horror would not repeat itself.
Yet today, it is Gidado. Tomorrow, whose name will we be forced to learn through blood and tears?When did we sink so low that human beings are slaughtered like animals? When did killing women and children become something anyone could explain away, excuse, or normalize? These are not rhetorical questions; they are a mirror held up to our collective conscience.
The systematic targeting of Mbororo families, the burning of homes, the killing of cattle, and the terrorization of entire communities cannot be wrapped in political language. There is nothing political about murdering a family into extinction. There is nothing strategic about wiping out children.
Violence against civilians is not a tactic,it is a crime.This violence dishonours every cause it claims to serve. No struggle,political, ideological, or otherwise,can be purified by the blood of innocents. What remains is a stain that no rhetoric can cleanse, a wound that deepens mistrust and passes trauma from one generation to the next.I am angry. I am grieving. And I refuse to be silent.We must say it clearly and without fear: this is wrong. It is criminal. It is inhuman. And it must stop. Silence, denial, or justification in the face of such brutality is not neutrality; it is complicity.
Peace cannot be built on the graves of children. Freedom cannot be born from the blood of families. And no future is possible when we continue to choose death over life.When will the morning break? When will our tears dry?Only when we decide, collectively, that no cause is worth the destruction of our own humanity. Only when we choose to protect the vulnerable, reject violence against civilians in all its forms, and demand accountability without exception.
When a family is eradicated, humanity fails. Our task—urgent and unavoidable—is to ensure that this failure does not define who we are, nor the future we leave behind.
By Omam Esther Eringo Cha Ekombo,Global Peace Champion
