There was once a Benue we all understood too well.
A Benue where suffering had become so familiar that it no longer shocked anybody.
We woke up to bad roads the same way we woke up to sunlight, and nobody complained too loudly anymore because complaining itself had become exhausting.
The potholes had names — I am emphatic about Achusa and Welfare Quarters roads. Me and my friends named them according to valleys of the earth. They had histories and reputations of their own. Some were so deep that motorists approached them with prayer and caution. During the rainy season, certain roads transformed into rivers with ambitions of becoming seas.
People adapted. Human beings — especially Nigerians — always do.
Mechanics smiled more than civil servants, legitimately. Drivers developed the reflexes of fighter pilots, dodging craters from Agbadu to Wurukum. Vehicle owners stopped asking what was wrong with their cars and simply asked mechanics, “How much again?”
That was the life we knew.
Salary delays became part of our calendar. Pensioners sat quietly with fading hope, staring at phones that rarely rang with alerts. Gratuities sounded like myths from another generation, while young people mastered the art of surviving disappointment.
Markets struggled. Communities adjusted themselves to neglect. And slowly, painfully, Benue people learned not to expect too much from government. It was safer that way because hope had become a very dangerous act.
Then something strange began to happen.
Roads that had humiliated drivers for years started changing shape. Construction equipment appeared in places people had already given up on. Dusty, broken paths slowly began turning into smooth stretches of asphalt.
At first, many thought it was the usual political drama that disappears after camera flashes. But the machines kept moving. The roads kept extending and, shockingly, the work continued.
Civil servants began receiving salaries with a consistency that felt unfamiliar. Pensioners who had nearly forgotten the sound of bank alerts suddenly remembered it again. Traders began speaking with cautious optimism. Transporters noticed they were spending less time repairing vehicles destroyed by roads that once looked like abandoned battlefields.
Something was changing in Benue, and many people did not know how to react to it.
The strange thing about prolonged suffering is that people eventually arrange their lives around it. They build emotional furniture inside hardship. They normalize pain until discomfort becomes culture.
Benue had done this for years. We had mastered survival so completely that development itself began to feel suspicious.
And perhaps that is the real offense here.
Because how does a man enter a state already accustomed to disappointment and begin disrupting the order of things? How do you interrupt years of hopelessness with visible projects? How do you tamper with a people who had carefully trained themselves not to expect governance?
Even conversations at beer parlors have changed. The old discussions filled with bitterness and resignation are gradually being replaced with arguments about projects, infrastructure and possibilities.
That alone is dangerous.
Expectations are rising again, and people are beginning to believe government can actually function. This is not the Benue many people were used to.
We were familiar with leaders who specialized in promises and disappeared into silence after elections. We understood that script perfectly.
We also knew it was time to relocate to International Market and nearby schools once the rains started as “flood victims,” where rice, garri and Indomie would suddenly appear. Somehow, that cycle of dependency had become predictable, comfortable and even beneficial to those with “long legs,” despite the state’s painful stagnation.
But now, the script has changed, and some people are deeply unsettled by it.
Makurdi breathes differently now. Roads are opening up. Movement no longer feels like punishment. Communities long ignored are beginning to feel seen again. The atmosphere itself seems confused, as though the state is struggling to recognize its own reflection.
And so, after careful observation, there is only one conclusion left:
Fr. Hyacinth Iormem Alia must be punished.
Punished thoroughly. Punished decisively. Punished in a way Benue has never punished anybody before.
Come 2027, the people must gather together and sentence him with overwhelming votes, so that he may remain confined inside Government House until 2031, continuing the very “offenses” that disrupted the long-standing peace between Benue people and suffering.
After all, if a man insists on building roads, paying salaries, remembering pensioners and making people believe in governance again, then surely there must be consequences.
Akpehe D.Israel, writes from Makurdi
Akpehe D.Israel: Father Alia must be punished!! Punished severely