The 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Adewole Adebayo, has criticised President Bola Tinubu for not visiting Yelewata town in Benue State where scores of residents were killed by vicious marauders last Friday.
Tinubu visited Benue on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, to sympathise with the people of the state over the killings of innocent residents by suspected killer herdsmen.
“I aborted my visit to Yelewata town because of the rain, flood and bad roads,” Tinubu had said during his visit to Makurdi, the state capital.
SDP’s Adebayo said the president’s excuse was not tenable. “He (the president) should have made sure that come rain, come shine, he got to the venue of the attack, Yelewata, and he saw the people.
“He cannot say as commander-in-chief, there is a part of the country that is unreachable by you. People are living there,” Adebayo said.
The politician also said the president’s visit was politicised and that the number one citizen should have been more empathetic to the plight of the people.
He said, “Going to a place of mourning that even during the Nigerian civil war, it would be newsworthy if there were 200 lives lost at one time.
“So, such a place is a somber occasion and he is in charge of all the people who followed him there.
“But what do you get there? It was like another political rally. That sombreness was not there.
“The president should have gone there as a chief mourner and his language should have been somber and his language should have been better controlled.”
Last Friday, scores of residents in the Yelewata area in Benue were killed and over 3000 persons displaced during an overnight attack by suspected herdsmen. Though the government put the number of slain persons at 59, civil rights groups claimed that about 200 deaths were recorded.
The killings in Benue have attracted national outrage and global attention from Pope Leo XIV, who condemned the “terrible massacre” and called for an end to it.
