Attention Nigeria: Capturing new life of Zaki, Benue King now in IDP Camp

By Stephanie Shaakaa, Benue

Twenty-five years ago, Zaki Terungwa Gwaza Bunde, the clan head of Mbatyav in Shitile, Benue State, woke before dawn because the land was waiting.

Yam fields stretched beyond the eye. Cassava stood in disciplined rows, promising food for months. Children followed him into the fields, baskets swinging, laughter rising with the roosters. The earth responded to touch. The seasons kept their word. So did the king. Today, he wakes at the same hour not to farm, but to queue.

The line is long. Sun presses down on canvas tents. Dust coats bare feet. The hands that once blessed harvests and settled disputes now clutch ration cards. The tools that once carved dignity from soil lie abandoned, rusting where fear forced him to leave. A clan head. A king. Waiting for handouts.

You cannot plant when you are running,he says. And he is still running.

Back then, farming was certainty. Rain arrived when expected.

Children learned to plant before they learned arithmetic. A good harvest meant food, trade, and surplus.
Even when there was little, there was rhythm. Hunger existed, but it was temporary, an interruption, not a condition.

We knew what tomorrow would bring, Zaki says.

Even when there was little, it was enough.

The farm was never just livelihood. It was identity. Authority. Continuity. Leadership stitched into every yam mound and cassava shoot. The land conferred dignity because it demanded responsibility.

Now, the land exists only as memory.

Insecurity turned fields into risk zones.

Rumours hardened into names. Names became danger. Returning to harvest meant gambling a life no compensation could replace. Crops were left standing mid-season. Tools dropped where fear arrived faster than rain.

There is nothing to harvest here, he says in the camp.
Not even my patience.

Zaki’s displacement is not exceptional. Across Benue and Taraba farmers face the same cruel arithmetic, leave or die. But there is a deeper insult here. When a clan head is reduced to an IDP number, dignity itself is displaced.
With every abandoned farm, Nigeria loses more than food. It loses memory. Skill. Authority. Continuity.

Food aid may arrive in trucks, but food security is not charity. It is protection. Stability. Infrastructure. None of these live in a camp. Nigeria debates food inflation daily. Prices rise. Markets complain. Analysts argue. Rarely does the country ask the most important question. Where did the farmers go and why are their kings now in queues?

When farmers stop farming, prices do not just rise. They mutate. Yam becomes luxury. Cassava becomes compromise. Meals shrink. Children sleep hungry not because the land is poor, but because production has been strangled where it should have been strongest.

When farmers stop farming, Zaki says, food becomes a story people tell.

Benue is still called the food basket of the nation.On paper. On the ground, many of the hands that fed Nigeria are idle. Fields lie fallow. Crops rot where farms still exist. Markets bustle with inflated prices while production collapses upstream. The irony is brutal: the people who once fed a nation now wait to be fed.

There are no durable solutions. No meaningful resettlement. No protection that allows return. Only reactive aid. Emergency replacing policy. Camps replacing communities. Dependency replacing dignity.
Zaki still knows when the rains should come. His body remembers seasons his land no longer sees. He is a living archive of abundance now stranded in dependency.

The cruelty is complete: a clan head who once fed thousands now queues for rations.
‘You people in the media attach numbers to those killed by these criminal herdsmen,’ he says.
‘I attach faces. Names. Because they were family, not statistics’.

Numbers cannot feel grief. Names can. Figures fade. Faces do not.

Zaki used to wake before sunrise not because life was desperate, but because leadership required discipline. Farming was knowledge passed from palm to palm. He knew the smell of rain before it fell. His father taught him that land does not reward haste, it rewards care.

Then fear arrived where rain once did. Today, he still wakes early. But the sound that greets him is no longer birds over farmland. It is the restless shuffle of an IDP camp. No barns. No fields. Just queues.

In the camp, he is no longer introduced as a clan head. He is an “IDP.” A label that erases authority, history, and pride in one word. His hands still remember leadership. Now they hold plates that may or may not be filled.
This is the human face of Nigeria’s food inflation. Inflation has a voice. It sounds like a king displaced from his land.

It looks like children eating once a day in a state still mockingly called the food basket of the nation.
You cannot displace farmers and expect cheap food.

You cannot turn producers and their leaders into refugees and ask why markets fail.

In the camp, hunger is visible. The deeper wound is identity. A ruler reduced to ration days. A man who once measured time by harvests now measures life by aid distribution. The damage is psychological, generational, and compounding.

When the cameras leave, Zaki remains.

So does the camp.

So does the silence.

Until Nigeria understands that food security begins with human security, this story will not end.
It will multiply.

Quietly.
Cruelly.
Expensively.

And hunger will stop being an emergency.

It will become policy.

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