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The Honourable member representing Kwande/Ushongo Federal Constituency, Rt. Hon. Terseer Ugbor, has dropped a bombshell that should shame every level of leadership in Benue State.
Appearing on Arise Television Thursday morning, the lawmaker bluntly told Nigerians that the official numbers being bandied about for Internally Displaced Persons in Benue are heavily massaged, deliberately understated, and do not come close to reflecting the scale of human suffering on ground.
“The figures you are hearing are lies,” Ugbor said. “The real number of our people rotting in those camps, the real number of villages that have been sacked and remain occupied, the real depth of this crisis is far, far worse than what is being reported.”
He accused both state and federal agencies of playing politics with human misery, deliberately downplaying the statistics so that budgetary allocations remain low and accountability remains zero.
Ugbor, who moves regularly between Abuja and the bush camps in his constituency, painted a grim picture: new arrivals streaming in weekly, children dying quietly of malnutrition and preventable diseases, women giving birth under leaking plastic sheets, and an entire generation growing up knowing only life behind camp fences.
“While we argue about numbers in air-conditioned offices, people are dying in silence,” he charged.
The Kwande/Ushongo representative challenged the Benue State Government and the National Emergency Management Agency to come clean with fresh, verifiable data instead of recycling outdated and manipulated figures that make the crisis look “manageable.”
His outburst is already generating heated reactions across the state, with many asking the uncomfortable question: if a sitting federal lawmaker says the official numbers are fake, who then is telling the truth, and why has the humanitarian catastrophe in Benue been allowed to fester this long?
One thing is clear tonight: Hon. Terseer Ugbor has thrown down the gauntlet. The people are waiting to see who will pick it up.
