President Tinubu at the Airport meeting.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBehind the scenes, a federal team had been deployed ahead of him to assess the situation and begin community engagement.<\/p>\n
\u201cNOT JUST TO CONSOLE\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the constraints, the President sought to project resolve.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to come here just to commiserate,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to establish peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
He promised justice for victims, invited community leaders to Abuja for further dialogue, and unveiled a plan to deploy 5,000 AI-enabled surveillance cameras across Jos to track perpetrators and prevent future attacks.<\/p>\n
He also emphasized that peace must be negotiated with communities\u2014not imposed from above.<\/p>\n
For some in the hall, the message resonated. The meeting, broadcast live, offered a rare moment of direct engagement between victims and the presidency.<\/p>\n
Outside the airport, however, criticism grew louder.<\/p>\n
Many Nigerians questioned why the President did not visit the affected communities or hospitals. The brevity of the visit – reportedly under an hour – fueled perceptions of detachment.<\/p>\n
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar was among the most vocal critics, calling the visit \u201cinsensitive\u201d and \u201cchoreographed.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a sharply worded statement, he argued that transporting grieving victims to the airport reduced a human tragedy to political optics.<\/p>\n
\u201cA leader who cannot stand with his people in their darkest hour cannot convincingly claim to be fighting for their safety,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The criticism deepened after reports that the President referenced time constraints linked to darkness at the airport and his onward travel plans.<\/p>\n
Government officials insist the criticism overlooks operational realities: aviation safety limits, tight diplomatic schedules, and urgent security coordination.<\/p>\n
They argue that Tinubu\u2019s visit was never meant to be symbolic\u2014but strategic.<\/p>\n
By meeting victims directly, deploying security teams, and initiating dialogue, they say, the President laid groundwork for a longer-term intervention.<\/p>\n
Yet in Plateau, where graves are still fresh, symbolism matters.<\/p>\n
For residents who fled gunfire, for families burying loved ones, and for a mother still holding the memory of her son, presence can feel as important as policy.<\/p>\n
As dusk fell over Heipang, the presidential jet lifted off\u2014leaving behind a state caught between reassurance and resentment.<\/p>\n
Tinubu\u2019s message was clear: the violence must end.<\/p>\n
But in Plateau State, where history has taught communities to measure promises against reality, the question lingers long after the engines fade: Will this moment mark a turning point\u2014or just another chapter in a cycle that refuses to break?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beneath the fading light at the Yakubu Gowon Airport in Heipang, grief arrived before the President. Women clutched photographs. Men spoke in hushed anger. And somewhere in the crowd, a mother who had become the face of the tragedy – captured in a viral video holding the lifeless body of her son, Promise – waited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":98398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5777,7],"tags":[1166,8198,3136,854,8199,56],"class_list":["post-98390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-features","category-news","tag-airport","tag-angwar-rukuba","tag-derby","tag-plateau","tag-promise","tag-tinubu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/98398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}