By RismadarVoice Media, December 10, 2025
A serving member of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Orkeghen Philip Aondofa, has issued a heart‑rending cry for help after armed herders allegedly invaded his village, New‑Gboko (Nyugoko) in Peva–Chanchanji Ward, Takum Local Government Area of Taraba State, killing his father and four other members of his family.
Philip, currently serving in Enugu State, spoke to newsmen, recounting a tragedy he says the Taraba State Government has refused to acknowledge, even as the entire communities are being wiped out.
According to him, the attackers stormed the village on November 27, 2025, unleashing terror that forced all surviving residents to flee.
The killers, he said, have remained in the village since then, occupying homes and farmlands, making it impossible for survivors to return, not even to recover the carcasses of their loved ones.
“After the attack, one of them took my father’s phone and called me,” Philip recounted.
“When I asked where the owner of the phone was, he replied that my father was killed by him, directly!
I broke down and ended the call.”
The corps member said the inability to retrieve his father’s corpse has pushed him into deeper despair.
“What gets me so devastated is how I will have my father’s body for burial.
Those herders are still there. Nobody is left in my village” he lamented!
Philip, who is nearing completion of his NYSC programme, now says he feels stranded, penniless, and homeless, having lost not just his family, but the very community he was meant to return to.
“After my service, I don’t know where to go. I don’t know where to start. I am calling on the Federal Government and those concerned to come to my aid. I am broken and hopeless.”
As of the time of filing this report, the Taraba State government has made no public statement on the killings, a silence that is already fuelling outrage among residents of Takum and surrounding areas, who accuse authorities of abandoning them to the mercy of armed groups.
Over the years, Takum and its environs have come under repeated attacks, with villagers insisting that early warnings and desperate pleas are consistently ignored until lives are lost, communities are erased.
Philip’s story, many fear, may become yet another statistic in a long chain of massacres that never receive justice, accountability or even acknowledgement.
