By Ihie Grace
Three persons were killed and houses razed in a bloody clash between the youths of Ijegwu and Ojantele in Obi and Otukpo over Electricity outage in Benue State.
It was gathered that the crisis between the communities erupted on Monday morning over three days of electricity outage by the Jos Electricity Distribution Company, JED.
According to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity, the youths of Ijegwu suspected that Otukpo youths had sabotaged the high tension line which supplies power to Obi and Oju at a JED Isolation Switch located near Ijegwu community.
Speaking on the issue, the Otukpo Regional Manager of JED, Olaniyi Ogunmakinya said, “What actually happened is that there is what we call isolators, which we use to segment our network if there are problems on our lines in some areas.
“We use it to isolate those areas and allow others to have an electricity supply, while we work on the areas that have problems.
“We have that isolator located towards the end of Otukpo Local Government linking Obi.
“When it rained a few days ago and we had our lines destroyed, we had to isolate the affected areas to enable us to work on the lines.
“But unfortunately, whenever we do this to repair the lines, the people on the Obi Local Government side will not be happy that we are isolating them to repair the lines; they would prefer that everyone is denied power supply instead of isolating them alone before the repairs”.
Reacting, the Adutu Obi, His Royal Highness Chris Ijale and his Otukpo counterpart, Samuel Onu sued for peace between the affected communities stating that, stakeholders from both Areas are on top of the matter with a view to bringing an end to the unfortunate development.
When contacted, the Benue state Police Public Relations Officer SP Catherine Anene, who confirmed the development said, she was yet to get full details of what happened.