In May 2023, over 130 people were killed in Mangu Local Government Area, Plateau State, in two days. Farmers. Herders. Villages burned. Bodies in the fields.
The government condemned it. The army deployed. Statements were issued.
Then it happened again somewhere else.
This has been the pattern for decades. Violence. Condemnation. Deployment. Silence. More violence. The Nigerian state has treated one of its deadliest ongoing crises as though it were a weather event something to respond to after it happens, not something to prevent.
By 2021, over 15,000 deaths had been linked to farmer-herder violence, with half of those occurring since 2018. That figure has continued to rise. In that year alone, at least 2,600 deaths were recorded in Nigeria’s north-central and northwest regions surpassing fatalities from the Boko Haram insurgency.
More people have died in this conflict than in Boko Haram. Nigeria barely talks about it.
It was not always like this
This is important. The farmer-herder conflict is not ancient. It is not inevitable. It is not rooted in some permanent incompatibility between two ways of life.
In the pre-colonial era, records of conflict between herders and farmers were lean. The socio-economic interaction between both groups was symbiotic farmers and herders had a stake in the well-being of the opposite group. The symbiosis was characterised by complementarity: cattle entrustment, dung and stubble exchanges, mutually beneficial arrangements that supported increased productivity for both sides.
There was even a governance structure for managing the relationship. A social structure called Ruga was created by some Fulani groups in the pre-colonial era to preserve harmony between both groups. The Ruga was an elected official who regulated grazing activities, selected grazing areas and migratory routes, and took responsibility for conflict resolution between his kinsmen and farming communities.
These systems worked because both groups needed each other. The farmer needed the herder’s cattle for manure and draft power. The herder needed the farmer’s crop residue for dry-season grazing. The relationship was economic, not just cultural. Economic relationships have built-in incentives for peace.
Something destroyed those incentives. Several somethings, in fact.
What the colonial period broke
The colonial period was marked by modifications in the social and physical environment that disrupted pre-existing arrangements.
The British introduced formal land tenure systems that prioritised sedentary farming over nomadic pastoralism. Traditional grazing routes established over generations were cut by railway lines, roads, and agricultural concessions granted to colonial interests. The legal frameworks that had governed land use under the emirate system were replaced with colonial structures that did not account for the movement of livestock across seasons.
The 1978 Land Use Act, inherited from the colonial framework, vested all land in state governments. This was meant to rationalise land ownership. What it did instead was eliminate the customary rights through which both farmers and herders had historically negotiated access to land. With no legal recognition of traditional grazing routes, herders became trespassers on land their ancestors had used for generations. With no legal mechanism to enforce crop protection, farmers had no recourse when livestock destroyed their fields.
The law created a vacuum. Into that vacuum, violence moved.
What climate has done to the conflict
The colonial dismantling of traditional land governance would have been damaging enough on its own. Climate change has turned a damaged system into a catastrophic one.
Underpinning the escalation in frequency of conflicts in Nigeria is a confluence of environmental and demographic forces especially desertification caused by climate change and population explosion. With the depletion of arable land as a result of climate change, especially along the Lake Chad basin, there is increased struggle between herdsmen and farmers.
Lake Chad has shrunk by approximately 90 percent since the 1960s. The Sahara Desert is advancing southward at an estimated 0.6 kilometres per year across the Sahel. The effect of desertification has already put pressure on the industry, leading to a decline in food production that has negatively affected food security and inflation. The economic impact of desertification has pushed pastoralists further south, threatening cultivated fields and forcing pastoralists to rely on illicit means to provide for their herds.
A Fulani herdsman whose grandfather grazed cattle in land that is now desert does not disappear. He moves. He moves south. He moves onto land that farmers are already using. He is not doing this because he wants conflict. He is doing this because the land his livelihood depended on no longer exists.
As climate change stretches Nigeria’s dry seasons and disrupts traditional grazing patterns, tensions between nomadic herders and settled farmers fuel violent conflict most intensely just before the planting season. Despite policy efforts such as open-grazing bans, violence has surged, highlighting the failure of exclusionary approaches.
Banning open grazing without providing an alternative does not solve the herder’s problem. It criminalises his survival.
What religion and ethnicity have done to the story
The farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria has been told, in much of the media and in much political discourse, as a religious and ethnic conflict. Muslim Fulani herders against Christian farmers. Northerners against Southerners.
This framing is not entirely wrong. Religion and ethnicity shape how communities identify their enemies and mobilise for retaliation. But it is dangerously incomplete.
Events in the 19th century helped shape today’s violence between mainly Muslim Fulani cattlemen and largely Christian farmers a battle of blood and identity. Historical grievances exist. They are real. But they do not explain why a conflict that was manageable in the colonial period has become catastrophic in the post-independence era.
The answer is not religion. The answer is resources. Specifically, shrinking resources and an absent state.
When land is abundant and the state provides mechanisms for resolving disputes, religion and ethnicity are not enough to sustain large-scale violence. When land becomes scarce, when the state disappears from rural communities, when there is no court to go to and no law that actually applies to your situation then existing identities become weapons. The Fulani herdsman is no longer just a competitor for land. He becomes a Muslim enemy. The farmer is no longer just a person whose crops are being destroyed. He becomes a Christian aggressor.
The conflict did not start with religion. Religion has been recruited to make it worse and harder to end.
What evidence-based policy would look like
There are known solutions to this crisis. They are not cheap. They are not politically easy. But they exist, and other countries have implemented versions of them.
The first is the restoration of legal grazing routes. Nigeria has over 400 gazetted grazing reserves land set aside specifically for pastoral use. Most of them have been encroached upon by farming, development, or simple neglect. Restoring and enforcing these reserves would give herders legal land without needing to move onto farmland. The 2013 Great Green Wall Agency was established to tackle desertification but without simultaneous restoration of grazing reserves, the agency addresses the symptom without addressing what herders do when their land disappears.
The second is ranching incentives. Countries with large pastoral populations Kenya, Ethiopia, Botswana have moved significant portions of their herding communities toward sedentary ranching through subsidies, land allocation, and technical support. The cattle end up in one place. The conflict over migration routes ends. Nigeria has debated this. It has not implemented it at scale.
The third is functioning rural courts. The farmer whose crops are destroyed by cattle needs a legal remedy that does not involve picking up a machete. The herder whose cattle are killed by vigilantes needs a legal remedy that does not involve burning a village. Neither of these legal remedies currently exists in most of rural Nigeria. Magistrates courts in rural areas, with clear jurisdiction over land and livestock disputes, staffed and funded to function this is not complicated governance. It is basic state provision that Nigeria has failed to deliver.
The fourth is climate adaptation support for herders. Desertification is not going to reverse itself in the relevant timeframe. Herders need support in transitioning to new livelihoods, new locations, or new methods. Criminalising their movement without supporting their transition is not a policy. It is an eviction notice written in blood.
Who pays when nothing changes
The dead in Mangu are not statistics to their families. They are fathers and mothers and children who woke up one morning and did not survive the day.
The human cost of farmer-herder violence has been immense, surpassing even the toll of the Boko Haram insurgency. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives or have been forced to flee their homes.
Nigeria’s agriculture sector represented 28.65 percent of GDP in the third quarter of 2024. The violence is destroying it — fields abandoned because it is not safe to farm, livestock killed in reprisal attacks, communities displaced from their agricultural land. The economic cost of this conflict is not just the deaths. It is the food that is not grown, the income that is not earned, the investment that does not happen in regions where security cannot be guaranteed.
A state that cannot protect its farmers cannot feed its people. A state that cannot protect its herders cannot maintain its livestock sector. Nigeria is failing on both counts simultaneously, in a country where agriculture is the livelihood of most of its people.
This is not a religious conflict waiting for a spiritual solution. It is a governance failure waiting for a government that decides to govern.
