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Averting looming consequences of Fulani herdsmen attacks 06 Mar 2017

Between 2009 when Mohammed Yusuf, founder of the Boko Haram sect, was killed and now, the death toll arising from Boko Haram insurgency approximates 20,000. That makes the yearly deaths 2,500. This is very significant. But there is another death toll that has been rising since 2015 from a different crisis in the Middle Belt and a number of other regions of Nigeria. The death toll from attacks by herdsmen stands at nearly 5,000, rivalling the killings by Boko Haram insurgents per year. Unfortunately, this crisis has largely been officially ignored.
    
Over the last three years, my organisation has covered a lot of ground and put a spotlight on the pastoral conflict. The initial information we received came from personal interactions and encounters with survivors online and offline, together with sparse reports on the violence in the press. We have subsequently visited and interviewed survivors of the conflict, some of whom are at Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, and curated as much casualty figures from all the reports we could find. We have also visited the markets in Lagos where agricultural produce from the affected regions are sold in order to assess the economic impact of the violence.

We have analysed the root causes of the violence, its recent escalation, the government’s reaction as well as the reactions of the affected communities with regard to finding solutions. There is a sense from the communities that they have been abandoned by the government. Hardliners in the affected communities believe that resorting to violent self-help is the only way forward.

Devastated communities

Agatu, Ukpabi-Nimbo, and Godogodo are names that many Nigerians would have hitherto been unfamiliar with. In 2016, all three communities were thrust into the national consciousness. Our research paints a grim picture of methodical violence being perpetrated by herdsmen against various communities. As the violent herdsmen steadily advance southwards, they are facing increasing violence from cattle-rustlers, coupled with the spectre of declining grazing resources.

Attitudes towards the Fulani, which is the ethnicity of the majority of the herdsmen, are hardening, and there is evidence of diminishing confidence in the ability of the Nigerian security forces to guarantee law and order.  The social, religious and political conditions that created and have helped engender the crisis has left both sides – the heavily armed nomads and devastated communities – with little hope that the government, both federal and the affected states, can do anything significantly to safeguard lives and property.

During our research into the Ukpabi-Nimbo attack in April 2016, we found that the community had been forewarned. This necessarily brought up the question: how many other communities had been warned ahead of time, and to what extent are the attacks escalating?

Historical overview of attacks

Over the last seven years, there have been incidents in various states, from Rivers to Zamfara. The majority of these incidents have been in Benue, Nasarawa, Plateau and Taraba States. But it is important to look at the data on the attacks to get a sense of the difference between recent attacks and what has historically occurred as farmer-herdsmen clashes. Between 1997 and 2010, there were a total of 18 reported attacks, with most of them taking place in the North-East.

The four-year period between 2011 and 2015 saw an escalation. There were 371 incidents, with the epicentre of the pastoral conflict being in the Middle-Belt. Plateau State in the Middle-Belt, recorded the highest casualty count during this period. However, during this period, the attacks spread to all three geopolitical zones (GPZs) in Southern Nigeria. Delta, Oyo and Enugu States were the hardest hit in each of the Southern GPZs.

In too many cases, the casus belli is the same. It starts with reports that a community stole cattle from Fulani herdsmen, prompting retribution from the herdsmen. Up until the third quarter of 2016, members of the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, an organisation that purports to represent the interests of cattle farmers and nomadic herdsmen, often claimed responsibility for the attacks. Despite this acknowledgement, not one member of the group has, to my knowledge, been interrogated by the state security forces following such claims. This, more than any other, has led to a hardening of attitudes among the affected communities – some of whom have responded by forming ethnic militia to address the "Fulani problem."

Nowhere have these ethnic militia been more successful, thus far, than in Plateau State, where a "peace of the graveyard" currently reigns between the Tarok and Berom on the one hand, and the Fulani on the other hand. Since at least 2013, elements of the Tarok have been responsible for attacks on settler Fulani communities, many of whom were themselves innocent of atrocities committed by their nomadic kin. The Tarok response, and they have in some cases collaborated with the Junkun in Taraba, appears to be coordinated. The aim appears to be about creating a sort of buffer between themselves and the Fulani.

Why should we care?

The area known as the Middle-Belt in Nigeria, is largely rural. A drive from Abuja to Enugu takes you through large swathes of villages, which were once viable farming communities – and which unknown to many urban Nigerians, especially those based in the South, are largely responsible for feeding the country. This is the reason the area is called Nigeria’s “Food Basket.”

Because most of Nigeria’s elite and middle-class are based in the urban agglomerations of Lagos-Ibadan, Abuja, Enugu-Onitsha, Port Harcourt-Aba and Kano-Kaduna, along with the mid-sized towns and cities littered across the entire South, we tend not to see the predicament of these rural poor. As a result, we can hardly relate to their concerns in an intelligent and nuanced way.

This continuing conflict affects us in more ways than just food production. For example, in the transport sector, it is important to note that as the federal government attempts to resuscitate the Nigerian rail service, both major rail lines – the Western Line linking Nguru in Yobe State and Kaura Namoda in Zamfara State to Lagos; and the Eastern Line, which links Maiduguri to Port Harcourt – intersect by means of a link line from Jos, in Plateau State. This link line also passes through Kafanchan, the core of the current herdsmen-related conflict in Southern Kaduna.

Therefore, a resuscitation plan for rail service that does not include solving this security breakdown will inevitably lead to bigger problems as witnessed by the kidnap of two Germans in Southern Kaduna in the week of February 20, 2017. Passengers on the trains, many who are likely to be middle-class, will probably be moving goods and services across the region, or from North to South, or vice-versa. They would be potential casualties in a hypothetical clash between herdsmen and settler communities.

Another problem that this conflict will intensify is a large rural-urban drift. Those who live in the urban areas of the South, for instance, would observe that there are more people of Northern extraction moving into the cities. This is unsustainable both in the short- to medium-term as the slummification of our major cities will only intensify. In the long-term, this North-South drift will bring its attendant conflicts as various cultures collide and clash, and as the demographic weight invariably shifts in favour of these indigent Northerners. There is the potential for the crisis to escalate as more people compete more fiercely for ever-dwindling resources.

The other concern is that most of the people who are on the move are the young and strong – those who should be able to farm the land. This is having an impact on food production in the Middle-Belt region. Moreover, a decline in food production has an impact on employment and income generation in states that, even by Nigeria’s abysmal standards, are some of the poorest in the federation. If this trend goes on unchecked, questions about the country’s overall food security will arise, with the attendant geopolitical and security implications.

Can the government do more?

Clearly, the government can do a lot more. But it first has to acknowledge that this crisis is a matter of national security. Then the government has to develop an overarching national strategy to address the issue, deploying significant military, intelligence, and police resources to restore public safety and order in trouble spots.

The governors of the affected states should stop addressing the Fulani herdsmen as foreigners. It is a losing strategy, which ostensibly seeks to absolve the state governments of any responsibility in containing the crisis. Unfortunately, absolving themselves has had the unintended effect of stoking fears of ethnic bias by Nigerian officialdom.

If the marauders are indeed foreigners, it represents a failure of the federal government to adequately police our borders and it leads to a simple question: if our political leaders know for a fact that these rampaging herdsmen are non-Nigerians, why has it been tough for them to simply deport them? In any case, determining the nationality of people who have no interface with the formal economy and probably no official means of identification, is nigh to impossible.

In the final analysis, the Middle-Belt conflict, like the more dominant security challenges Nigeria has had to face since the turn of the millennium, such as the Boko Haram insurgency and the Niger Delta militancy, is fundamentally rooted in the broken economic conditions that have consigned millions of Nigerians to a life of penury and poverty. For many, their fate is, to put it very simply, bleak. Faced with growing population pressures, dwindling access to increasingly scarce resources and failed government policies, many have resorted to fending for themselves.