The Herder-Farmer Crisis: A Clash of Livelihoods

They aren't fighting over grass and water alone. They are fighting over who gets to define Nigeria's future.

The Body Count

On Christmas Eve 2023, armed men moved through villages in Bokkos and Barkin Ladi Local Government Areas of Plateau State with a coordination that suggested military-level planning. SBM Intelligence, in its analysis published days later, noted that the assailants used mobile communications to strike twenty communities simultaneously. By morning, at least 160 people were dead, according to Premium Times and HumAngle reporting. Some local estimates put the figure closer to 200. The attackers burned homes, destroyed yam barns, and drove cattle through the ruins. The Nigerian state maintained a full complement of security agencies on the Plateau. None of them prevented the massacre.

Three weeks later, in January 2024, violence swept through Mangu Local Government Area, leaving dozens more dead and thousands displaced. I drove through Pushit on a morning when the air still smelled of wet ash. At the roadside, a man named Yakubu Adamu sat on a wooden bench outside his burnt house. He was sixty-three years old and had farmed maize and sorghum on that land since he was a boy. The roof was gone. The interior walls were blackened. He did not cry. He looked at the ground and said, "They came at night. We ran into the bush. When we returned in the morning, the cattle were eating what was left of our yam barns." He was not talking about cows. He was talking about a system that had failed to protect him from the moment he was born.

In the Abagena IDP camp outside Makurdi, I met women who had farmed rice in Gwer West Local Government Area before the violence drove them out. They lived in tarpaulin shelters and cooked with firewood collected from the surrounding bush. None of them had received government relief in six months. The camp chairman, a retired teacher named Simon Tarkema, showed me a register with 2,400 names. "These are only the ones who came here," he said. "Many more are living in schools, in churches, in the homes of relatives who cannot feed them. The government counts us when the cameras come. Then they forget."

The displacement crisis has its own political economy. Camp chairmen like Tarkema must negotiate with local government chairmen for food supplies that rarely arrive. International humanitarian organisations, including the International Organisation for Migration, maintain displacement tracking matrices that document the scale of the crisis, but their reports do not translate into sustainable resettlement. The displaced farmers cannot return home because their land is either occupied by herders or too dangerous to cultivate. The herders cannot settle because there are no ranches and no legal grazing routes. Both groups become permanent refugees in their own country, sustained by intermittent charity and forgotten by the state.

The Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker, in its 2024 assessment, documented that farmer-herder clashes claimed approximately 3,000 lives and displaced more than 300,000 Nigerians between 2018 and 2023. The 2024 Nigeria Watch Report, cited by The Guardian Nigeria on 4 March 2026, estimated another 567 deaths linked to such violence across 20 states and the Federal Capital Territory within a single year. These are conservative figures. In rural Nigeria, many killings go unreported because the roads are bad, the mobile networks are down, and the survivors have learned that calling the police often achieves nothing. The Nigeria Security Tracker counts only documented fatalities. The true number is higher, buried in unmarked graves across the Middle Belt and beyond.

The Nigeria Watch Report's figure of 567 deaths in a single year does not capture the full geography of the violence. The report documented fatalities in twenty states, from Adamawa in the Northeast to Ogun in the Southwest, meaning that no region of Nigeria remained untouched. In Taraba State, clashes in Wukari and Ibi Local Government Areas killed dozens in 2024. In Nasarawa State, herders moving through grazing corridors clashed with Tiv farming communities in Lafia. The violence has become a mobile crisis, following the cattle as they move southward in search of pasture that no longer exists in the north.

The spread of violence to twenty states and the FCT in a single year reveals a conflict that has outgrown its regional origins. What began as disputes over dry-season grazing corridors in the Middle Belt has metastasized into a national security crisis. In Oyo State, farmers have clashed with herders moving south from Kwara. In Enugu State, forest reserves have become contested territory between Igbo farmers and armed herding camps. In the Federal Capital Territory itself, abductions linked to herder-bandit collaboration have reached the peri-urban fringes of Abuja. The cattle are no longer just walking through the Middle Belt. They are walking through Nigeria.

The categories that divide farmer and herder in today's Nigeria were sharpened by colonial land policy, but the bullets are fired by Nigerians abandoned by their own state.

The People Without Work

The violence does not emerge from empty air. It grows out of soil that has been poisoned by idleness. The National Bureau of Statistics Labour Force Survey, Q4 2022, recorded unemployment rates that should shame any government: Benue State, 18.4 per cent; Plateau State, 25.3 per cent; Taraba State, 16.2 per cent. These are the all-ages figures. Among youth aged 15 to 24, the rates climb higher, though the NBS has not published a state-level youth breakdown since the methodology revision of 2023. What the numbers describe is a generation with no legitimate employment and plenty of access to weapons.

Plateau State's unemployment rate of 25.3 per cent was the highest among the three states, and it showed. In Jos South Local Government Area, I met young men playing cards outside a shuttered textile mill that had employed their fathers. The mill closed in 2008. None of the card players had held a formal job since graduation. One of them, a twenty-nine-year-old named Philip Dalyop, told me that he had joined a neighbourhood vigilante group not because he hated Fulani herders but because the vigilante group paid N5,000 per month and provided a meal on patrol nights. "It is not a salary," he said. "But it is something. And something is better than sitting in the sun waiting for a government that forgot we exist."

The economics of vigilante membership are rarely discussed in policy circles, but they are decisive. Aondohemba Tersoo's patrol in Guma carried machetes and Dane guns purchased with community contributions. Philip Dalyop's group in Jos South had acquired two AK-47 rifles by 2024, though no one would tell me where they came from. The weapons circulate through the same informal economy that employs the youth who carry them. When the state removes legitimate livelihoods, it does not remove the market. It simply changes what the market sells.

In Guma Local Government Area of Benue State, I met another young man, Aondohemba Tersoo, twenty-six years old, who had finished secondary school in 2018 and had never held a paying job. He was carrying a machete when I met him, not for farming but for a vigilante patrol that guarded his village against night attacks. "If the government cannot give us work," he said, "they cannot complain when we find our own work in protecting what is ours." He spoke softly, without anger, as if stating a law of physics. When the state withdraws employment, it does not withdraw the human need for purpose. It simply redirects that purpose toward the barrel of a gun.

The pastoralist youth face the same desolation from the other side of the fence. In Wase Local Government Area of Plateau State, a Fulani herder in his twenties named Suleiman Abdullahi told me that he had left school after primary six to tend cattle. His family once managed a herd of four hundred. Drought, banditry, and the enclosure of grazing routes had reduced that number to ninety. "The farmers block the paths," he said. "The government builds nothing for us. And when the cattle enter a farm because there is no other road, we are called killers." He had never joined an armed militia, but he understood why some of his cousins had. Idle hands in farming communities become vigilantes. Idle hands in pastoralist communities become armed herders. The state created the idleness. The conflict harvests it.

The Cattle Economy That Refuses to Grow

Nigeria possesses approximately 20 million cattle, according to Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates compiled across various years. This is one of the largest cattle populations in Africa, comparable to Ethiopia and surpassed only by a handful of nations on the continent. Yet in 2024, Nigeria generated only $172,000 from cow exports. Brazil, with superior ranching infrastructure and sustained state investment in agricultural research, earned $9.3 billion from beef exports in the same year. The Guardian Nigeria reported this figure on 4 March 2026. The contrast is not merely embarrassing. It is explanatory.

Brazil did not achieve $9.3 billion through magic. It achieved it through fenced ranching, veterinary supply chains, cold storage, refrigerated transport, export certification systems, and a federal agricultural research institution that has been operating since 1973. Nigeria achieved $172,000 because its cattle economy remains trapped in a pre-industrial model where wealthy urban investors own the herds, poor herders manage them on foot, and no one builds the abattoirs, the roads, or the sanitary infrastructure that would turn cattle into revenue. A Nigerian cow walking through a maize field in Benue is not an export commodity. It is a mobile poverty trap.

The lack of cold chain infrastructure means that most Nigerian beef is sold within hours of slaughter in local markets. There are few export-grade abattoirs. The Nigerian Veterinary Research Institute in Vom, Plateau State, has produced world-class research on livestock disease, but its findings rarely reach the herders in the bush. A pastoralist in Wase does not need a research paper. He needs a borehole, a veterinary clinic, and a road that can carry a refrigerated truck. None of these exist.

The livestock sector contributes roughly 5 to 8 per cent of Nigeria's GDP, according to federal agricultural estimates, yet it receives a fraction of the budgetary attention given to crop agriculture. Between 2015 and 2023, crop production received approximately 75 per cent of federal agricultural budget allocations, while livestock development received less than 15 per cent. This funding imbalance reflects a broader policy bias toward sedentary agriculture despite the significant economic contribution of pastoralism. The state invests in the farmer's fertiliser subsidy while leaving the herder's borehole unfunded, then expresses surprise when their children kill each other.

The breed composition of Nigeria's herd tells part of the story. The white Fulani and Bokolo breeds, prized for their adaptability to tropical conditions, have been crossbred haphazardly without a national breeding programme. Brazil's Nelore and Gir cattle, by contrast, have been systematically improved through decades of state-sponsored research, producing animals that yield more meat per hectare and meet international sanitary standards. Nigeria's 20 million cattle are genetically capable of competing in global markets, but they are managed by herders who cannot access veterinary services and owned by investors who have no interest in export markets. The cattle are not the problem. The ownership structure is.

The pastoralists know the math. A herder in his forties, Fulani, from Wase Local Government Area of Plateau State, told me in February 2024 that he had never met the man who owned the 120 cattle he tended. The owner lived in Abuja and communicated through an agent who visited twice a year. The herder received a monthly stipend of N15,000 and the right to keep a few calves for himself. When the cattle destroyed a farmer's crops, the herder faced the machetes and the arrows. The owner faced nothing. "The cattle are his," the herder said. "The trouble is mine." This is the political economy of Nigerian pastoralism: capital without responsibility, labour without protection, profit without reinvestment.

The farmers, meanwhile, watch their own agricultural output stagnate. Agricultural production in the most affected local government areas of Benue declined by an estimated 40 per cent between 2017 and 2024, according to the Benue State Emergency Management Agency. The state that cannot protect the farmer from the herder also cannot protect the herder from economic collapse. Both groups are trapped in a zero-sum competition for survival, while the capital that owns the cattle and the political power that allocates the land remain safely distant from the killing fields.

A Law Without a Bridge

Benue State tried to solve this by legislation. In November 2017, Governor Samuel Ortom signed the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law. The law banned open grazing across the state and mandated that all livestock be kept in ranches of a minimum size. It established penalties for violators and created a committee to oversee implementation. It was a popular decision among farming communities who had watched their crops destroyed for years with no compensation and no recourse. But the state government built almost no ranching infrastructure. No federal funding arrived to support the transition. The herders who had grazed cattle across the Benue Valley for generations suddenly found their way of life criminalised with nowhere else to go.

The result was predictable. Violence in Benue did not decrease after 2017. It intensified. Farmers who had supported the law found that their crops were still trampled, because herders without ranches had no alternative but to graze illegally or watch their cattle starve. Herders who had lived peacefully in Benue for decades found themselves treated as criminals. By 2024, the Benue State Emergency Management Agency had registered over 1.5 million internally displaced persons from farmer-herder violence, though exact casualty figures remain disputed because state agencies and federal security forces publish different numbers. What is not disputed is that the law was implemented as a prohibition without a bridge.

A farmer in Guma Local Government Area, who gave his name as James Ukor and who had voted for Ortom in 2015, told me in 2024 that he regretted nothing about supporting the law but regretted everything about how it was executed. "They banned the grazing," he said. "But they did not build one ranch. They did not give the herders one alternative. So the herders still come, and now they come angry, and we are still unprotected." A law without infrastructure is not governance. It is provocation.

The law also faced legal challenges. Herders' associations argued that the legislation violated constitutional rights to free movement and economic activity. The federal government, under President Buhari, declined to endorse the law, creating a stand-off between the Benue State government and Abuja that paralysed enforcement. State police and federal security forces operated at cross-purposes. Farmers who expected protection got politics.

Benue was not alone. Taraba State passed its own Open Grazing Prohibition Law in 2017, and Ekiti State had enacted a similar ban even earlier, in 2016. Each law followed the same pattern: popular support from farmers, legal challenge from herders' groups, federal non-cooperation, and implementation without infrastructure. The result was a patchwork of prohibition that criminalised pastoralism in some states while leaving it unregulated in others, pushing herders into states without anti-grazing laws and spreading the conflict rather than containing it. Legislation became a displacement mechanism, not a solution.

Plans That Never Left Abuja

The federal government's response to the crisis has been a series of plans that never left the conference rooms of Abuja. The National Livestock Transformation Plan, approved by the National Economic Council in 2018, envisioned a phased transition from open grazing to ranching, with model ranches in seven pilot states and private-sector partnerships. By 2024, most of these ranches existed only on paper. Budget allocations were minimal and disbursement slower than the desertification creeping southward from the Sahel. No updated grazing reserve inventory has been published by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development since 2016— itself a measure of institutional opacity.

In 2019, the Buhari administration introduced the Rural Grazing Area programme, known as RUGA. The programme proposed settling herders in designated grazing areas across the country, with the federal government providing infrastructure including water, schools, and veterinary clinics. The proposal triggered nationwide protests, particularly in the South, where governors and civil society groups interpreted it as a federal land grab designed to benefit Fulani herders at the expense of indigenous farming communities. Protesters in Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Enugu marched with placards rejecting what they called "land colonisation." President Muhammadu Buhari suspended the programme within weeks. The suspension demonstrated that the herder-farmer conflict was no longer just a Middle Belt problem. It had become a national polarising force, capable of shutting down policy before it could be tested.

The RUGA protests revealed how deeply the herder-farmer conflict had penetrated Nigeria's political imagination. Governors of southern states issued statements rejecting any federal grazing settlement on their land. The Ondo State government threatened to arrest herders who entered forest reserves. The Enugu State House of Assembly passed its own anti-open-grazing law within months of the RUGA suspension. The message was clear: the southern states would not accept a federal solution that they perceived as favouring one ethnic group. The northern states, meanwhile, accused the south of ethnic profiling and demanded federal intervention to protect pastoralist rights. The federation was pulling apart at the seams, and the cattle were still walking.

The failure of RUGA and the stagnation of the NLTP leave Nigeria with no national livestock policy worthy of the name. What exists is a patchwork of state laws—some banning grazing, some attempting to revive grazing reserves, most unenforced—through which pastoralists must navigate like migrants crossing hostile borders. The Land Use Act of 1978 vests control over all land in state governors, but no governor has used that power to create a viable dual system that protects both the farmer's crop and the herder's route. The federal government blames the states. The states blame the federal government. The cattle keep walking, and the crops keep burning.

The Nigeria Governors' Forum has deliberated on the NLTP and RUGA repeatedly since 2018, but the deliberations have produced more communiques than ranches. Southern governors have demanded that ranching be made compulsory nationwide. Northern governors have resisted, citing the cost of transition and the cultural significance of pastoralism. The forum's inability to agree on a common approach reflects the same national polarisation that killed RUGA in 2019. Federalism, in this case, has become a mechanism for paralysis rather than adaptation.

The NLTP's pilot states were supposed to demonstrate what ranching could achieve. Kaduna State was selected as a flagship, with promises of model ranches in Kachia and Jema'a Local Government Areas. By 2024, the Kachia ranch had a fence and a borehole but no sustained funding for operations. Plateau State was also designated a pilot, but the ranching site in Bassa Local Government Area stalled after the first phase of land clearing because the state could not secure matching funds from the federal government. The private-sector partnerships that the NLTP promised never materialised, because no investor would commit capital to a sector where land tenure is uncertain, security is non-existent, and government policy reverses every election cycle.

The Investors Behind the Herders

Dr. Bukar Usman, a researcher at the Centre for Information Technology and Development in Kano, has spent years arguing that the entire "farmer-herder" framing is itself a colonial construct that obscures the real conflict. The real conflict, he says, is not between ethnic groups but between forms of capital: landed agricultural capital and mobile livestock capital. Many of the cattle involved in conflicts are owned by wealthy urban investors, including politicians and senior civil servants, who employ poor herders as proxies. The herders face the violence on the ground. The investors collect the profits from the sale of meat and dairy in city markets. "When a herder's cattle destroy a farm," Usman told me in a 2024 interview, "the farmer blames the Fulani. The Fulani herder blames the farmer. Neither of them sees the investor in Abuja or Lagos who owns the herd and will never visit the village where the blood was spilled."

This argument complicates the simple morality play that dominates Nigerian media, in which farmers are uniformly victims and herders are uniformly aggressors. The truth is messier. In Nasarawa State, I met a pastoralist rights advocate who asked to be identified only as Alhaji Ibrahim because of threats against community leaders who speak publicly. He is a spokesperson for the Coalition of Fulani Pastoralist Associations. "We are not against development," he said. "We are against a development that begins with our extinction. You cannot pass a law that makes our fathers' way of life illegal, build no ranches, offer no credit, no training, no land, and then call us criminals when we continue to live. The investor who owns five thousand cattle and keeps them in Kaduna will never be called a criminal. The herder who walks fifty cattle through a farm because every path is blocked will be called a terrorist. This is not justice. This is politics."

Both perspectives—Usman's investor critique and the pastoralists' rights argument—point to the same failure: the Nigerian state has never treated pastoralism as an economic sector worthy of public investment, only as a security problem to be managed through prohibition and periodic military intervention. The result is a cattle economy that generates $172,000 in exports while producing thousands of corpses and millions of displaced persons. The investors remain invisible. The herders and farmers remain dead.

The media coverage reinforces this invisibility. When armed herders attack a village, the headlines read "Fulani militia kills farmers." When farmer vigilantes attack a herding camp, the headlines read "Farmers massacre Fulani." The investor who owns the cattle is never named. The politician who employs the herders is never photographed. The frame is ethnic, because ethnicity sells newspapers and ethnic rage mobilises voters. The frame is rarely economic, because economics would require naming the powerful, and the powerful own the advertising budgets.

The Militias Fill the Gap

Into this vacuum, ethnic militias have stepped with the certainty that the state lacks. In the Southwest, Amotekun patrols highways and farms with official state backing, operating as a de facto state police force that the constitution does not authorise. In the Southeast, Ebube Agu operates as a vigilante force nominally under state control. In the Middle Belt, community defence groups have acquired weapons that rival those of the police. These are not criminal gangs, at least not at their inception. They are the state's protection function outsourced to ethnicity, because the federal security apparatus has proven unable or unwilling to protect rural citizens from any armed group, whether herder militia, farmer vigilante, or bandit gang.

The proliferation of these militias nationalises what the newspapers still call a "Middle Belt problem." It is not. It is a Nigerian problem of protection. When a Yoruba farmer in Oyo State sees Fulani herders moving south with their cattle, he does not call the police, because the police will not come in time and may not come at all. He calls Amotekun. When an Igbo trader in Enugu State hears that armed herders have camped in a nearby forest, he does not expect the army to intervene. He expects Ebube Agu. The herder-farmer conflict has become the template for a broader collapse of the federal state's monopoly on protection, and the template is spreading.

Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force. The herders who drive cattle through a maize farm at dawn and the farmers who ambush them in the bush are both speaking that language, because no one in Abuja has taught them another. The rural farmer in Benue and the urban godfather in Lagos are separated by six hundred kilometres and a world of infrastructure, but they inhabit the same political economy. Both are governed by a state that protects capital while abandoning citizens.

The weapons that fill this gap travel the same informal routes as the cattle. Dane guns, AK-47 rifles, and improvised explosive devices move southward from the Sahel through the same corridors that herders have used for generations. The line between armed herding and banditry has dissolved in several states. In Niger State, herder camps in the Borgu Forest have been identified by security sources as staging areas for kidnapping gangs. In Kaduna State, the same young men who tend cattle by day have been accused of participating in night raids on farming villages. The pastoralist youth who cannot find a livelihood and the bandit who offers one have become indistinguishable, not because pastoralism produces criminals, but because the Nigerian state has produced neither lawful employment nor lawful protection.

The political machines that extract Lagos State's internally generated revenue and the cattle investors who profit from herds they never see are separated by geography but united by logic. Both convert public goods into private advantage. Both rely on a state that is strong enough to protect their interests but too weak to protect the ordinary citizens who pay the costs. The young vigilante in Guma and the political thug in a Lagos campaign office are both products of a state that has monetised protection and privatised violence. The herder-farmer crisis is not an exception to Nigeria's political economy. It is the rural expression of the same predation that operates in urban Nigeria.

Ranching is not a technical solution. It is a political choice about whose way of life survives and whose does not. Until Nigeria makes that choice honestly, the cattle will keep walking, and the blood will keep flowing.

Sources

1. Council on Foreign Relations, Nigeria Security Tracker, 2024.
2. Nigeria Watch Report, 2024; cited in The Guardian Nigeria, 4 March 2026.
3. Premium Times, "Christmas Eve attacks in Plateau," 25 December 2023.
4. HumAngle, "Coordinated attacks kill over 160 in Plateau," 25 December 2023.
5. SBM Intelligence, Nigeria Security Report, Q4 2023.
6. National Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force Survey, Q4 2022.
7. Food and Agriculture Organisation, Nigeria cattle population estimates, various years.
8. The Guardian Nigeria, "Nigeria's cattle export gap," 4 March 2026.
9. Benue State Government, Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law, 2017.
10. National Economic Council, National Livestock Transformation Plan, 2018.
11. Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development; no updated grazing reserve inventory published since 2016.
12. Interview with Dr. Bukar Usman, Centre for Information Technology and Development, Kano, 2024.
13. Interview with Alhaji Ibrahim, Coalition of Fulani Pastoralist Associations, Nasarawa State, February 2024.
14. Benue State Emergency Management Agency, displacement data, 2024.