Nigeria cattle crisis: how drought and urbanisation led to deadly land grabs

In February last year, Sunday Ikenna’s fields were green and lush. Then, one evening, a herd of cattle led into the farm by roving pastoralists crushed, ate, and uprooted the crops.

“I lost everything. The situation was sorrowful, watching another human being destroy your farm,” says Ikenna, a father of 10 who farms in UkpabiNimbo in Enugu state, southern Nigeria. “I farmed a smaller portion this year because I am still scared of another invasion.”

Ikenna’s experience is not an isolated event. In the past few years there have been a growing number of skirmishes between farmers and cattle herders searching for pasture and water.

For many years the clashes were problematic, but the two groups usually managed to reach a mutual accommodation. But in the past two decades, the climate crisis has contributed to altering that old order, and what used to be a friendly arrangement has become a crisis marked by looting, raids, cattle rustling and premeditated killings.

In 2016, Ukpabi-Nimbo, Ikenna’s community, was attacked, allegedly by cattle herders, resulting in the death of 46 people, according to one local media report. “Nimbo will never be the same after that morning,” Ikenna says of the attack.

At the root of the crisis, according to experts, is Nigeria’s teeming cattle population, which has more than doubled from an estimated 9.2 million in 1981 to around 20 million, making it one of the world’s largest.

Nigeria’s human population has grown too, to about 200 million, the highest in Africa by far. This has led to cities sprawling ever larger and wider, in some cases into formerly designated cattle routes and reserves. Routes that dated back to the 1950s, in line with colonial arrangements, have either been overrun or dominated by new human settlements – pushing herders further into contested territories.

In rural communities, smallholder farmers are claiming large swathes of grazing land. “It means that grazing space, for example, that should originally accommodate only 10 cattle is now being grazed by 50 or more,” says Ifeanyi Ubah, a cattle rancher based in eastern Nigeria.

Nigeria is, moreover, a crossroads for cattle from other countries: tran

A huge expansion of farming in Nigeria has cut access to grazing land for nomadic herders and fuelled violence. Photograph: Luis Tato/AFP/Getty

Nigeria’s cattle population has doubled since 1981, leading to a rise in clashes over water and grazing land. Photograph: Stefan Heunis/AFP/Getty