Battle for land heats up in Nigeria
Ordinary people keeping peace amid farmer-herder crisis
BARKIN LADI, Nigeria — Farmers and herders once lived harmoniously on Nigeria’s bucolic central plateau, but when Amos Lenji, a farmer, caught a young herdsman grazing cattle in his cornfields this October, he feared for his life.
His fear was rooted in a massacre that took place in June. More than 200 people, mostly farmers, were slaughtered by a gang of masked men dressed in black who marauded through the county of Barkin Ladi. Although no one was apprehended, the killers are suspected to be herdsmen.
It was the biggest bloodbath yet in a cycle of retaliatory killings between farmers and herders competing for space across Nigeria’s hinterlands.
At least 1,300 were killed in the first six months of 2018, according to the International Crisis Group. That is more than six times as many as were killed in Nigeria in the same period by Boko Haram, one of Africa’s deadliest terrorist groups.
Nigeria’s population has grown exponentially and is projected to surpass the population of the U.S. by 2050, although Nigeria is 11 times smaller in area.
Amid the boom, land has become increasingly scarce, and disputes over ownership are frequently turning bloody.
New generations of farmers are planting on land traditionally used for grazing, and out of desperation, herders are grazing their cattle in fields still full of crops, destroying harvests. Many in the two groups now see each other as existential threats.
The near-constant violence has catapulted the farmer-herder crisis to the top of an already long list of security concerns in Nigeria.
The country is roughly half Christian and half Muslim, and because farmers tend to be Christian and herders tend to be Muslim, the crisis has worsened the friction between the religious communities.
In the absence of an effective government response, locals have cobbled together groups of peacekeepers who have become the plateau’s de facto law enforcement.
Barkin Ladi’s vigilantes, as they’re known, are particularly effective because they include farmers and herders.
Bitrus Dung Pam, the local group leader, says he commands 30 times as many recruits as there are police in the county.
“When people see us, they trust us,” Pam said. “It’s not like the army or the police. We are the community.”
Pam was who Lenji thought of, standing there in the cornfield. He picked up his cellphone and asked for help. The herdsman ran away.
“I had no other option,” Lenji said.
Nigeria’s police and security forces are underequipped, underpaid and often deployed to unfamiliar areas of this country of almost 200 million people.
Vigilante groups have proliferated out of necessity. They have formed a national umbrella organization that says it has nearly 350,000 members. They fill a law enforcement vacuum, but they also represent a homegrown approach to peacekeeping.
They build trust by settling not only potentially explosive disputes between farmers and herders, but also smaller ones. The process often resembles a court proceeding.
The volunteers are everyday people, mechanics and bricklayers, men and women, and Muslims and Christians, and they represent all the plateau’s ethnic groups, including the two largest, the Berom and Fulani. Most farmers here are Christian and Berom, while most herders are Muslim and Fulani.
That inclusiveness commands the respect of local officials.
“No one will accuse them of being partisan or conniving with one tribe against the other,” said Yakubu Dati, a spokesman for the state government. “That is what we want, that is what this administration is all about, and we are doing everything to encourage other vigilante groups to emulate that so that peace can return permanently.”
The violence between farmers and herders is Nigeria’s deadliest, but it is just one of three major conflicts exposing the fraying social fabric in this country.
For a decade, Boko Haram has terrorized the northeast, killing tens of thousands, burning villages and kidnapping children. And in the Niger Delta in the country’s south, guerrilla groups continue to target foreign oil companies and the government, slowing Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy.
All these crises have led local communities to arm themselves against perceived enemies, while in the background, gargantuan challenges such as rapid population growth, climate change and religious rivalries deepen.
On the central plateau, Berom farmers are in the majority. Many believe that they are indigenous and that nomadic Fulani herders are either interlopers or invaders. The same dynamic is playing out across semiarid parts of Africa, but most violently here, where the plateau’s edges seem to provide a closed arena for battle.
“I won’t be sad if all the Fulani leave this place,” said Rose Mashinging, 36, a farmer who lives in a village that was attacked in June. “It is Berom land anyhow.”
The polarization has penetrated Nigeria’s politics. The country is set to hold a presidential election in February, and many in the mostly Christian south accuse President Muhammadu Buhari, an ethnic Fulani, of siding with herders.
His predecessor was voted out partly because he was perceived as weak against Boko Haram.
Buhari’s re-election will partly rely on convincing skeptics that he is serious about peace in the Middle Belt, an ethnically diverse band across the country that is home to Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, though his government has done little to intervene in the conflict.
On the plateau, Fulani leaders say that members of the state security forces, who are mostly Christian, discriminate against the herders, and the leaders also allege that security personnel have engaged in revenge attacks.
Local ardos, or Fulani traditional headmen, complained that police don’t take cases they file seriously. And reports of Berom farmers stealing cattle are common, and the subsequent clashes often result in the deaths of herdsmen.
“It is a mess of poisoned relationships — layers of grievance that accumulated for generations are exploding,” said Adam Higazi, an anthropological researcher at the University of Amsterdam who has been based on the plateau for more than a decade. “Most people on the plateau don’t think of anything else now except the animosity.”