THE FULANI HERDSMEN THREAT TO NIGERIA'S FRAGILE UNITY

By Prof. Moses E. Ochonu

Nomadic Fulani herdsmen have become a much-
resented group across the country. The resentment has
intensified as they have clashed with farming
communities across the country. In the Middle Belt,
however, it is no longer accurate to call the attitude
resentment, just as it is no longer accurate to describe
what is happening as a clash. It is a sustained
massacre, and it has engendered an attitude that is
approaching hatred — the kind of hatred that one
reserves for someone who threatens one’s very
existence.



Recently, hired mercenaries in the pay of Fulani
herdsmen massacred 300 people in several Agatu
villages, burned down homes, food barns, and
churches, and displaced tens of thousands of Agatu
people. Fulani herdsmen leaders in Makurdi then
brazenly claimed the attack, describing it as payback
for cattle theft. The massacre was a reprise of several
such murderous invasions across different areas of the
Middle Belt — in Plateau, Kaduna, Taraba, Nasarawa,
Adamawa, and Benue States. The genocidal rampage
of well-armed herdsmen has become a feature of life in
the area in the last seven years.
Let me make some itemized observations about these
killings, what they portend for this country, the issues at
stake, and possible ameliorative reforms:


1. There is a pattern to these massacres; they are not
random, spontaneous acts. The pattern is predictable.
The Fulani never deny the killings. Instead, they are ever
ready with a familiar alibi: the indigenous people stole
our cows and this was payback. By this bizarre logic,
the theft of cows by a member of a host community is
not only a death sentence; it is a death sentence for
the thief and all of his kinsmen and women. It is a
strange, murderous logic that equates the lives of cattle
with those of human beings, including those of women,
children, and the elderly. It also advances collective
retributive punishment as a form of interethnic
engagement. The herdsmen basically, and repeatedly,
admit to and boast of razing down communities and
engaging in massacres of defenseless people,
including women and children. Yet they have never
been held accountable. And their leaders who make
these admissions are coddled, dignified, and invited to
press conferences with high-ranking police officers and
political leaders, where they are given a platform to
justify their genocidal operations. Afterwards, they are
allowed to freely walk away to plot the next massacre.


2. The militia members are mostly foreigners. In the
rare couple of instances when several of them were
captured in some Middle Belt communities, they were
discovered to be foreigners from neighboring countries,
who had been conscripted by the Fulani herdsmen to
commit these massacres. It is not a far-fetched
hypothesis to surmise that only foreigners with no
historical or mutual existential ties to the targeted
Middle Belt peoples would be capable of unfeelingly
committing the scorched earth atrocities that have
been unfolding in the area, a tapestry of massacres
documented in unspeakably grisly pictures of infants,
pregnant women, and the elderly hacked or burned to
death. The militias are basically armed, stand-by
proxies of the Fulani herdsmen. They have no regard
for Nigeria’s security agencies and their capabilities.
They rape, murder, burn, and pillage at will.


3. Every massacre is followed by two developments:
the desertion of villages and towns by the surviving
members of Middle Belt communities, and a
subsequent occupation of these communities by
herdsmen and their cattle — a forceful, de facto
territorial takeover.


4. It is wrong to call the massacres clashes. They are
not clashes. They are invasions that result in the
massacre of defenseless indigenous people in
purportedly vengeful orgies of bloodletting. Clashes
require two sets of combatants. In these massacres,
there is only one heavily armed group of combatants, a
militia armed and hired by the herdsmen, a militia that
the leaders of the Fulani herdsmen boldly and proudly
admit is doing their bidding.


5. These massacres do not fit into the traditional,
familiar mold of “farmer-herdsmen” clashes. No, what
is happening in the Nigerian Middle Belt is not that.
Clashes between farmers and headsmen are common
in Africa. In Nigeria such clashes often pit Fulani
herdsmen against largely non-Fulani farmers. Such
clashes are even common in the Muslim-majority
states of the Northwest. On a research visit to Jigawa
state in 2009, I sat in on a mediation meeting between
farmers and herdsmen in Dutse emirate. The District
Head of Dutse presided over the meeting and later
briefed me about the recalcitrant ways of the Fulani
nomads who routinely violated rules the emirate made
to stem conflicts between herdsmen and farmers. The
herdsmen, he said, regularly let their cattle encroach on
farmed lands and refuse to pay compensation to
farmers whose crops are eaten up. Such clashes occur
all over the country. But they rarely result in the loss of
human life and tend to be amicably settled by
traditional authorities through mediation, payment of
compensation, and the institution of preventive
measures to keep cattle away from farms. The aim of
the herdsmen in these instances is never to kill off,
displace, or take over territories for their cattle. At any
rate, these crises involve roaming nomads who are
seasonal migrants, so why should they want territory?
Why should they want to seize territory for their cattle?
What is happening in the Middle Belt is totally different.
It is an organized, systematic and repeated invasion of
communities with the obvious aim of displacing them
from the land. These nomads are not the familiar
seasonal nomads who migrate southward through
Middle Belt communities during the dry season and
northward during the rainy season. No, these new,
unfamiliar nomads camp out in these communities all
year, hence the desire to displace the locals so they do
not have to obey farmland restrictions. What they are
perpetrating in the Middle Belt is a forceful territorial
takeover. We need to properly name the problem to
stand any chance of solving it.


6. This hunger for grazing territory — permanent
grazing territory — is a zero-sum quest pursued at the
expense of the area’s local farmers. It is intensifying as
a result of two realities: Nigeria’s population is
increasing rapidly, bringing more land into cultivation
and habitation; and the arid Sahel region is expanding
rapidly in correspondence to the southward expansion
of the frontiers of the Sahara desert.


7. Some people say that we should not couch the
massacres in ethnic terms, that is, that we should not
refer to them as Fulani herdsmen massacres. They
also say we should not use the term indigene to
describe local farmers who are being killed and
displaced. This argument is not faithful to the
sociological realities of the problem. The ethnic idiom
is inevitable, since the herdsmen are Fulani by ethnicity.
As for “indigenous,” that is a function of the Nigerian
constitution, which defines citizenship in terms of
ancestry and consanguinity rather than residency. The
constitution confers rights of communal land ownership
on indigenes, defined by these criteria, not on
residents, whether such residents are temporary,
migratory, or permanent sojourners. If we are going to
reform this constitutional citizenship clause, let us do
so holistically through a constitutional amendment
instead of making an exception for the Fulani
herdsmen or any other group.


8. One of the causes of the problem is the
unchallenged, open bearing of automatic firearms by
Fulani nomads. Our laws forbid regular citizens to own
or bear automatic weapons, but the Fulani openly carry
them and presumably use them. Fulani herdsmen are
seen all over the country with these weapons, creating
tensions and putting farmers on edge — farmers who
are not allowed to bear such arms. This impunity on
the part of the Fulani herdsmen is inexplicable. It is as
though there are different sets of laws for the Fulani
nomads. The nomads have to be disarmed unless the
government wants farming communities to similarly
arm themselves with sophisticated military-grade
weapons. That would be disastrous for everyone and
for the country.


9. Clearly, the Fulani nomads do not yet realize that
their brand of cattle husbandry is outdated. From the
yield perspective, nomadism diminishes the meat and
milk yield of cattle. It precipitates clashes with farmers
in the context of increasing populations. What’s more,
nomadic grazing exposes cattle to the vagaries of
disease, pestilence, and natural disaster and puts them
out of the reach of advanced veterinary and scientific
interventions that could protect them and improve their
yield. Nomadic, long-distance grazing is simply
unsustainable in our world, hence the transition to
ranching and other sedentary forms of cattle
production in many countries. If the Fulani nomads
themselves do not get it, for the sake of farming
communities across the country, the government
should use its bully pulpit and overarching might to
convince them to relocate their cattle to watered
ranches carefully carved out for them in certain states
of the North, where the bonds of ethnicity (and religion)
might make the local people more receptive to such
ranches and where the abundance of land and low
population density would make the ranches more
feasible.


10. It is time to tell truth about the transformation in
the herding culture of the nomadic Fulani in Nigeria.
Their vocation is a dying one, and many younger
nomads are quitting transhumant herding because it
has become increasingly hazardous, economically
unstable, and precarious. Many inherited herds have
been lost to organized rustling, to disease, and to the
absence of a scientific, sustainable mode of
husbandry. The result is that many nomadic Fulani
youths have become bandits and criminals. Familiar
with grazing routes and routines, they lead bands of
rustlers camped out in forests in the Northwest and
parts of the Middle Belt. Others have taken to armed
robbery and kidnapping. This is one more indication
that the nomadic lifestyle is not one for the future and
should be reformed into more sedentary vocations that
would give nomadic youths a future outside criminal
activities. Most of the rustlers arrested or killed by the
security services since the Governors of the northwest
states launched an operation against rustling in that
zone turned out to be mostly former nomadic Fulani
who knew the lay of the land as it were. Many
members of the murderous Fulani militias are former
herdsmen who now earn a living as mercenaries for
their nomadic kinsmen.


11. The mercenaries (foreign and local) who perpetrate
the massacres in the Middle Belt on behalf of
herdsmen have to be dealt with, disarmed, and
prosecuted as terrorists.


12. The Fulani nomads are essential members of the
Nigerian fabric. They play a role in providing animal
proteins to Nigerians, enriching our dietary repertoire.
But they have to realize that their current method is
unsustainable, and has already strained the fragile unity
of the country. They should therefore cooperate with
the government to transform their craft into sedentary
ranches. Speaking of ranches, it is now the only viable
solution. Previously suggested solutions such as the
establishment of grazing routes and grazing reserves
are now passé, rendered unfeasible by Nigeria’s
charged politics of land ownership, the combustible
mélange of ethno-religious self-preservation and the
politics of autochthony, and contested access to
ancestral lands.


13. Non-Fulani peoples should not be forced to give up
their age-long access to ancestral lands in other to
solve a problem they did not cause.
Non-Fulani people should not allow recent tragic
massacres to transform the search for solutions into
an inquest on the Fulani, their culture, their ways of life,
and their rights as Nigerian citizens. Negative myths
and stereotypes of the Fulani have already unfortunately
proliferated across Nigeria and West Africa. The
solution to this problem must include non-Fulani people
unlearning their anti-Fulani prejudices and stereotypes.


Professor Ochonu can be reached at
meochonu@gmail.com