Normadic 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:
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 inter-ethnic 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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PLEASE BE POLITE