The herdsmen crisis: A review

Thankfully, the most vicious of herdsmen and farmers clashes in the North Central that dominated the media space in the last year has subsided. Now is the time to do a review, and understand the scale of the crisis, and why it is important to note that a country the size of Nigeria, or any country for that matter cannot make progress economically, politically, and grow the citizens income if we continue to leap from one crisis to the other.
The first thing to note is that the recent wave of clashes between herdsmen and farmers in recent years is simply an escalation. Intermittent clashes between farmers and herdsmenthat have led to loss of lives and properties have occurred since independence. However, due to pressures from climate change and population growth, which have increased competition for resources in the Sahel region, the situation has escalated in recent years. It has also been made worse and complicated by armed militias and Boko Haram. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project there were 1024 deaths attributable to such clashes from 1997 to 2011. However, since 2012, these numbers have skyrocketed, with 5977 deaths from 2012 to 2018.
After a decline from the previous highpoint in 2014, the number of deaths has spiked again this year, with more deaths in just the first seven months of 2018 than in 2016 and 2017 combined. Also, the recent crisis has become infused with religious and tribal sentiments, which have polarised the nation. While the long-time clashes have occurred in a minimum of 18 states of the Federation, the recent escalation has largely been confined to the North-Central region, with Benue bearing the heavy brunt of the attacks.The six North-Central states (Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, and Plateau) and the FCT account for 66% of the total killings since 2012 with the adjoining states of Taraba and Kaduna accounting for a further 88%.
The concentration of this recent crisis in the Middle Belt and states close to them (Taraba and Kaduna) with large Christian populations and of diverse ethnic groups has furthered the perception that the killings have ethnic and religious motivations. Furthermore, the lethargic response of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to the crisis, interpreted by many as complicit indulgence, has worsened this perception, given that President Buhari is from the same Fulani ethnic group as the herdsmen.
In relation to economic implications and a growing pattern of economic collapses in Nigeria, there is concrete risk to the nation that the herdsmen crisis can follow the destructive patterns of the Niger Delta militancy and the Boko Haram terrorism. Both of these crises have precipitated the collapse of growth in their respective regions and the potency of the recent herdsmen crisis has the potential to create a similar collapse in the North Central.
The militancy chased off the oil companies from the South-South. The headquarters of these companies, along with their corporate spending and the incomes of their staff that fuelled the erstwhile booming local economies of the South-South cities have all been transported to Lagos. While Lagos has multiplied its growth over the years, the South-South cities, which were once competing centres of serious economic activity, have retrogressed to near stagnation. In the same vein, since 2011, the North-East is only recognisable for the destruction that BokoHaram had visited on it. Although it has historically been the least developed region and the lowest contributor to growth, those in the region have sunk further into poverty and destitution after the Boko Haram crisis.
Both regions are of the remotest reckoning in private considerations and public discourses of activities leading to Nigeria’s economic growth. Local and international investors, both new and existing, avert entertaining the thought of going to either the region of a terrorist group that could bomb the UN office in its country or that of a gang of brigands where they could be kidnapped and killed. Since the militancy, the South-South has hardly accounted for anything economically outstanding other than continuous extraction of crude oil while the North-East has achieved a zero-share in the market size determination for Nigerian investments and constitutes a negative drag on the upward potential of the Nigerian market size and economic growth relative to population. With unyielding characterization of South-South’s instituted brigandage and North-East’s terrorism, growth in both regions has effectively collapsed.
In the cases of the two regions, the government of the day had prevaricated on an early termination of the problem and unwittingly allowed the problems to fester into gigantic monsters. The late solutions could not restore the damages. The amnesty could neither fully rehabilitate the wasted years of the youth nor could it restore the opportunities and growth the South-South had lost. The North-East version of the amnesty could neither redeem the warped justification of the crude, inhuman and criminal rampage by the Boko Haram nor could it reinstate the lives killed, the villages and properties destroyed and the entire economic activities extinguished.
There is a clear risk of the herdsmen crisis taking the same path. It has already passed the early stage as the government continues to delay, pussy-foot and buck-pass as before.
The six states that make up the North-Central account for approximately 12.3% of Nigeria’s GDP, roughly in proportion with their share of the nation’s population. Owing to the large amount of fertile land in the area and its favourable weather, the region has remarkable potential for growth, particularly in the agricultural sector, if the rightpolicies are implemented. The government’s renewed emphasis on agriculture since 2015 has availed it the opportunity to explore that potential convincingly. Currently, the region accounts for 40% of the nation’s agricultural exports.
Given that the crisis has resulted in the destruction of farms and killing of farmers, agricultural production in the region will decline from its 2017 level this year. Further delays in determinately solving the herdsmen crisis will scare away all existing and planned investments in the region and portend the same danger of an eventual collapse of the economy of the North-Central region (as with North-East and South-South).
Such imminent collapse of growth in the North-Central region has a wider implication for Nigeria. It would bring the number of non-functional regions of the country to three. It will ensnare the region with the characterisation of “a killing field” that would take decades to wear off just as the North-East and South-South have permanently been with terrorism and militancy respectively. Even if the government later solves this problem, the perception of the Middle Belt as a volatile region will be hard to shake off. That is the food for thought ahead of the 2019 elections and the coming decades.

I thank you.

Ogho Okiti