With the recent abduction of the Emir of Kajuru, Alhaji Alhassan Adamu, from his palace in Kaduna State, along with 12 members of his family, including a few weeks old baby, by killer herdsmen, the chickens may have finally come home to roost in northern Nigeria. In the last six years, the current plight of the Emir and his family has been the everyday reality of thousands of Nigerians who have been robbed, kidnapped or killed by herdsmen of mostly Fulani ethnicity. While the violent activities of this terror group started out as deadly attacks on farming communities across Nigeria, northern Nigeria, particularly its western flank, which is the homeland of Nigeria’s indigenous Fulani people, is now the epicentre of herdsmen’s terrorism.
In the first half of the year 2021 alone, out of the 2,943 incidents of kidnapping in Nigeria, 2,557 took place in northern Nigeria, with the North-West alone recording the highest cases of 1,405. Similarly, of the over 5,800 killings recorded in Nigeria between January and June 2021, northern states like Borno, Zamfara, Kaduna, Niger, Katsina and Kebbi, with 1,137, 862, 715, 407, 164 and 144 deaths, are top of the list of human slaughter slabs in Nigeria. In addition to kidnapping, robbery and mass killings, killer herdsmen are now in control of vast swaths of ungoverned territories, where they exercise pseudo authority and forcefully extract taxes and levies from farmers before they plant in their farms or harvest their crops.
In the face of this growing security challenge, the President Muhammadu Buhari administration appears to have no solution to killer herdsmen’s terrorism and is increasingly looking helpless, unable to contain what has become the most potent existential threat to the Nigerian state. But the failure of the Buhari administration to effectively contain the menace of killer herders and decisively defeat their savagery is less about military capability and more about a clear lack of political will arising from a misrepresentation of herdsmen terrorism as farmers-herders’ clashes.
Buhari, an ethnic Fulani from Katsina State, northwest Nigeria, like a lot of his kinsmen, is a cattle breeder. And like many Fulani political elite and intellectuals, Buhari is a staunch defender of the cultural occupation of nomadic pastoralism and an advocate for the economic rights of his Fulani brethren in Nigeria. This advocacy for economic rights revolves around access to land for cattle grazing either as semi-sedentary reserves or traditional routes that run from the arid Sahel savannah of the northernmost part of Nigeria through the Guinea savannah’s vegetative belt in central Nigeria, down to the rain forest zone of the southern parts of Nigeria, where the pasture required to feed cattle is greener and more abundant.
In a typical transhumance practice, Fulani cattle breeders usually drive their herds from their original homelands in the arid Sahel region of Nigeria during the dry season into the Guinea savannah and rain forest belts in central and southern Nigeria in search of greener pasture for their cattle. Once the rainy season sets in, nomadic herdsmen commence a homeward journey from the south through the central regions to the northernmost part of Nigeria. Year after year, the seasonal cycle of movement of cattle from north to south and back to the north has become the Fulani’s defining feature, the cultural occupation of nomadic pastoralism in Nigeria.
However, this practice is not without its problems. In a country of indigenous tribesmen and not a nation of citizens such as Nigeria, where access to land is mostly by privilege of birth and not always economic right, the indigenous peoples of central and southern Nigeria are predominantly farmers who require their own lands for crop cultivation. The cultural occupation of farming usually gets disrupted by the transhumance cultural occupation of migrating Fulani herdsmen, whose cows often stray into farmlands and eat up crops even before they are harvested. With a weak policing system and slow dispensation of justice by constituted authority, aggrieved parties often take the law into their hands in the ensuing farmer-herder clashes.
The rise to power of Buhari in 2015 set off a powerful wave of ethno-religious populism in northern Nigeria, with Fulani nationalism as its most defining feature. At the core of Fulani nationalism in Buhari’s Nigeria is the carefully crafted belief that there is such a thing as legally gazetted grazing reserves and routes for herdsmen that have been encroached upon by sedentary communities along the lines of the traditional routes running from the north to the south. Convinced about the existence of these gazetted routes and reserves across Nigeria, many Fulani herdsmen have now come to believe themselves to be the victim and farmers the offenders in the encroachment upon their traditional grazing routes. Motivated by this belief, Fulani herdsmen now consider the invasion of farmlands with their cows and destruction of crops as a legitimate process of recovering ‘their’ grazing routes. And when farming communities put up resistance to what they considered trespassing, an armada of Fulani militiamen was mobilised into Nigeria from the neighbouring countries of the Sahel to launch a “cow war” in Nigeria.
The ensuing cow war, which started as retaliatory attacks in Kaduna and Plateau states, soon degenerated into a situation where armed herdsmen would invade farming communities and mow down human beings to make way for cows to graze on their farms. Across Nigeria, killer herdsmen wreaked havoc on lives and properties, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of houses burnt down. While this was going on, the Buhari government continued to view the crisis through the narrow prism of farmers-herders’ clashes, even when the matter at hand had transcended such simplistic struggle over land resources between the two cultural occupational groups to outright terrorism.
Unfortunately, President Buhari’s security response mechanism to the raging cow war as commander-in-chief has been severely hampered by his elevation of his Fulani ethnicity above his Nigerian citizenship. His usual refrain to rehabilitation of non-existent gazetted grazing routes and reserves as his solution to herdsmen’s terrorism, while also preaching to the victim farming communities to learn to live in peace with their killers and without bringing those who committed genocide in Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Enugu and other places to justice, clearly emboldened herdsmen terrorists to move to the next level of their killing franchise.
With borders made porous by Fulani ethnic-transnationalism, which has made the Fulani homeland of Nigeria an easy point of entry for killer herdsmen and militia men of fortune, the motive is no longer to wage a cow war on farming communities but to wage war on cows and their owners, with money as the main objective. Those who brought worm-infested wood into the Nigerian house have inadvertently invited reptiles, serpents and scorpions for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
From Zamfara to Katsina to Kaduna, Kebbi, Sokoto and Niger states, herdsmen terrorists now beatified as Fulani bandits have turned the northwestern corner of Nigeria into a terrorist playground, where thousands are slaughtered before many more are abducted for ransom. The monster that was fed in Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Enugu and other places is now consuming Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger states.