Why It Is Overly Simplistic to Call the Non-Linear War in the Middle Belt Region of Nigeria a 'Farmer-Herder' Conflict

When violence becomes predictable, it is no longer a conflict — it is a system speaking through outcomes. Or as my countrymen would say, “Na fruit dey expose tree, no be the name wey dem give am”.

Consider for a minute if you will, a protest. By design, a protest is a gathering of aggrieved people whose convergence at any given location or whose clearly defined concerted actions, serves to either apply pressure to any tier of government, or group whose actions/inactions have led to public demonstrations initiated to inform the world — both local and many times, to a wider international audience — of a perceived grievance. Nothing about a protest if properly constituted ordinarily suggests imminent danger or impending doom. That is not to say that conflict seldom occurs as a result of protests. No, it would be naïve to come to such a conclusion. However, a protest by its initial design, unless where infiltrated or otherwise manipulated either externally or sabotaged internally, is a peaceful means of communicating grievance — aggrieved to the offender, victim to the aggressor.

Using recent protests like the EndSARS protest of October 2020 as a case study, some may now say — armed with the benefit of hindsight — that a protest of that magnitude, where thousands of youth congregated to call the Federal Government to account on concerns involving police brutality, was from its inception, a protest destined to run into conflict; a recipe for mayhem. That is revisionist at best.

The fact remains that even the EndSARS protest, contentious as the issues it tried to address were, left on its own without any attempt to subvert or instigate violence as a pretext to shut it down, would have been a peaceful exercise concluded without incident. It is therefore no surprise really, how external pressure turns an otherwise peaceful assembly into chaos and potential conflict.

The very same process has been witnessed in protests around the world: Black Lives Matter in the USA, the Gen Z revolution in Nepal, the 2024 post-election protests in Venezuela, and the 2025–2026 Iranian protests; all point to the heavy hand of governments, directly or indirectly tipping the scales in favor of violence, to undermine otherwise largely peaceful demonstrations. All across such “hijacked” protests, are the similar, very familiar trends of lootings and burglaries which then always provide the pretext/conditions for the use of force by government or its agents, to quell what at that point, would have metamorphosed into riots.

However, what is largely a reoccurring theme, is that those violent actions are neither endorsed by the conveners, planners, leaders or to a large extent, the genuinely aggrieved participants of such protests. Which suggests that those actions are by and large, neither planned for nor intentioned by design, to be part of the protest. At best, they are impediments to a successful demonstration. Worse, they are distractions fanned into flames, to divert attention from genuine concerns raised by genuinely aggrieved protesters.

Borrowing a leaf from that page, today what is generally known as “Farmer-Herder” conflict, is by design alien to the Middle Belt region historically. It isn’t that farmers and herders never had reason in the past to cause offence, take offence or even run into conflict against each other, and it certainly isn’t that the climate — as is often pointed to as a major factor in this ongoing conflict — has always treated each party fairly either. Yet, in the last decade, this running conflict has proven to have no ready solutions nor offered reprieve to those directly devastated in its wake.

In the meantime, perspectives offered in an attempt to understand the conflict have been continually viewed from the convenient, yet misleading lenses of religion, ethnicity and indigene-ship. Neither of which gives the full scope nor picture of what is really going on beneath the surface.

Are there Muslims carrying out vicious attacks on Christians? Yes. Do these Muslims belong to a certain ethnic group? Yes; more often than not, they are Fulani by ethnicity. Are these Muslim, Fulani attackers often non-indigenous to the conflict-prone zones? Absolutely.

However, beyond the primary profile of a herder of the Fulani extraction — a non-indigene by ancestry and ethnicity to the Middle Belt geographical zone — due diligence has not been properly utilized to understand why non-ancestral lands, debated historical claims, non-contested heritage or even, lack of primary evidence to link any kind of competition in the acclaimed climate change induced “resource-control competition”, has managed to become a perennial problem and a major impediment to peaceful co-existence, where harmony once presided.

Could it be, that much like how a planned protest is sometimes derailed by “useful-idiots”, to subvert and sabotage the original intent envisioned by the aggrieved in airing their grievances through means of a planned peaceful protest, this too, masquerading as a Farmer-Herder conflict, is a tool wielded by actors hidden in the shadows under the guise of religion and ethnicity, intent to subvert or sabotage an otherwise peaceful region? If that is the case, a pressing question emerges: to what end?

Following the news on the conflict in the Middle Belt State of Plateau for instance, what is pretty obvious is that the “Farmer-Herder” conflict whose narrative began sometime in the early 2010s, started at the fringes of the state, across few Local Government Areas, and has increasingly over time, gotten to the city center.

What becomes even more instructive however, is that this pattern bears a striking resemblance to what we have come to understand about protests. A protest, in its original form, is neither violent nor chaotic; it only assumes those characteristics when infiltrated, manipulated, or deliberately steered off course by actors whose objectives lie beyond those of the aggrieved. In much the same way, the violence now synonymous with the Middle Belt — far from being an organic outgrowth of longstanding farmer-herder tensions — appears instead as the product of sustained interference. The same logic applies: where chaos emerges repeatedly under similar conditions, with similar outcomes that obscure rather than clarify the original actors and motives, it ceases to be incidental and begins to suggest design.

This is what makes the nature of these conflicts particularly perplexing — how defenseless “farmers” are mowed down at night by people with no claims to cattle, but who are well resourced and well-armed. Nor the telling bias of the army — often times seen to be very clear-cut between aggressors and victims. It’s not even in who the victims are, their ethnicity, their language nor their faith. It is rather, the kind of coordination with which these “herders” strike even through the smokescreen of chaos. It is the degree to which their controlled chaos is structured: “herders” (spies and foot soldiers), narrative commentary (elite social media commentators in favor), organizational cover (herder associations), legal cover (expensive lawyers on retainer, capable of talking down lawful arrests regardless of what evidence in these devastated communities point to).

What is obvious, is this level of organization and sophistication cannot merely be dismissed or summed up under the shabby generalization of a “Farmer-Herder” conflict. But again, to what end?

In a protest, the aggrieved have to depend upon a basic level of co-ordination to successfully identify members of a given group, community or society at large, in order to organize under a common banner, message or grievance. However, despite their best efforts, they may never be able to weed out bad actors from amongst them who are either planted during the organizational process to serve as saboteurs or used externally to break coherence and (or) cohesion of the demonstrations.

In any case, for a successful protest at any stage to happen, governments or heads of institutions — depending on who the protestors are and to whom their grievances are directed at — do not only owe a measure of tolerance, but also the duty to ensure dissent is protected by law; by agents of the law. What that entails includes at the minimum: security for the protesters, an enabling environment to speak and be heard, but most importantly, non-interference by any measure in the process of the demonstration. Non-interference in this case could also include (but not limited to) weeding out protesters — in collaboration with the conveners of such protests — who engage in activities at odds with the aims of the protests: shop break-ins, lootings, theft and wholesale conflict-seeking behavior. To do otherwise, is to fall short of an endorsement of potential conflict, by creating an environment where such actions would thrive.

So, using that as a template, consider for a moment more if you will, the absurdity of the “Farmer-Herder” conflict. A conflict which has ravaged communities with no history, previous records nor appetite for the kind of violence the region has in the last decade, somehow become synonymous with.

If there were armed militias on both sides, it would be a war; one characterized by resource control. Only in this case, one party is well armed, the other vulnerable and defenseless.

If both parties were hostile to the idea of sharing land resources to permit co-existence of both groups, then armed hostilities when they finally break out, would be almost justified. However, that isn’t the case here either.

If both parties were well structured, well financed, possessing multi-layered covers such as religion or ethnicity under which they could hide to perpetuate violence in the manner we have seen, then we would pay little attention to this war, as they would be equally matched militarily and capabilities. Again, that isn’t what is happening here.

If both parties targeted each other only for the sake of their ethnicity or religion, we would call it what it is: an ethno-religious crisis (war). However, even by its descriptive name, “Farmer-Herder”, we know that that too, isn’t the case. No doubt religion and ethnicity are the glaringly obvious factors wielded in this crisis, but the fact remains that, casualties also include both Muslims and Fulani alongside countless Christians and Middle Belters.

If the government through its agencies and its law enforcement agencies, was an unbiased arbiter of justice, then I make bold to claim that these crises, much like the analogy of protests, would have been long resolved. However, the unhelpful mix of rhetoric without teeth and piecemeal interventions, have only served to either embolden aggressors at best, or de-legitimize concerns of the vulnerable at the worst-case scenarios.

To answer the burning question, “to what end?”, one would have to hold competing ideas in the mind which create tensions on both ends: is this a religious jihad in action, as is wildly believed in some quarters? Is this a conflict borne out of the need to control resources, both mineral and agricultural? Or is this a silent war, undeclared in formal terms, non-linear by execution, for the purpose of subjugation of local peoples toward political ends?

Put differently, what some strategists describe as “non-linear war” — often associated with Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov’s 2013 reflections on modern conflict — is a form of warfare in which the decisive battles are not fought first with tanks, but with narratives, proxies, pressure-points and deniable force. In that model, the line between war and peace is intentionally blurred: non-military measures (political, economic, informational and social) are coordinated with a society’s “protest potential,” while overt military power is held back, concealed, or introduced only at a later stage to lock in outcomes already shaped by confusion, paralysis and loss of legitimacy. The point is not merely to defeat an opponent on a battlefield, but to fracture cohesion, manipulate perception, and make a targeted community experience organized violence as “normal” disorder — all while the true authors of the war remain obscured behind convenient local labels.

This goes to explain why all of the aforementioned reasons of the conflict could be true for different groups, depending on whom is asked. However, given the nature of this conflict — considering how long it has gone on for, the one-sidedness in vulnerability, the one-sided military-like sophistication, the random, yet strategic attacks and most importantly, the lack of genuine cause or basis for the conflict — one could safely assume that while the puppeteers might be unknown, the puppets are merely using ethnicity and religion as a means to an end. An end for which those two factors — ethnicity and religion — mean even less than the human lives slain by these assailants, in pursuit of their obscured goals.

It is said that a system is not necessarily defined by what it is designed to do, but by what it does. In other words, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck. In a protest where the grievances of the demonstrators — though at variance with those of the party towards whom those protests are aimed — are given a sympathetic listening-ear, so long as the powers that be does not allow its need to protect its perceived interests supersede its duty — sworn or implied — to bring it to a level in which it uses agents — internal or external — to sabotage those protests, would ultimately be a peaceful one. The opposite is also true. Complicity by those who wield power, inevitably creates an environment where violence thrives. In the same vein, victims up against entrenched interests represented by aggressors dressed up as Herders in this case, which continually get underserved justice and offered piecemeal solutions that more or less, continuously consoles casualty suffered while pushing the can of corrective, even proactive actions down the road, are by all intent and purposes, designed to be perpetual victims of the system. Where government plays the role of mediator, rather than enforcer of the law whose duty includes providing equal opportunity to hear all grievances and protecting the right of those who lay them, while ensuring that those intent to cause harm under the guise of seeking justice are dealt with by law; such a government may be rightly viewed as sympathetic to a side.

Hence, the misnomer of the conflict bedeviling the Middle Belt region of Nigeria as, “Farmer-Herder conflict”, is grossly inaccurate. Invader-Settler conflict is much more suitable considering the facts. This conflict has gone on far too long for it to be a mere “Cattle-need-green-vegetation-to-stay-healthy-and-return-profit-to-their-owners; Northern-Nigeria-is-suffering-from-desert-encroachment-hence-cattle-suffer-loss-of-vegetation-to-feed-on; the-Middle-Belt-has-vegetation; herders-don’t-have-land-of-their-own-to-serve-as-an-alternative; farmers-are-blocking-grazing-paths; cattle-have-to-eat-produce-of-farmers” situation. Government response in this armed conflict has always oscillated between a lukewarm approach of comforting the farmers and a restrained reaction involving issued statements “condemning” the aggressors. At some point, without concrete punitive measures in place to deal with any wrong-doer regardless of what party they belong to, hand wringing on the heels of no-action fall sharply below the threshold of resolute resolve to end all hostilities, and therefore continued hostilities can be effectively viewed as state policy.

Most importantly, those who perpetuate this violence, have learnt to operate under perceived tensions of religion, ethnicity and indigene-ship. Until the day comes when those convenient tags are rid of, action required to prosecute a war of this nature: a non-linear war, would suffer under politically inconvenient delays which could potentially mean victory for the puppeteers lurking in the shadows.

It is true that the assailants in this conflict might be Muslims. They may even be of the Fulani extraction, and they may indeed own cattle, but ultimately, they are representatives of a political order, waging war on innocent, unarmed indigenous peoples of the Middle Belt region of Nigeria. The sad part? The coloration of ethnicity and religion continues to be the focus, while a security competition-type, great power like, non-linear political war rages on.

Don’t call it a “Farmer-Herder” conflict. It is a non-linear war fought under convenient tags, by an enemy who thrives under the mischaracterization of who he really is.