CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
In Nigeria the practice of preserving land for exclusive use by livestock existed prior to colonial times. Allocation of grazing grounds to pastoralists around towns and villages for use particularly during the cultivation season were socially sanctioned (Waters-Bayer and Taylor-Powell, 1986). However, since there was no legal instrument to prevent encroachment by crop farmers, such reserved areas subsequently disappeared with increasing population and cropping intensity.
This phenomenon was most visible in the subhumid zone of Nigeria where pastoralists from the semiarid zone further north traditionally moved to exploit dry-season pastures. Additionally, improved veterinary services and tsetse control and eradication campaigns have resulted in an expanding ruminant livestock population in the subhumid zone itself and in restricting pastoralists' access to the grazing lands (Waters-Bayer and Taylor-Powell, 1986). Combined with this, the greater preference afforded to local (i.e. subhumid zone) farmers' livestock both for grazing and water has contributed to the further reduction of the resources available (Kjenstad, 1988)
The cultivators among whom the pastoralists now live were traditionally subsistence farmers with extensive swidden (slash and burn) agriculture. They kept very few livestock, mostly small trypanotolerant breeds of goats and sheep. Although sleeping-sickness is generally cited as the reason for the sparse population of the zone, it is now recognized that the high labour inputs required for cultivation also deterred settlement. Farming systems are marked by a wide diversity of crops and crop mixtures, often combining cereals, grain legumes and tubers. Compared with the humid and semiarid zones, regional marketing and long-distance trade were poorly developed.
An unfortunate consequence of this situation is that all the most fertile pockets of land in the zone have been occupied. Grazing reserves cannot be sited in populated regions without dislocation of indigenous populations and consequent ill-will. Reserves are necessarily situated in places previously avoided for sound ecological reasons. As an illustration of this, when ILCA tried to keep cattle permanently on Kachia reserve without supplementation, almost half the animals suffered severe malnutrition stress because of insufficient and low quality feed that resulted from the poor nature of the soils.
Nigeria’s cattle-grazing crisis has become a national security threat, sparking ethnic tension nationwide. Amnesty International estimates that more than 2,000 deaths in 2018 alone resulted from clashes between herdsmen and farmers over access to water and pasture and the destruction of land and property — particularly belonging to farmers in the country’s middle belt region.
Herdsmen from the Fulani ethnic region in the north have brought their cattle to other parts of the country to graze for generations. Climate change, rapid population growth and desertification in the north have made it difficult to breed cattle.
The brutal violence has been a problem for some years. In 2014 the Global Terrorism Index judged Fulani militants to be the fourth most deadly terror group in the world, behind Boko Haram, Isis and the Taliban.