INTRODUCTION: For generations, the Fulani — an estimated 20 to 25 million people spread from Senegal to Sudan — have moved cattle across West and Central Africa in search of pasture and water, a way of life known as transhumance. As one of the largest nomadic ethnic groups in the world, the Fulani have never had a unified political leadership; their communities are dispersed across more than half a dozen countries and shaped by significant local variation. Yet in the last fifteen years, a subset of Fulani communities has become associated with a very different story: armed conflict, militia violence, and in some cases outright militancy. Understanding how that happened — and why Nigeria in particular has borne so much of the resulting violence — requires tracing a chain of events that begins far from Nigeria’s borders, in the collapse of a North African state.
Old pressures, long before the guns
The roots of herder-farmer tension predate any of the region’s recent arms flows. Recurring drought and southward-creeping desertification in the Sahel have steadily shrunk traditional pasturelands, pushing herders into new and often already-cultivated territory further south. At the same time, population growth on both sides of the herder-farmer divide — and the corresponding expansion of cultivated land — intensified competition for the same shrinking pool of land and water. Traditional mechanisms that once resolved these disputes locally broke down under the strain, removing an informal system that had contained friction for generations. None of this, on its own, required weapons. It created grievance and competition. What transformed that friction into sustained lethal violence was a flood of small arms that had nothing to do with farming or grazing at all.
2011: The Libyan collapse
The turning point was the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Libya’s arsenal was among the largest in Africa, and in the chaos following Gaddafi’s death it was looted and scattered across the Sahara within months, arming Tuareg fighters, Islamist militants, and opportunistic traffickers alike. The effect on regional arms prices was immediate and dramatic: firearms that would have cost hundreds of dollars before 2011 reportedly sold, by 2012 and 2013, for around $10 in parts of northern Nigeria — roughly the price of a bag of rice.
Nigerian Major General Edward Buba summarized the chain of causation directly in 2024, noting that the proliferation of arms in Nigeria traces back to what happened in Libya and then across the Sahel, as weapons filtered into the wrong hands and worsened insurgency and terrorism in the country.
The following year, in 2012, Tuareg fighters returning from the Libyan conflict launched a rebellion in northern Mali. As Islamist and separatist groups advanced, they made enemies beyond the Malian military — looting Arab-owned businesses and raiding cattle from Fulani herders. In response, Arab merchants and Fulani herders organized their own armed self-defense groups, including MUJAO, largely as a reaction to being caught between rival armed factions rather than as an ideological project. It was an early illustration of a pattern that would repeat across the region: self-defense militarization, born of vulnerability, later absorbed into larger and more ideologically driven networks.
The Sahel as a weapons distribution network
More than a decade later, the corridor that opened in 2011 has not closed — it has matured. Of the roughly 100 million small arms estimated to be in circulation across Africa, some 30 million are believed to circulate in sub-Saharan Africa alone, much of it supplied through the diversion of poorly managed national stockpiles. Corruption, weak border controls, soldiers selling weapons for profit, and long-established smuggling networks all contribute to that diversion.
Mali’s northern regions, once at least nominally secured by French military support, are now largely open to weapons movement. Burkina Faso faces a full-blown jihadist insurgency that has displaced millions of people. Niger, Chad, and Mauritania round out a belt of fragile states sitting directly along Nigeria’s northern border. Together, these conditions have turned the southern Sahel into what one recent analysis called a weapons distribution network, with Nigeria as one of its primary destinations.
From grievance to recruitment
Arms alone did not create armed Fulani factions; grievance and opportunity did the rest. Fulani pastoralists have joined militant Islamist groups in the Sahel for a range of reasons that go well beyond ideology. Some took up arms specifically to resist abusive government authorities who extracted arbitrary fees. Others turned to militant groups for economic survival after livestock epidemics and severe droughts wiped out their herds and impoverished their families.
A particularly damaging dynamic has been the use of non-Fulani militias by state militaries as reconnaissance scouts against jihadist groups. That collaboration has, at times, provoked unprecedented attacks on Fulani villages and camps, deepening ethnic polarization and intercommunal violence. Each new massacre of Fulani civilians has, in turn, driven further recruitment into militant Islamist groups — a self-reinforcing cycle in which the state’s own counter-insurgency choices have sometimes fed the insurgency they were meant to suppress. Groups such as MUJAO, and later networks tied to JNIM and Islamic State’s Sahel Province, have drawn recruits from precisely this pool of grievance.
Nigeria: The corridor where the conflicts meet?
Nigeria sits at the convergence point of both stories — the regional arms corridor and the decades-old, homegrown herder-farmer conflict — and the results have been severe. Since the founding of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic in 1999, farmer-herder violence has killed more than 19,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. By 2018, the International Crisis Group assessed that this violence had already become roughly six times deadlier than Boko Haram’s insurgency, and had become Nigeria’s gravest security challenge. Between 2017 and 2020 alone, one compilation of reporting attributed 654 attacks to Fulani militias, resulting in 2,539 deaths and 253 kidnappings. By 2025, Nigeria ranked sixth on the Global Terrorism Index, up from eighth the year before.
The country’s Middle Belt states — Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, and Taraba — have absorbed the worst of this violence, as herders pushed south by desertification collide with an expanding agricultural frontier.
Nigeria’s own armament pathway illustrates the broader regional pattern in miniature. Cheap weapons diverted from Libya and channeled through fragile Sahelian neighbors filtered into Nigeria’s North West and North East, feeding an intermediate stage of banditry — armed groups blending cattle rustling, kidnapping-for-ransom, and highway robbery, often overlapping with herder communities. That trajectory has, in some cases, escalated further still. Lakurawa, a Fulani-rooted armed group with ties to Islamic State Sahel Province, was designated a terrorist organization by the Nigerian government in 2025 after killing 59 civilians across Sokoto and Kebbi states in the first half of that year alone. Reports indicate growing operational ties between Lakurawa and Boko Haram, with militants from both groups reportedly reinforcing each other.
What Nigeria has tried
Nigeria’s policy response has evolved considerably, if unevenly. In 2017, Benue State passed the country’s first anti-open grazing law, banning the practice outright in an effort to curb violence; its enforcement has produced polarized reactions from both herders and farmers. In 2019, the federal government’s RUGA settlement initiative — intended to create herder settlements nationwide — was withdrawn following public backlash over perceived religious and political motives.
The most ambitious response to date has been the National Livestock Transformation Plan, which envisions at least 119 ranches operating across several states by 2028, with the federal government funding 80 percent of qualifying state proposals. Two years after its launch, however, the first ranch had yet to be built, and implementation has been slowed by widespread distrust: herders doubt the viability of ranching, and farmers doubt the government’s follow-through, both having been let down by previous, unfulfilled promises. Nigeria created a dedicated Federal Ministry of Livestock Development in 2024 to coordinate reform, and by 2025 and into 2026 the government had selected Kwara State as a ranching pilot, launched a 100,000-hectare ranch project in Niger State with Brazilian investment, and begun centralizing national livestock data.
Toward a more durable response
Disarming the Sahel corridor without resolving the underlying land, water, and justice grievances is unlikely to end the violence — and reform focused only on domestic livestock policy is unlikely to succeed while cross-border arms flows continue unaddressed. A more durable response likely needs to move on multiple fronts simultaneously: stronger regional coordination on stockpile security and arms tracking with Niger, Chad, and Mali; fully funded and transparently milestoned ranching infrastructure that both herders and farmers can verify is actually being built; rebuilt mediation institutions with genuine joint herder-farmer representation at the local government level; evenhanded prosecution of attacks by all parties to break the cycle of retaliation; and sustained investment in drought-resilient agriculture and water infrastructure to reduce the resource pressure that started this crisis in the first place.
None of these measures is sufficient alone. Together, they represent the closest available answer to a conflict that was decades in the making and that, as recent history shows, can be reignited by forces — like a foreign arsenal unlocked a thousand miles away — that have little to do with Nigeria’s borders at all.
Sources
Africa Center for Strategic Studies, “Understanding Fulani Perspectives on the Sahel Crisis”
Combating Terrorism Center, West Point, “The Fulani Crisis: Communal Violence and Radicalization in the Sahel”
One Earth Future, “Stemming the Tide: African Leadership in Small Arms and Light Weapons Control”
Pan African Visions, “The Open Gate: Why Nigeria Can’t Stop the Surge of Small Arms from the Sahel” (2026)
International Crisis Group, “Nigeria: Livestock Reform Is Key to Solving Farmer-Herder Conflict”
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science, “The Nexus of Banditry, Farmer-Herder Clashes and Insecurity in Nigeria: Causes, Consequences and Policy Responses” (2025)
Wikipedia, “Herder–Farmer Conflicts in Nigeria” (background statistics)
Nairametrics, “FG to Modernise Livestock Farming to Reduce Farming-Herding Conflicts” (2025)
PRNigeria, “On the Economic and Security Benefits of Ranching Reform” (2026)
African Arguments, “Why Nigeria Must Return to Indigenous Cattle in Solving Farmer-Herder Clashes” (2026)
The Punch, “Herders’ Violence: Implement Ranching to End Open Grazing” (2026)
This article synthesizes open-source security, policy, and academic reporting current through mid-2026. It is intended for research and policy discussion, not as a definitive intelligence assessment.
