In May 2024, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume, made headlines around Nigeria when he attributed the majority of the country’s insecurity problem to “the issue of climate change.” Akume’s remarks did not go down well with large swathes of the Nigerian public, but they were predictably well received by the international audience for whom they were intended.
This audience, through no fault of its own, has regularly been informed that deadly, large scale non-state violence in Nigeria can be largely reduced to a series of “clashes” between rural farmers and itinerant herders. These “clashes,” according to the prevailing narrative, are driven by increased competition between both groups for increasingly scarce irrigated land and water sources, due to the twin pressures of population growth and climate change, manifested primarily through desert encroachment.
As is so often the case with such conveniently polite, cut-and-dried explanations, the actual facts of the matter have never quite matched the narrative. For one thing, arable land and water sources are not by any means scarce resources in Nigeria. The country’s 993,000km² land mass is laterally dissected by the Niger River and the Benue River, which combine in a Y-shape to discharge a combined 11,377m³ of freshwater. At 279/km², Nigeria is also the world’s 59th most densely populated country behind the likes of Belgium, Great Britain and Jamaica – hardly the scenes of desperate population crises.
Facts notwithstanding, the idea that Nigeria’s alarming rural mass death problem can be boiled down to the twin pressures of climate change and Africans having too many babies, is one that remains deeply rooted in the imagination of the global intelligentsia. Against this backdrop, findings from a new study by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA) promise to blow this and other tightly held assumptions out of the water once and for all.
The study, which examines patterns of violence in Nigeria over a 4-year period reveals some interesting insights that provide definite answers to questions about the motives, intent, timing, enablement, locations and demographics involved in the spate of killings across the country. Very importantly, the data presented in the report presents a clear and dispassionate picture of exactly who has been doing the killing and who has been doing the dying – a topic that continues to generate significant controversy in Nigeria and beyond.
Murderous Intent Established
One of the key findings in the ORFA report is that the majority of mass killings in Nigeria are ‘land-based’ as against random attacks. These are scenarios where specific villages or settlements are selected as targets and violently attacked. This is a very important finding because it debunks the official Nigerian state narrative that seeks to typify this violence as random, unpredictable and even mercantile.
Indeed, the “unofficially official” use of the term “banditry” – as against say, “terrorism” – to describe the regular deadly attacks, is a known part of the Nigerian government’s strategy of denial. The data from the study proves authoritatively that random attacks, such as those targeting highways or marketplaces, are a much smaller category. In 81% of civilian killings, someone is selecting, and clearing out, land.
Another key finding from the report is that the Middle Belt has been deliberately and systematically left undefended. Bearing in mind that such large-scale violence in the Middle Belt first came to the forefront of public consciousness nearly a decade ago, the study shows that years after incidents like the Agatu Massacre in Benue State became regular occurrences, Nigeria’s security establishment failed to demonstrate any change in strategy.
Despite the existence of vast amounts of precedent to inform the deployment of equipment and personnel to defend areas under attack, these attacks continued to happen under the nose of the Nigerian authorities without any hint of pushback. The lack of effective security engagement in the Middle Belt has long been referenced and discussed by survivors, researchers and international bodies, but the study’s data mapping shows it clearly for the first time.
Crucially, the study shows that the Fulani Ethnic Militia (FEM) is now statistically the deadliest terror group in Nigeria, ahead of the likes of Boko Haram, ISWAP and Ansaru. In fact, the combined body count of the latter groups now sum up to only a fraction of FEM killings. The study also reveals that over the 4 year data period, there was a shift from violent attacks within Muslim-dominated states towards those states with Christian majority populations. Across the country, 2.7 Christians were killed for every Muslim.
These findings are important because they prove that though the violent extremists murder both Christians and Muslims, the wave of murderous violence afflicting Nigeria’s Middle Belt has been planned and targeted to accomplish a Darfur-style demographic replacement of indigenous Christian populations with exogenous Muslim groups – or genocide, as that is otherwise known. That is not an opinion – the data says so.
Buttressing this conclusion, the data also reveals that even in states with majority Muslim and minority Christian populations such as Kaduna, the damage to minority Christian populations was exceptionally high. When examined on a state-by-state basis, losses to local Christian populations were higher in both absolute and proportional terms. The data paints a different picture for each state: in Kaduna, for example, over the four years, 8.2 Christians were killed for every Muslim.
Even more curiously, the study also shows that in the immediate run-up to 2023 elections, there was a sudden, significant dip in the number and frequency of attacks that was completely out of keeping with existing patterns. Almost immediately after the election period, this anomaly ceased and the regular attacks resumed. While the data cannot tell us for certain whether this is proof that Nigerian political actors control the levers of genocidal violence and can manipulate them for electoral purposes, it does at the very least beg the questions – who benefitted from the sudden and unexplained drop in violence just before the elections, and why did the killings resume after the elections?
Perhaps we will always have more questions than answers. However, this study provides at least some answers through data – a wealth of evidence that we dare hope may yield more insights, the more closely it is examined. Maybe that is as much as we can ask for, under the present circumstances.