The Sahel south of Lake Chad has lost 90% of its surface water since 1960 (UNEP 2018). The Fulani pastoralist migration corridors of the 19th century — running from Sokoto and the Senegal valley south to the Atlantic coast through Cameroon — collapsed as urbanisation, farming expansion and desertification closed the seasonal grazing reserves established by the 1965 Grazing Reserves Law (Western Region) and never updated. By 2010 the pressure had pushed semi-nomadic Fulani herders into the forest belt of Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa, Enugu, Ekiti, Ondo, Edo and Delta — the so-called 'Middle Belt killing fields'.
The Global Terrorism Index 2015 ranked 'Fulani militants' as the world's fourth-deadliest non-state armed group, after ISIS, Boko Haram and the Taliban — based on 1,229 killings attributed to herder-identified attackers in 2014 alone. Major attacks of the decade: Agatu (Benue, February 2016, 500+ killed in seven Idoma villages), Nimbo (Enugu, April 2016, 40 killed), Logo and Guma (Benue, January 2018, 73 killed at New Year, leading to the Benue 'Anti-Open Grazing Law' of November 2017 and President Buhari's reluctant condolence visit), Plateau (June 2018, 200+ killed across 11 Berom villages), Owo (Ondo, June 2022, 41 killed at St Francis Catholic Church during Pentecost Mass), and the recurrent Benue-Nasarawa killings of 2023–2024.
The Federal Government's response — the 2019 RUGA settlement scheme (Rural Grazing Areas) — was abandoned after Southern governors rejected federal seizure of land for cattle colonies. President Tinubu's Federal Ministry of Livestock Development (created 2024) has yet to produce policy. There has been no national land-use reform since the 1978 Land Use Act, no Grazing Reserves restoration, and no enforcement of the Open Grazing Prohibition Laws of Benue, Ekiti, Taraba, Bayelsa and Abia.
Cumulative deaths 2014–2025 across 20+ states conservatively exceed 10,000. The conflict combines all three of the recurring patterns: climate-conflict (Sahel desiccation), grievance-insurgency (uncompensated displacement and ethnic targeting), and northern-abandonment (state failure to police the rural night). Without land-use reform and water-resource investment in the Sahel-edge zone, the southward push of pastoralists into farming country is permanent.