The herder-farmer conflict is the most under-discussed mass-casualty crisis in Nigerian security since the civil war. Its drivers are partly environmental, partly demographic, partly political — and the political response has been notably weaker than the response to Boko Haram, despite a comparable death toll.
The environmental driver is Lake Chad. The lake has shrunk from approximately 25,000 sq km in 1963 to about 1,500 sq km by 2018 (a 94 percent reduction), driven by reduced rainfall in the Chari and Logone catchments, dam construction in Cameroon and Chad, and increased irrigation withdrawal. The pastoral economy of the Lake Chad Basin — primarily Fulani, Buduma, Shuwa Arab — has collapsed, pushing pastoralists west into Niger and Sokoto, south into Benue and Plateau, and ultimately as far south as Enugu, Anambra, Imo, Edo, Ondo and Ekiti.
The demographic driver is the doubling of the population of the Middle Belt and the simultaneous expansion of cultivated land into the traditional dry-season grazing reserves established by the 1965 Grazing Reserves Law. The Gana grazing reserves were never fully implemented; by 2014 most of the legally gazetted reserves had been converted to farmland.
The political driver is the asymmetric national response. Benue State (Governor Samuel Ortom, 2015–2023) passed the 2017 Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law, banning open grazing. Federal security forces did not enforce it. The 1 January 2018 Benue New Year massacre — coordinated attacks on Logo and Guma LGAs that killed 73 people — drew global attention; the federal response was the deployment of 'Operation Whirl Stroke', criticised as inadequate by Benue community leaders and the Catholic Bishops' Conference.
The ICG's December 2018 report, Stopping Nigeria's Spiralling Farmer-Herder Violence, concluded that the conflict was producing fatalities 'six times higher than the death toll from Boko Haram' for that year — over 1,300 killed in the first half of 2018 alone. ACLED data show consistent annual death tolls of 1,500–3,500 between 2018 and 2024 across the Middle Belt and increasingly the South-East and South-West.
By 2024 the conflict had spread visibly to the southern states. Coordinated attacks on farming communities in Enugu (Eha-Amufu), Anambra, Imo, Ondo (Owo), Edo and Oyo were reported throughout 2022–2024. The classification of perpetrators as 'bandits', 'unknown gunmen' or 'herdsmen' varies by media outlet and political alignment; the death toll is consistent. See also Southern Kaduna killings.