Drought, population explosion, and poverty are aggravating conflict in Nigeria. Climate change will likely add fuel to the fire.
Blessing sits on the floor, knees into chest, in an empty room in Bukakotto village in eastern Nigeria. She's "40 something," but looks 25, and her face is scarred with tribal markings razor cut into her face as a baby. Just the day before, her sister was murdered. She went to her farm to look for firewood, Blessing says through a translator, and she was knifed to death by nomadic cattle herders with machetes. "They hacked her all over."
A pink and white scarf hangs off Blessing’s head, and she arranges and rearranges it as she speaks, looking straight ahead into nothing. "We picked up her corpse and buried it yesterday."
Blessing's sister is another casualty in Nigeria's long-running battle between mostly Christian farmers and mostly Muslim cattle herders over access to land. This increasingly violent clash is playing out alongside the Boko Haram terror campaign that has captivated the world since the group kidnapped more than 300 schoolgirls in April. On the surface, the two conflicts—which have both resulted in thousands of deaths over the past few years—appear unrelated. One is centered around Islamic fundamentalism, the other around grass and water. But look a bit further and you find that both conflicts are deeply tied to a massive ecological crisis that is breeding desperate poverty in the north of the country.
For centuries, the nomadic Fulani people drove their cattle east and west across the Sahel, the expanse of land just south of the Sahara desert. With the onset of a string of droughts in the early 20th century, Fulanis began to shift their migratory routes north to south. Land battles between nomadic Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers were first reported about 60 years ago. The clashes have intensified since the start of another series of droughts beginning in the late 1960s that parched the land up north, driving more farmers and herders south for longer periods of time.
"They come [south] because of the nature of the climate in the north," says Mohammed Husaini, a Fulani herdsman and official with Nigeria's cattle breeder trade association. He's seated on a plastic lawn chair inside his spartan cattle vitamin shop in the eastern Nigerian town of Garaku. Just outside the open front door, a young man chants the Koran into the afternoon heat.
"The period of time that northern Fulani nomads used to spend in the middle of the country used to be December to May," he says. "Now it's December to June or July, and some nomadic Fulanis decide to just stay here." Why? Because, he explains, the grasses up north "don't grow totally" any more.
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