Middle Belt: The harvest of grief
Orisemeke Benjamin
In Nigeria’s Middle Belt, a warming climate, shrinking pasture and inaction have turned farmers and herders into enemies and made the country’s interior one of the deadliest places on earth to be a rural villager.
The smell of decomposition hung over Yelewata weeks after gunmen stormed the farming town in Nigeria’s Benue state.
When Amnesty International researchers arrived, they found bullet casings littering the ground, homes reduced to ash and mass graves freshly dug for the more than 100 people killed in the raid of 14 June 2025. Over 3,900 survivors fled.
Few attackers were ever named, until February, when prosecutors filed 57 terrorism charges against nine men accused in the massacre, according to Reuters.
Yelewata is a single skirmish in one of the world’s deadliest and least-watched conflicts. At least 3,641 people died in farmer-herder violence between January 2016 and October 2018, 57 per cent of them in 2018 alone, Amnesty International reported.
The International Crisis Group counted more than 1,000 violent episodes between the two groups in the 2010s, against fewer than 100 the decade before; by its reckoning, the bloodshed of 2018 was six times deadlier than the Boko Haram insurgency that year.
Over two million Nigerians have fled their homes, and researchers estimate the disruption costs the economy 14 billion dollars a year.
At its core is a struggle over land and water, sharpened by climate change. Longer dry seasons and vanishing pasture push cattle herders, predominantly Fulani, southward into the fertile Middle Belt, where expanding farms and towns have swallowed old grazing routes. Researchers say violent flashpoints follow climate-induced migration of herders searching for grazing land.
The conflict is often framed in ethnic and religious terms, but both communities are also prey to armed gangs who rustle cattle and loot villages.
What turns disputes into slaughter, human rights groups argue, is impunity. In Benue, where Amnesty has monitored the bloodshed since 2016, survivors said security forces often arrive long after the gunmen have left.
The state now hosts 510,182 displaced people, many in crowded camps short of food, water and medicine, where camp officials say births occur almost daily. “If we don’t get drugs, we just sit and watch the sick person helplessly,” one resident told researchers.
For farming communities, the question is survival. “The Nigerian authorities have failed the people of Benue state again and again,” said Isa Sanusi, director of Amnesty International Nigeria. Attacks typically come at night, with gunmen using rifles and machetes; Amnesty has documented amputations among the injuries.
Herders tell a different story. Many Fulani pastoralists say they are stereotyped as killers while their own losses, cattle rustled and kinsmen killed by bandits, go uncounted. Many distrust official plans to fence their livelihood into ranches, fearing a slow confiscation of ancestral grazing land.
The Crisis Group notes ranching schemes have stalled amid herders’ resistance and farmers’ resentment of benefits flowing the other way.
Government responses have multiplied without resolving much. Benue banned open grazing in 2017.
The National Livestock Transformation Plan, adopted in 2019, promises at least 119 working ranches by 2028, and President Bola Tinubu created a Ministry of Livestock Development in 2024, whose minister, Idi Mukhtar Maiha, says Nigeria is making progress toward a lasting solution.
Officials insist there is no outright ban on open grazing, only a gradual transition. Yet funding gaps, technical shortages and distrust persist.
In a camp in Makurdi, a mother of eight displaced by the violence told Amnesty she has lost track of her children.
“Many of them have left me and I do not know where they are,” she said. Until the state can protect either side from the other, Nigeria’s farmers and herders will keep burying their dead, and the harvest will keep being grief.
