Desperate Guests, Unwilling Hosts: Climate Change-Induced Migration and Farmer-Herder Conflicts in Southwestern Nigeria
Publisher: Conflict Studies Quarterly
Author(s): Azeez Olaniyan and Ufo Okeke-Uzodike
Date: 2015
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Renewable Resources
Countries: Nigeria
Discourses on the relationship between climate change and violent conflict have created two opposing views of the enthusiasts and the skeptics, with the former arguing that there is a strong connection and the latter doubting it. This paper combines elements from the two lines of thought to assess the phenomenon of incessant farmer-herder conflicts in southwestern Nigeria. Presenting evidence collected from a town in southwestern Nigeria, the paper demonstrates not only the saliency of climate change but also its instigating influence in human migration and the associated violent conflicts in southwestern Nigeria. It argues that acute shortage in rainfalls, increasing dryness and scorching heat have resulted in depletion of water, flora, and fauna resources on the land. This has triggered forced migration of many cattle herders of the region to the lush wetter parts of the south in desperate search of grazing spaces. More often than not, however, the desperate guests (the grazers) have often been met by unwilling hosts (the farmers) in the wetter destinations, thereby setting in motion violent conflicts, which have increased and intensified since the late 1990s. However, the paper concludes that, on its own, climate change-induced migration seldom causes conflict unless enmeshed with the struggle for economic ascendancy, intolerance, ethnicity, insensitivity, an integration problem, and state incapacity.