How Climate Change is Driving Nigeria's Herdsmen Conflict

May 13, 2016 | Chidi Oguamanam
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Forging national unity has been a perennial challenge to Nigeria’s evolution as a country. Since independence from Britain 56 years ago, the country continues to weather severe existential storms that strike at its very core. These make national cohesion and political stability largely elusive. They include: a bloody civil war in the 1960s; decades of corrupt military dictatorships; perennial inter-ethnic distrust; occasional religious strife and political insurrection; minority and resource rights agitation; and a trademark corrupt political and ruling class.

Recently, Nigeria’s sociopolitical and geopolitical tensions have taken on another dimension. This is evident in the escalating bloody clashes between nomadic cattle herders and farmers. Though there are alternative narratives, the ongoing tensions reflect, in a way, climate change-induced resource scarcity that threatens food and national security.

Nigeria is by far Africa’s most ethnically diverse country. It has an estimated 250 ethnic nationalities. Its most visible faultline is its stark religious divide between the Islamic North and Christian/animist South. This is a less accurate simplification of a complex dynamic. Before Nigeria’s independence, the British in 1914 coupled independently administered protectorates of southern and northern Nigeria by fiat as an act of convenience, before bowing out 46 years later in 1960.