Statecraft and the Perennial Farmers: Herder Clashes in Nigeria (Published)
Farmers and Herdsmen, in sub-Saharan Africa have being coexisting and doing their vocation amicably. In northern Nigeria for instance, both of them have being using and benefiting from the nation’s ecology without much conflicts. In recent times however, this legendary mutual cooperation has soured resulting in to needless, avoidable wanton destruction of lives and properties. This paper therefore examines statecraft and the perennial farmers – herder clashes in Nigeria .the paper adopted library based documentation analysis as its major methodology since bulk of the data were sourced from secondary source. The paper revealed that: population explosion and land hunger, governmental policies ECOWAS protocol, climate change, communication breakdown, weak punitive measures against previous offenders, as Democratization and mainstream and social media dominance among others, are some fundamental factors that generated and ignited the incessant Farmers-Herders; which caused several setbacks on the socioeconomic development of the country such as decline in production and supply , inflation in prices of staple, destruction of lives and properties, proliferation of small arms and light weapons, growth in refugee and displacement of persons as well as food shortage and scarcity. The paper recommends among other Robust socioeconomic and psychological education/orientation of both the farmers-herders for peaceful coexistence, governmental investments in and provisions of basic necessities/infrastructures favorable for these agriculturalists and disciplining of offenders are some of the panacea to halt the incessant clashes.
Keywords: Conflict, Farmers, Herders, state craft