Nigeria Content Online

Due to the
regular conflicts that occur between Fulani herdsmen and farmers in the
Gwagwada district of Chikun local government area of Kaduna State, a
conflict resolution committee has now been set up in the council.

The conflicts
usually arise over ownership of land between migrant herdsmen and
indigenous farmers, with cattle invading farms and destroying crops; or
cattle drinking from streams where humans drink. According to Habila
Kaura Jatau, who is a farmer and the chief of Dutse, a village in the
district, some portions of land far from the farms were initially
allocated to the herdsmen, but due to climate change, pasture has dried
up in that area and herdsmen are now occupying the same area with the
farmers.

“Before, they
gave the cattle rearers land far from the farmers, but with this change
in weather, we are now mixed up. What they do sometimes is that after
harvest, they rush down to where they can get feed for their cows. And
since we are mixed together, in the rainy season, and the lack of food
for the cattle, it would cause problem one way or the other between
farmers and cattle rearers in that when they come to somebody’s farm,
dispute will arise. We are already facing our own problem, because now
it is very hard to produce anything without fertiliser, and you now
come and destroy the crops, there will be problem,” he said.

Jamilu Sani, a
Fulani herdsman in the community, said they have been migrating
southwards over the years, basically looking for greener pasture for
their cows.

“We have some
problems because the cows do not have enough food to eat, so we have to
travel far to where we can find food for them,” he said.

According to Mr.
Jatau, such disputes are first taken to the village head, then to the
district head, then to the local council, with the owner of the
straying cattle usually asked to pay a monetary compensation to the
farmer whose crop was destroyed.

“But even if the
conflicts are resolved without violence, there will always be conflicts
because we are still together and since places are developing, it is
difficult to find bush where the cattle rearers can stay on their own,”
Mr. Jatau said.

Moving South

According to
Yahaya Ahmed, the chairman of the Developmental Association for
Renewable Energies, DARE, it has been discovered that about 200
villages have disappeared in the top northern Nigeria due to
desertification.

This was found
during their survey to substantiate their claim of adverse conditions
in the Sahel region of northern Nigeria, due to deforestation and
desertification for the approval of their Clean Development Mechanism
CDM project by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change, UNFCCC. The project is distributing Save80 stove, a wood stove
which cooks food for about 50 people using just one kilogramme of wood
[dry sticks] as well as solar cookers. The Save80 stove is aid to be
saving 80 percent of trees in these regions.

“Since we could
not get any useful information from the government, we decided to do
the survey ourselves. So we started talking to migrants around Kaduna
and Abuja; we discovered that about three-quarter of them had migrated
from Yobe. That’s why we chose Yobe as our baseline.

“While we
interacted with the people there, we discovered that about 200 villages
have migrated from an area between a place called Dapchi, north of
Damaturu, to the northern border of Nigeria with Niger Republic. The
Sahara desert had taken over their villages and they had to migrate to
different parts of the country, including Lagos,” Mr. Ahmed said.

These migrations
do not happen only from northern Nigeria; some of the migrants also
come from Niger Republic. According to Mr. Ahmed, it happens mostly in
the dry season when many of the youth in the rural areas are idle.

They move into
cities southwards and take up jobs as cobblers, Okada riders
(commercial motorcyclists), and water vendors. They arrive cities like
Lagos on trucks bringing beans, tomatoes, onions, and cows. Some return
to the north to farm during rainy season, some don’t.

Decrease in farm yield

Adamu Tanko, an
associate professor of geography and agricultural development and the
head of Geography Department, Ado Bayero University, Kano, has been
conducting a research on Climate Change and Adaptation, sponsored by
Heinrich Boll Foundation, through Tubali, a non-profit organisation
focused on rural development.

In Cifatake, a
village in Kaduna State, he discovered a gradual decrease in the amount
of rainfall from 1000-1200mm about 50 years ago to 884-1000mm in recent
times. He also noted that rainy season now starts late April and ends
early November, as against March to end of November that it used to be
some years ago. Coupled with tree-felling for firewood, the vegetation
cover is gone and erosion has set in, said Mr. Tanko, resulting in low
yield. So, the people are taking up other professions as hunters and
blacksmiths.

Climate change is to blame

This situation
across northern Nigeria, which is linked to global warming and climate
change, is putting a lot of pressure on the land in the middle-belt
within the Guinea Savannah. This, according to some organisations
studying the “ethno-religious” conflicts that have led to the death of
hundreds of people in Jos and Kaduna, is the root of the conflicts.

“The conflicts
that people say are religious are not. Ethnicity and religion are just
the triggers because they are the major sources of identity for most
Nigerians. The key issue is fight for economic and political control.
Jos became a city where a lot people came because of the tin mining and
the serene environment until it was divided into different zones then
we started hearing of ‘indigenes’ and ‘settlers’ and the tussle began”
said Sani Suleiman, programme manager, Emergency Relief and Peace
Building, Justice Development and Peace Commission, JDPC, Jos.

Nnimmo Bassey,
the executive director of the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of
the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), who was named winner of the Right
Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2009,
raised more alarm. He said Nigeria is not only threatened by the Sahara
desert, with increasing temperature due to global warming, the country
will lose coastal lands due to sea rise and hinterlands from gully
erosion in the southeast.

Economic survival

“The violence in
the middle-belt, particularly in Jos area, is not just an ethnic thing;
it’s not people struggling for political posts; it has an environmental
root. Because more pastoralists are going to come down from the North,
the more the desert spreads and Lake Chad dries up.

“They have to
look for good grazing land; fishermen are going to look for somewhere
else to fish. And the more the Niger-Delta environment gets polluted,
we will begin a system of eternal displacement from the South and also
from the North. And the displaced people will migrate and they going to
meet at the Middle-belt. Imagine if the southern part goes under water,
more people will be naturally displaced.

“So, the violence we are seeing in the Middle-belt is a foretaste of what our children are going to face,” he said.

Mr. Bassey said
one of the first steps in handling this environmental challenge is to
stop gas flaring in the Niger-Delta, which is one of Africa’s biggest
contribution to global warming.

Just as the
desertification in the North, coastal erosion is gaining ground along
the 853km Nigerian coastline. Properties along the coast like Goshen
Beach Estate, Lekki, Lagos, are now being threatened.

Larry Awosika,
the head of the Marine Geology and Geophysics Division of the Nigerian
Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research, NIOMR, said the sea was
over 100 metres away when the estate was built in 2003. Now it is less
than 20 metres away and the deep drain that was built to channel waste
into the ocean is now completely filled with sand.

He said the regular ship wrecks that lie perpendicular to the sea shore accelerate the coastal erosion.

“The littoral
drift, that is the movement of sediments in the near-shore, is usually
from west to east. So these ship wrecks act as groins. On one side,
there is deposition of sediments; while on the other side, there is
rapid erosion,” he said.

Apart from the
coastal erosion, experts say the recent flooding in various parts of
the country, especially in the Lagos region, is a result of the
ecological imbalance caused by climate change.

Climatic predictions

Victor Fodeke,
head, Special Climate Change Unit, Federal Ministry of Environment,
said climate change could exacerbate tension between and within
countries, leading to politics of insecurity, as countries focus on
protecting themselves from impacts.

The
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, predicts that between
75 and 250 million people in Africa will be affected by flooding in
2020, which will result in the destruction of traditional living
environments, more limited access to clean water, decreasing food
production from farms, forests, and aquaculture; and threats to food
security.

Recent history in
Nigeria points to the fact that if this prediction and other climate
change predictions come through, more serious conflicts will most
likely generate from the Middle Belt region than can be handled by the
type of conflict resolution committee that currently exists in Chikun
Council.