ABSTRACT
Introduction In the numerous conflicts bedeviling postcolonial Nigeria, land conflicts have been growing in frequency, intensity, and scale. The national profile has various manifestations. In the desert-threatened northwest and northeast, farmer-grazer conflicts are the major trends; in the northcentral, southeast, southsouth and southwest, land ownership contestations are dominant. The phenomenon of land conflicts in Nigeria in general, and in central Nigeria in particular speaks to the importance of land. In sub-Saharan Africa, generally, land was and still is central to economic production, as a source of raw materials and as a means of livelihood sustenance, for the rural/agrarian majority. Ironically, Nigeria has plenty of land but none is vacant or lacking an owner.1 In central Nigeria,2 which is my area of focus, since the 1970s, and particularly from the 1990s, land conflicts have increased in the number of occurrences, frequency, intensity, and spread. Since the Fourth Republic of 1999-2006, more than fifty land conflicts occurred, with the Benue valley accounting for about 50 percent of these.3 By 2009, land-based conflicts in the Benue valley alone accounted for 42.9 percent of the conflicts in the region.4 Though rooted in precolonial intergroup relations, land conflicts have been elaborating through the colonial period to the present, and showing no signs of ending. In Benue state, citizens have had land disputes and conflicts on their borders with Enugu, Ebonyi, Cross River, Kogi, Nasarawa, and Taraba states.5 As of April 2013, Kogi state government and people in central Nigeria have been battling with their counterparts in Enugu and Anambra states in Nigeria’s southeast over borders found to contain oil; Tiv and Fulani, Tiv and Kuteb, Berom and Fulani, Taroh and Fulani are all at daggers’ drawn in their respective states.6 These have implications for widening the parties in conflict. To this extent, Blench has correctly identified many “potential parties to natural resource conflict, including farmers, pastoralists, fishermen and hunters.”7 This categorization speaks to occupational class; there are ethnic and religious identities, as there are also political markers, such as local governments and states that have become parties as well. This study shows that three major trends in land conflicts in Nigeria in general and central Nigeria in particular exist:
• conflicts over farmland-involving farmers disputing who owns a piece of land, and farmers in boundary communities disputing on which side of the boundary the farmland/mineral rich land falls;
• conflicts over access to natural resources: land, water, and other resourcesinvolving various natural resources contested by farmers, herders, fishers and hunters-with the farmer-grazer conflicts dominating8; and
• conflict over ethnic/religious ownership of an entire territory-between those regarded as indigenes and others regarded as settlers.
