Special Investigation: The Fulani ‘Doomed to a bleak future?’

– Island of calm – 

At the end of a long track, across bridges half collapsed, a village of round homes of mud walls stands. Here, in the Kachia grazing reserve in Kaduna state, the Fulani live — for the most part — on their own. The region has been hard hit by the conflict between farmers and herders, but Kachia, earmarked for nomads, is a refuge.

Some 18,000 people lived here four years ago, according to the latest estimates. But since then people have arrived in droves, fleeing the violence elsewhere. “There was nothing here when we got there, just the bush,” said Idriss Jamo, the only doctor for far around. “Nobody lands here by choice.”

Jamo is the exception; he came here a few years ago from Kaduna to open his basic clinic. The clinic has shortages of equipment and drugs, but the patients now at least have one doctor.

“We could have stayed in town, with all the modern comforts,” said Bilkisu, Jamo’s oldest daughter, her hair neatly tucked under a brown headscarf. “But my father got tired of seeing people die of malaria, and pregnant women lose their child before reaching the hospital,”  said 24-year-old Bilkisu, studying microbiology at university in town. Life is quiet here.

The two mosques call the faithful to prayer five times a day, marking out time for the people. There is also the market and the football pitch, which comes alive when the baking heat drops at dusk.

Phones are quiet: the network doesn’t reach here. There is no internet access, no state electricity. If you want power for your mobile, you pay a small fee to charge your device at a store with a little generator.

Isa Ibrahim is a herder -– half of the time. Otherwise he drives a motorbike, a taxi driver on two-wheels for hire, offering the escape out of the village the young men aspire to.

Ibrahim, 30, with a beard and his forehead tattooed with stars in the tradition of the Fulani, leaves his wife and children to zoom off for the half-hour trip on the rough tracks to the trading centre on a crossroads. People simply call it the “Crossing.”

There, among the tin-hut shops with phone network, he can finally call friends, listen to music and –- most importantly –- play pool, the main attraction.

Ibrahim was born in the area nearby, in a small village called Madakyia, at a time when life still revolved around the herd. Life was for father as it was for son.

The number of cows you counted in the herd was the measure of the man; it was who you were, your wealth, and your social status.

As a boy, he moved with the herds according to the rains in search of grazing, travelling with the animals, before returning to the village. They no longer lived quite as their ancestors had been; only a tenth of pastoralists now remain fully nomadic. But he had time to experience a life of camp and bushfires. It was a happy existence.

Then, in 2011, everything shattered. The post-election violence that followed the presidential election soon divided the Kaduna region along the religious and ethnic lines of its many different peoples. Christians against Muslims, Fulani against Atyap, Fulani against Ninzom, Fulani against Kaninkom… The villages burned one after the other. Eighty members of Ibrahim’s clan were slaughtered in one night alone. Of their hundred cows, two-thirds were slaughtered. The sheep were stolen.

So Ibrahim’s father and his wives, with 15 children, took refuge like so many others on the reserve. “The change was difficult,” said Ibrahim. “We started to farm the land because we had lost a lot of animals, so we could not count on that to live on anymore.”

– ‘The cow is magic’ – 

Ibrahim wakes at dawn to milk the animals he has left before heading to look for work on his motorbike taxi. The cows’ milk is declining drop by drop and today there is not enough for the family, let alone to sell at market. Squatting beside a cow, Ibrahim’s 12-year-old brother pushes away a young calf wanting milk from its mother.

In the end, both clinging to the udders, the calf and boy both suck at the rich milk. The herds are precious. Only when a family member gets sick, or to celebrate a wedding or a birth, does the family sell a cow. The herd is the family’s bank, a savings account to be drawn on only in dire need.

“The cow is magic, more magical than the fairies!” wrote Fulani writer Tierno Monenembo.

“She feeds, she protects, she guides… She opens the doors of destiny.”  But times are tough, and Ibrahim hankers for the old days.

“The flock is no longer a symbol of wealth, but of survival,” he said sadly.

“It has become impossible to go 10 kilometres in the bush without crossing a field, which is when we have problems with the farmers.

“The grazing routes no longer exist. Everything is cultivated.”

Nigeria, on the advice of the World Bank, set down plans as early as 1964 to protect 10 percent of the country for grazing lands for livestock herders. But the promises of the Grazing Reserve Act were largely ignored. Only a fraction of the reserves ever emerged.

Of the 415 reserves planned, about a hundred were gazetted, meaning that their creation was officialised, although only 20 are actually up and running.

But as the conflict spreads, the calls grow louder for the law to be implemented in the hope that the herders will settle for good — and that the violence ends.

The Kachia Grazing Reserve, where Ibrahim lives, is supposed to be a model example.

– Kalashnikovs and codeine –

For Ibrahim, it is now too dangerous to leave the reserve. “With the theft of cattle, bandits and criminals are everywhere,” he said.

“We never go far with the animals. We are poor, but here at least we are safe, and our children are going to school.” He himself did not have that chance. He wanted to be a vet, looking after the animals of his people -– but violence and poverty meant he never got the chance.

In Kachia, there are 21 primary schools and one secondary school – for nearly 6,000 students.

All are “nomadic schools”, set up over two decades ago to provide access for herders to give their children education. But the bitter fact remains: Out of the 10-15 million cattle herders in Nigeria, more than three million children do not go to school.

Even in Kachia, the “model” reserve of the Fulani, dreams of a glittering future crash and burn inside the decrepit walls of schools. More than 120 children squeeze into a classroom, many without desks, benches or notebooks.

Yusuf Abubakar is 16 years old — but in second year at school. He struggles to speak English fluently. Yet he still dreams of one day becoming governor, to “do what others have not done… to bring peace to the people, build schools and hospitals.”

In the oldest school, established in 1990, there are four teachers for 860 pupils. Lessons fall back onto learning by rote; students recite  — without fault and in song — the capitals of the 36 states of the country.

“More than 90 percent of Kachia’s youth are unemployed — they sit in the village,” said 29-year-old teacher Shitu Abdullahi. “Some smoke cannabis or drink codeine.” The cough syrup of codeine, an opiate used to treat pain, numbs reality.

“They do not want to take care of livestock anymore, but they do not have a diploma, no qualifications,” said Abullahi. “How do you want them to cope?”

– Curse of crime – 

The statistics are sketchy, but everyone will say it: the crime rate among Fulani youth has exploded in northern Nigeria. In the troubled state of Zamfara, large-scale cattle thefts and kidnappings for ransom have become the norm.

“Many of those who lost everything in attacks have gone to get weapons to defend themselves, and also started to get involved in kidnappings and cattle rustling,” said Malam Mansur Isah Buhari, a university lecturer in Sokoto.

An AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle costs around $100. Within the gang structure, the Fulani are minions, although there is a lot of money at stake for leaders. The spiral of violence is endless. No one is spared.

“Criminals act indiscriminately, the Fulani attack Fulani, who seek in turn a way to survive,” Isah Buhari said.

The stolen animals are loaded alive on trucks, untraceable in the vast marketplace of the livestock economy.  There are eager buyers and the animals pass from dealer to dealer.  Money changes hands, until, eventually, the animals join that gruelling forced march to Lagos, and their rendezvous with the slaughterhouse

Hunger for beef offers rewards and risks for Nigeria’s pastoralists

With over 200 million people and an emerging middle class, Nigeria is witnessing a boom in demand for meat that offers potential but also risks for the semi-nomadic herders who provide most of its beef.

According to government estimates, Nigeria, consumes 360,000 tonnes of beef each year, accounting for half of all West Africa.

In per-capita terms, consumption is low compared with advanced economies, but it is growing fast, and expected to quadruple by 2050.

Today, most of the demand is met by pastoralists from the ethnic Fulani group, who follow time-honoured techniques of raising cattle, driving them south to pastures and taking them to market.

During the dry season, the herders come down from the arid Sahel to the fertile plains of central and southern Nigeria, seeking water and pasture for their livestock.

– Tensions –

The millennia-old activity has been thrust into the spotlight in recent years because of worsening confrontations with sedentary farmers over access to land and water.

Clashes have claimed 7,000 lives over the past five years and cost the Nigerian economy $13 billion (11.57 billion euros) annually, according to a report in May by the NGO Mercy Corps.

The friction has roots dating back more than a century. Droughts, population growth, the expansion of sedentary farming into communal areas but also poor governance have all played a role.

Such neglect has pastoralists feeling isolated, according to Ibrahim Abdullahi, secretary of Gafdan, a national union of herders.

“Nothing was done to implement the grazing reserves designed by the law in the 1960s — most of the land has been sold and is now cultivated by farmers who grow crops,” he said.

Nomadic herders also find themselves far from the channels of the meat trade, while many markets and outdoor slaughterhouses lack basic sanitary conditions, such as running water, animal shelters and cold storage rooms, he said.

“At all the levels of government, the livestock sector was always marginalised in favour of agriculture. Some states still allocate less than two percent of their budget to livestock,” he added.

– Opportunity – 

As Nigerians clamour for meat, can this ancient practice — with its long supply chains, climate risks and social tensions — compete against sedentary farming, which has high productivity and lower risks?

Jimmy Smith, director of the Institute for International Research on Livestock Farming (ILRI), based in Nairobi, argues that the system can not only survive but also flourish — in the right conditions.

“Pastoralism has been established for millennia — in the past we’ve seen it’s a very efficient system if you look at the input/output relationship. Very little is invested, but a reasonable amount is harvested,” he told AFP.

This model can prosper if the right support is put in place, he said.

“For example, it is possible to grow more forage and grain in sub-humid zones to create and develop feed markets for livestock based in northern areas, where it’s dry.”

“One animal which can give two litres (3.6 pints) of milk today could give 10 litres in the future.”

The government is mulling several plans to boost cattle raising and ease tensions over access to land.

They include initiatives for the creation of “cattle colonies” — dedicated areas where pastoralists can graze their animals and have access to veterinary and other care.

But these schemes are expensive and have already drawn flak from Nigerian states, which oppose handing over land for this use.

Another idea, for encouraging ranching, is doubted by agricultural experts. They point to a long list of past failures, during the French and British colonial period, to set up high-productivity “modern farms” in West Africa.

– Imports – 

Nigeria has considerable livestock — nearly 20 million cattle, 40 million sheep and 60 million goats — but about 30 percent of slaughtered animals are purchased from abroad, mainly from neighbouring Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Niger.

Often the herds are driven for hundreds of kilometres (miles) to be sold at border markets like Illela, a trading post between Niger and Nigeria.

The animals are then trucked to the cities, where they are sold again, slaughtered and butchered.

“As it is now, there’s no way Nigeria can produce all the meat and the milk it needs for its growing population,” said Smith.

“A significant proportion of animal source food demand will most likely continue to be met by importation.”

Nigeria’s hunger for meat is likely to be replicated across Africa, if expectations of population and income rise hold true.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates the continent will experience a doubling in consumption of

beef, pork and chicken between 2015 and 2050.

With most of the meat consumed in Africa still coming from pastoralism, Smith said, “All we need is to modernise it.”

History: Forces of history drive Nigeria’s herder-farmer conflict

Beneath an escalating conflict between herders and farmers in central Nigeria lies a relentless but often under-reported force: history.

Events in the 19th century helped shape today’s violence between mainly Muslim Fulani cattlemen and largely Christian farmers — a battle of blood and identity.

Sokoto, an ancient city in northern Nigeria, is where many Fulani, a semi-nomadic people stretching from Lake Chad to the Atlantic coast, have their spiritual roots.

Cross-legged, his eyes closed and palms turned upwards to the heavens, Saidu Bello prays before a huge marble tomb covered in blue velvet: the resting place of Usman Dan Fodio, revered by many as a Muslim saint.

“I pray Allah to give me the same strength as he gave to the Shehu,” says Bello, a 29-year-old trader, referring to Fodio.

“Whenever I have doubts, I come here for his help to make the right decision.”

– Caliphate –

In 1804, Fodio, a learned Fulani, declared holy war on despotic leaders.

Urging Muslims to observe a “pure Islam,” he launched an insurrection that, four years later, led to the establishment of the caliphate of Sokoto.

The state was as large as it was prosperous, extending from modern-day Burkina Faso to Cameroon — an area that took four months to cross end-to-end. The caliphate ended when its last leader was killed by the British in 1903.

“Usman Dan Fodio united former Hausa kingdoms and brought peace to the whole region,” says Sambo Wali Junaidu, advisor to the current sultan of Sokoto, a direct descendant of the first caliph and Nigeria’s highest-ranking Muslim.

“He fought social injustices and undue privileges.”

Fodio’s charisma and writings — treatises and poems written in Arabic, Hausa and the Fula language — inspired Fulani jihads in West Africa throughout the 19th century.

And his popularity persists today. At the shrine in Sokoto, pilgrims come from as far as Senegal, laden with offerings.

Many of these faithful are barely-literate Fulani herders who have not read any of Fodio’s writings but learned of him through madrassas, or Islamic schools.

– Roots of conflict –

The conflict in Nigeria between Fulani and sedentary farmers has erupted in a fertile central region called the Middle Belt.

Demand for water and access to land, driven in part by a surging population in a country of 200 million, are among the contemporary causes for the fighting.

But there is a deeper reason: the Middle Belt lies in Nigeria’s religious faultline, between the predominantly Muslim north and mainly Christian south. It is also a region that, historically, suffered chronic unrest.

Lying on the southern rim of the caliphate of Sokoto, the Middle Belt was largely populated by animist communities. These were frequently raided by the caliph’s troops to provide slave labour for the plantations, salt mines or burgeoning iron industry which made the empire so prosperous.

Contemporary descriptions by traders are eye-opening. In 1824, in the great commercial hub of Kano, the ratio of the population was 30 slaves to every one free man.

“Native populations, living in this zone of influence during the time of pre-colonial Islamic empires, were psychologically scarred” by the raids and the enslavement, says Alioune Ndiaye, a specialist on Nigeria at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada. Many became Christian as a result, and the traumatic episode resonates in Nigeria today, he says.

“There is still this dread among people in the south that the northerners are coming ‘to dip the Koran in the ocean,’ as the saying goes,” Ndiaye says.

– ‘Blame the Fulani’ –

This backwash of fear and mistrust is often reflected in the Nigerian media, whose main outlets are owned by a southern tycoon. Fulani herders are routinely called “terrorists,” and a supposed Fulani “plot” to Islamise Nigeria, begun under Fodio, is also media fodder.

Stigmatisation worsened after the election in 2015 of President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim Fulani from the north. His every decision — from the speed with which he has condemned massacres to the response of the armed forces and the appointments he makes in the army and police — is scrutinised through the lens of ethnic bias, says Ndiaye.

Ibrahim Abdullahi, who represents an association of herders in the northern city of Kaduna, says the notion of a modern-day “Fulani jihad” is a “pure fantasy” that was being manipulated for political ends.

Unlike Mali and Burkina, where jihadist groups exploit ethnic resentment to recruit among Fulani people, the Fulani in Nigeria generally have no claims based on religious ideology.

“Most of the Fulani pastoralists are poor and haven’t been to school. They don’t have a voice, there’s no organisation or political elite speaking on behalf of all of them,” he said.

“That’s why each time something goes wrong in Nigeria, people blame the Fulani.”

Profile : In the heart of the metropolis, a king of Nigeria’s herder Fulani

The Sarkin Fulani of Lagos sinks into his white upholstered throne, lays a hand on the sculpted golden cow head that forms the armrest and scans the subjects gathered at his feet.

Mohammed Abubakar Bambado is a busy 49-year-old businessman with a successful port handling firm in Nigeria’s economic metropolis. He is also a king.

The Sarkin Fulani of Lagos is one of Nigeria’s most influential members of a mainly Muslim community of nomadic herders from the far north, at a time when relations with the country’s largely Christian farmers are deteriorating.

All of those waiting for an audience to air their problems in Bambado’s cramped assembly room are ethnic Fulani-Hausa, two closely-tied northern ethnic groups. But few of them know the herding life.

Fulani-Hausa now make up around a quarter of the population of Lagos — around five to seven million people — in the ethnically Yoruba-dominated south of Nigeria.

The congregation is overwhelmingly urban — district chiefs kneel alongside the representatives from the ranks of the “okada” motorcycle taxis and the beggars who wander between the racing traffic in downtown Lagos.

“I am here to solve their problems,” said Bambado, a thick-set man with a Mercedes 4×4 who himself does not fit the stereotype of the weather-beaten wanderer.

Their problems are centred on the push and hustle of life in Nigeria’s frenetic economic capital. A money-changer was kidnapped and murdered. His family does not trust the police, and begs the influential chief to follow up on the investigation. He says he will.

There are land disputes, family quarrels, beatings and armed robberies, all brought to the chief for advice and help. He has no official powers, but when he speaks, the police and politicians listen.

“He is a good man. When something serious happens, even if he is travelling overseas he always picks up his phone. And if it is necessary, he flies back to Nigeria,” says Suleiman Ibrahim, a trader who has come to Bambado to adjudicate a family feud.

Indeed, the time Bambado spends on his gilded throne in his somewhat ramshackle palace in Surulere, the popular residential district of Lagos where he lives, is just part of his busy schedule.

The married father-of-three often travels for work and spends around half the year in London and Dubai on business.

– Blood and belief –

The Fulani seem to be a people without borders — the wider community is estimated at between 30 million to 40 million scattered across fifteen countries from Senegal to the Central African Republic.  In the north, every city has a Sarkin Fulani or a Sarkin Hausa.

Officially, Bambado’s authority extends only to the borders of Lagos, but his influence spreads wider and he is a powerful player in Nigeria’s political mosaic.  That position has become increasingly important in recent years as conflicts between Fulani and sedentary farmers have swept Nigeria’s fertile central region.

The bloodshed has been stoked by demand for water and access to land, driven in part by a surging population in a country of 200 million. The Fulani have also been accused of “terrorism” and aggression.

“Anywhere you see a Fulani man, people see them as killers,” said Bambado.

“But it is not true. A Fulani man is a wonderful person, he accommodates, he likes his people, he likes his neighbours, he interacts, he is a very social person. But you know what? There is no society that has no bad eggs.”

 – Drawn to Lagos –

Bambado’s grandparents were from an educated, religious family and were among the first migrants to leave the arid northern state of Jigawa and travel south at the beginning of the 20th century.

They eventually settled on the Atlantic coast and his grandfather, a trader in kola nuts and gold nuggets, increasingly became a linchpin of the Fulani community.

“When people from the north stayed in Lagos, he was the one to welcome them. They became more numerous. So one day, they decided that they needed a leader: my grandfather,” said Bambado, who inherited the title when his father died in 1994.

The first Sarkin Fulani of Lagos balanced his royal duties with diversifying his business interests, investing in the cattle trade and the docks.

He set up a port handling business, using “brothers” as labour, which has passed from father to son — like the Sarkin title — for three generations.

Bambado has continued in this tradition and Dockworth Services International now employs 1,500 people. He is also a central figure in the meat market in Lagos, which is the key sales hub for the cattle reared across the north and centre of the country. He even keeps a herd of around 300 cattle on the outskirts of the city to keep him tethered to his heritage.

And despite his travel schedule and the wide dispersal of his community across multiple countries, he remains loyal to his birthplace. “I am a Lagosian first and foremost,” he said.

An AFP special report by Celia Lebur, Florian Plaucheur & Luis Tato