ARTICLE : The Armed Fulani Herdsman: How Militarization Spread Across Sub-Saharan Africa And Took Root In Nigeria

By Farooq Gajo

Introduction

For generations, the Fulani — an estimated 20 to 25 million people spread from Senegal to Sudan — have moved cattle across West and Central Africa in search of pasture and water, a way of life known as transhumance. As one of the largest nomadic ethnic groups in the world, the Fulani have never had a unified political leadership; their communities are dispersed across more than half a dozen countries and shaped by significant local variation. Yet in the last fifteen years, a subset of Fulani communities has become associated with a very different story: armed conflict, militia violence, and in some cases outright militancy. Understanding how that happened — and why Nigeria in particular has borne so much of the resulting violence — requires tracing a chain of events that begins far from Nigeria’s borders, in the collapse of a North African state.

Old Pressures, Long Before the Guns

The roots of herder-farmer tension predate any of the region’s recent arms flows. Recurring drought and southward-creeping desertification in the Sahel have steadily shrunk traditional pasturelands, pushing herders into new and often already-cultivated territory further south. At the same time, population growth on both sides of the herder-farmer divide — and the corresponding expansion of cultivated land — intensified competition for the same shrinking pool of land and water. Traditional mechanisms that once resolved these disputes locally broke down under the strain, removing an informal system that had contained friction for generations. None of this, on its own, required weapons. It created grievance and competition. What transformed that friction into sustained lethal violence was a flood of small arms that had nothing to do with farming or grazing at all.

2011: The Libyan Collapse

The turning point was the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Libya’s arsenal was among the largest in Africa, and in the chaos following Gaddafi’s death it was looted and scattered across the Sahara within months, arming Tuareg fighters, Islamist militants, and opportunistic traffickers alike. The effect on regional arms prices was immediate and dramatic: firearms that would have cost hundreds of dollars before 2011 reportedly sold, by 2012 and 2013, for around $10 in parts of northern Nigeria — roughly the price of a bag of rice.

Nigerian Major General Edward Buba summarized the chain of causation directly in 2024, noting that the proliferation of arms in Nigeria traces back to what happened in Libya and then across the Sahel, as weapons filtered into the wrong hands and worsened insurgency and terrorism in the country.

The following year, in 2012, Tuareg fighters returning from the Libyan conflict launched a rebellion in northern Mali. As Islamist and separatist groups advanced, they made enemies beyond the Malian military — looting Arab-owned businesses and raiding cattle from Fulani herders. In response, Arab merchants and Fulani herders organized their own armed self-defense groups, including MUJAO, largely as a reaction to being caught between rival armed factions rather than as an ideological project. It was an early illustration of a pattern that would repeat across the region: self-defense militarization, born of vulnerability, later absorbed into larger and more ideologically driven networks.

The Sahel as a Weapons Distribution Network

More than a decade later, the corridor that opened in 2011 has not closed — it has matured. Of the roughly 100 million small arms estimated to be in circulation across Africa, some 30 million are believed to circulate in sub-Saharan Africa alone, much of it supplied through the diversion of poorly managed national stockpiles. Corruption, weak border controls, soldiers selling weapons for profit, and long-established smuggling networks all contribute to that diversion.

Mali’s northern regions, once at least nominally secured by French military support, are now largely open to weapons movement. Burkina Faso faces a full-blown jihadist insurgency that has displaced millions of people. Niger, Chad, and Mauritania round out a belt of fragile states sitting directly along Nigeria’s northern border. Together, these conditions have turned the southern Sahel into what one recent analysis called a weapons distribution network, with Nigeria as one of its primary destinations.

From Grievance to Recruitment

Arms alone did not create armed Fulani factions; grievance and opportunity did the rest. Fulani pastoralists have joined militant Islamist groups in the Sahel for a range of reasons that go well beyond ideology. Some took up arms specifically to resist abusive government authorities who extracted arbitrary fees. Others turned to militant groups for economic survival after livestock epidemics and severe droughts wiped out their herds and impoverished their families.

A particularly damaging dynamic has been the use of non-Fulani militias by state militaries as reconnaissance scouts against jihadist groups. That collaboration has, at times, provoked unprecedented attacks on Fulani villages and camps, deepening ethnic polarization and intercommunal violence. Each new massacre of Fulani civilians has, in turn, driven further recruitment into militant Islamist groups — a self-reinforcing cycle in which the state’s own counter-insurgency choices have sometimes fed the insurgency they were meant to suppress. Groups such as MUJAO, and later networks tied to JNIM and Islamic State’s Sahel Province, have drawn recruits from precisely this pool of grievance.

Nigeria: The corridor where the conflict meets?

Nigeria sits at the convergence point of both stories — the regional arms corridor and the decades-old, homegrown herder-farmer conflict — and the results have been severe. Since the founding of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic in 1999, farmer-herder violence has killed more than 19,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. By 2018, the International Crisis Group assessed that this violence had already become roughly six times deadlier than Boko Haram’s insurgency, and had become Nigeria’s gravest security challenge. Between 2017 and 2020 alone, one compilation of reporting attributed 654 attacks to Fulani militias, resulting in 2,539 deaths and 253 kidnappings. By 2025, Nigeria ranked sixth on the Global Terrorism Index, up from eighth the year before.

The country’s Middle Belt states — Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, and Taraba — have absorbed the worst of this violence, as herders pushed south by desertification collide with an expanding agricultural frontier.

Nigeria’s own armament pathway illustrates the broader regional pattern in miniature. Cheap weapons diverted from Libya and channeled through fragile Sahelian neighbors filtered into Nigeria’s North West and North East, feeding an intermediate stage of banditry — armed groups blending cattle rustling, kidnapping-for-ransom, and highway robbery, often overlapping with herder communities. That trajectory has, in some cases, escalated further still. Lakurawa, a Fulani-rooted armed group with ties to Islamic State Sahel Province, was designated a terrorist organization by the Nigerian government in 2025 after killing 59 civilians across Sokoto and Kebbi states in the first half of that year alone. Reports indicate growing operational ties between Lakurawa and Boko Haram, with militants from both groups reportedly reinforcing each other.

What Nigeria Has Tried