Introduction
In the north-west, one man’s bandit is another man’s freedom fighter. (Gadu 2022)
Consider the following two fragments on the insecurity in Nigeria’s troubled northwest geopolitical zone – a region colloquially referred to as the ‘Wild Wild West’ (Egbejule 2022) – that initially began as farmer–herder conflicts between predominantly Fulani pastoralists and mainly Hausa farmers before transmogrifying into vicious banditry involving the use of sophisticated weaponry by violent non-state actors, some of whom are pastoralists.
Fragment 1
On 16 July 2022, Ado Aleru – a Fulani bandit who is not just ‘a leader of one of the numerous bandit groups which have been raiding communities, killing people, kidnapping for ransom, and rustling livestock in Zamfara, Sokoto, and Katsina states’ but also ‘so notorious that in 2019, the police declared him wanted, with a ₦5 million [US$6500] bounty on his head’ (Vanguard 2022) – was turbaned and conferred the title of Sarkin Fulanin Yandoton Daji (King of the Fulani of Yandoto Forest) in Yandoto in Zamfara by Aliyu Garba Marafa, the Emir of Yandoto (Abubakar 2022). In attendance were:
the Zamfara State Commissioner for Security and Home Affairs, Mamman Tsafe; security advisor to the governor, Abubakar Dauran; Tsafe Local Government Chairman, Aminu Mudi, and representatives of the information commissioner, district heads and other traditional title holders and government officials. (Babangida 2022)
Ado Aleru considers himself a freedom fighter for marginalised Fulani pastoralists rather than an ordinary criminal (Babangida 2022). Ado Aleru’s turbaning ceremony engendered mixed reactions. Many residents in the local communities, even those severely affected by banditry, lauded the decision of the emir to confer such a prestigious chieftaincy title on a bandit leader, while the spokesperson of the emirate justified the event: ‘The conferment of the title of Sarkin Fulani on Ado Aleru would give him more power to control the entire Fulani people within the emirate’ (Dahiru 2022). However, the ceremony was criticised by some journalists and the state government as rewarding pastoral bandits for perpetrating atrocities. The editorial office of Vanguard – a Nigerian newspaper – saw the ceremony as ‘a summation … of the total failure of the Nigerian state and its subnational distributaries (state and local governments as well as the traditional institutions) to assert their powers of governance in that part of the country’ (Vanguard 2022). The Zamfara state government suspended the emir for conferring the chieftaincy title on Aleru (Hassan-Wuyo and Ibrahim 2022), and soon after, the state police declared that Aleru was wanted:
We are looking for Aleru because of the acts of terrorism he committed in the town of Kadiso where he killed over 100 locals … We are charging him for committing acts of terrorism in Kadiso, and in other communities also. He had also kidnapped people and collected ransom. (Hassan-Wuyo and Ibrahim 2022)
Although Aleru is outlawed by the state, he is considered by some local communities and pastoralists as a peacemaker, hero and ‘good bandit’.
Fragment 2
On 16 December 2021, Adamu Ayuba’s song in praise of Bello Turji – a notorious Fulani bandit leader who terrorises communities in parts of the northwest, especially Zamfara and Sokoto states – trended in northern Nigeria. Ibrahim Alhassan – leader of the Gobir Community Development Association – describes Turji as follows:
He blocks roads, sacks markets, seizes food and any material he fancies, and kills anyone who resists … He sacks village heads and appoints his own village heads. He levies taxes on communities. If any village fails to pay the levies, Bello Turji visits it with [an] instant and merciless attack, [and] kills anyone he can find, including women and children. (Maishanu 2021a,b)
Despite this witheringly scornful attack on Turji, he is lauded in Ayuba’s song not only as a hero among heroes, but also as ‘a lion, untouchable, and a great leader’ (Nwannah 2021). According to Dahiru (2021), the chorus goes:
Come forward the gallant
Stand up Turji, the slayer of men
Elephant who kills a bull
Turji, you’ve dominated rivals
A man above men.
The song also named and extolled several pastoral bandits who, like Bello Turji, terrorise local communities in the northwest:
Sarkin Zango, you are greeted
Sarkin Hudu, I praise you
We should stand up and greet officer
Dugu MD I salute you
The hammer that beats men
I must greet you Isah
Daudawa, we must greet Auwal. (Dahiru 2021)
Following the song’s release, Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal of Sokoto State ordered the arrest of Adamu Ayuba to deter others from eulogising bandits, because ‘The song is capable of misleading young people to begin to idolise or even pay allegiance to the bandits’ leader’ (Nwannah 2021). In a similar vein, local sociologist Sulaiman Idris, who is conversant with the conflict dynamics of the northwest region, lamented that ‘Listening to such songs breeds criminals and outcasts in society’ (Dahiru 2021). Contrary to the state’s official interdictions, however, Turji regards himself as a freedom fighter for marginalised Fulani pastoralists who have ostensibly been betrayed by a corrupt and inefficient state. As he put it when interviewed:
My fellow Fulani were killed and over one thousand cattle rustled … When I realised that I have no one to complain to, and no authority will help us, there was no option when Fulani are being massacred. We will not allow the Fulani to be wiped out. That is why I picked up arms. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
Turji is a freedom fighter, activist and folk hero for some pastoralists in the northwest region.
These two fragments cast pastoral banditry not so much as a mundane or ordinary crime, but as resistance against social injustice. In both cases, pastoral bandits are seemingly, as British historian Eric Hobsbawm would argue:
peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped, and supported. (Hobsbawm 1981, 17)
Pastoral banditry has, it seems to me, an ideological-cum-political project despite its embeddedness in capitalist accumulation and the fact that it shares much in common with ordinary banditry in the region. However, the burgeoning literature on banditry in northwestern Nigeria tends to assess pastoral banditry as an ordinary crime that derives from ungoverned spaces (Olaniyan and Yahaya 2016; Ojo 2020; Onwuzuruigbo 2021; Ebonine 2022) and from economic deprivation (Ejiofor 2022a,b). This leads Okoli and Abubakar (2021, 1725) to advance the concept of ‘crimelordism’, which they explain as:
In the context of armed banditry in Nigeria, the crime lord leads a more-or-less sedentary bandit network that recognises a central leadership built around his personality and charisma. Within an enclave where he is domiciled, the crime lord wields, de facto, quasi-territorial powers which he exercises through sundry acts of criminal brigandage and illicit governance.
In this article, I depart from these dominant perspectives and contend that pastoral banditry is a form of resistance, or social banditry, that is geared toward contesting – to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Philippe Bourgois – the ‘conjugated oppression’ (Bourgois 1988) of Fulani pastoralists. The concept of conjugated oppression is commonly used to describe a situation ‘whereby an ideological dynamic of ethnic discrimination interacts explosively with an economic dynamic of class exploitation to produce an overwhelming experience of oppression that is more than the sum of its parts’ (Bourgois 1989, 641). Conjugated oppression is typically employed to explain:
how multiple axes of oppression based on social relations such as race/caste/tribe/ethnicity/region or gender and sexuality … are co-constitutive of and shape class relations, potentially producing extreme relations of oppression, inseparable from each other in capitalist accumulation. (Lerche and Shah 2018, 931; see also Bourgois 1988)
I understand the concept of conjugated oppression to indicate the intersection of ethnic discrimination and class exploitation in the subjugation, marginalisation and oppression of a people. In the case of pastoral banditry, I contend there is a mutual interaction of ethnicity and class in the marginalisation of Fulani pastoralists, not least because Fulani pastoralists perceive themselves to be marginalised – ethnically (as Fulani) and occupationally (as pastoralists) – with inadequate access to natural resources such as land that are indispensable for sustaining a pastoral economy.
I contend that pastoral bandits in the northwest region are avengers in the Hobsbawmian lexicon because:
They are heroes not in spite of the fear and horror their actions inspire, but in some ways because of them. They are not so much men who right wrongs, but avengers and exerters of power; their appeal is not that of the agents of justice, but of men who prove that even the poor and weak can be terrible. (Hobsbawm 1981, 58)
I should state from the outset that banditry in the northwest region is neither synonymous with pastoralism nor with Fulani communities: this would be tantamount to what Moritz and Mbacke (2022) call – appropriating Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s phrase – ‘the danger of a single story about Fulani pastoralists’ that categorises the Fulani as a ‘suspect community’ (Ejiofor 2022a,b). Apart from Fulani pastoralists, there are other ethnic and occupational groups involved in banditry – ordinary crime without any ideological or political project – so that ethnicising or essentialising criminal activities in the region would be foolhardy. 1 This article does not explore ordinary banditry.
The article is organised around four sections. The first discusses the key concepts – banditry and social banditry – that drive my research endeavour. The second delves into the historical context of pastoralists’ conjugated oppression in northern Nigeria. In the third, I underline how pastoral banditry is not just a simple criminal enterprise orchestrated by purely self-interested violent non-state actors, but one which harbours an element of social resistance against perceived marginalisation that is conspicuously ignored in the burgeoning literature on banditry in the northwest geopolitical zone. I focus on pastoral banditry as a form of misguided violent protest against conjugated oppression, notably socioeconomic deprivation and varied abuses, especially the extrajudicial killing of pastoralists. In the fourth section, I discuss the impact of pastoral banditry on local communities and highlight contrasting perceptions of the activities of pastoral bandits in the region. I conclude by reiterating my argument that pastoral banditry constitutes resistance to the conjugated oppression of pastoralists. I suggest that, devoid of concomitant efforts to address the multifarious grievances of pastoralists whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by environmental, social and political ecological factors, military warfare – even though necessary to extirpate recalcitrant criminals – is not sufficient to root out the menace of pastoral banditry.
The analytical framework of social banditry
Concepts are the building blocks of research; without clarifying them we are likely to wander in ambiguity (Adcock and Collier 2001). Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori (1970, 1052) avers that ‘concepts are not only elements of a theoretical system, but equally tools for fact-gathering, data containers.’ Put simply, concepts drive research. In this article, I utilise the term ‘bandits’ in a generic way to mean people who threaten the existing ‘social and moral order of the state by the use of private violence in pursuit of their aims’ (Shaw 1984, 4). I consider social banditry a subtype of banditry. The concept of social banditry was first advanced by Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels (1959) and later elaborated in Bandits (1981) to ‘describe those outlaws who, in peasant societies, were labelled as criminals by the authorities, but were supported and protected by local communities’ (Travaglino 2019, 165). ‘Social bandits expressed social protest among the peasants and were as such regarded as heroes and champions, contrary to the view of the elite and authorities who branded them as criminals’ (Wagner 2007, 354). The tensions between how social bandits are perceived by themselves, by those whose interests they claim to represent in rural societies – for example, pastoralists – and by the legal system that outlaws them distinguish social banditry from ordinary banditry and various criminal activities.
Hobsbawm’s conceptualisation of social banditry is influenced by Marxist political economy, whereby class antagonism is central to social justice and progress. Wagner (2007, 355) posits that due to the Marxist underpinnings of social banditry, the ‘social’ in ‘social bandit’ is synonymous with ‘just’ or ‘justice’ as social banditry is ‘about the struggle for social justice’ and about righting wrongs. This is why Travaglino (2019, 165) opines that social banditry is a ‘vicarious expression of dissent’ as it reflects aggrieved or disadvantaged individuals’ or groups’ desire for social justice when they feel they lack the channel to protest inequality or exploitation. Hobsbawm associates social banditry with resistance and the quest for social justice among disadvantaged groups – especially peasants and pastoralists in rural communities. As he puts it: ‘Social banditry is universally found, wherever societies are based on agriculture (including pastoral economies), and consist largely of peasants and landless labourers, ruled, oppressed, and exploited by someone else – lords, towns, governments, lawyers, or even banks’ (Hobsbawm 1981, 20). For Hobsbawm, social bandits voice discontent regardless of the forms they may assume: the terror-bringing avenger; the primitive resistance fighter; or the noble robber. 2 However, for Hobsbawm, social bandits are not revolutionaries but reformers, as they typically wish to restore the traditional order without necessarily overturning it which ‘leaves the rich to exploit the poor … [and] the strong to oppress the weak’ (Hobsbawm 1981, 26). They are non-revolutionary in large measure because they do not challenge the status quo but wish to return society to a time in the past when things appeared just or socially equitable.
Like many concepts in the humanities and social sciences, social banditry is an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie 1956). One such contestation that dominates the literature on social brigandage since Hobsbawm advanced the concept has to do with whether the ideal of social banditry reflects social reality beyond the myths, legends and folklores used to describe the lives and activities of purported social bandits. For instance, Anton Blok – a Dutch anthropologist and fierce critic of Hobsbawm’s social banditry model – contends that social bandits’ criminal activities are hardly in the interests of the poor:
If we agree on political mobilisation as a process through which people seek to acquire more control over the social conditions that shape their lives, it may be argued that bandits do not seem the appropriate agents to transform any organisational capacity among peasants into a politically effective force. Rather than promoting the articulation of peasant interests within a national context, bandits tend to obstruct or to deviate concerted peasant action. They may do so directly by means of physical violence and intimidation. … [W]e know that bandits have fulfilled pivotal roles in the demobilisation of peasants. Indirectly, brigandage may impede large-scale peasant mobilisation since it provides channels to move up in the social hierarchy, and thus tends to weaken class solidarity. (Blok 1972, 496)
Despite the persuasiveness of Blok’s criticism that social brigandage cannot be neatly disentangled from the bandit’s accumulation of wealth to the detriment of the poor so that hardly any subtype of banditry portends resistance, it does not vitiate Hobsbawm’s core thesis – which blends myths, legends and folklores with social reality – that social banditry is an elementary form of social protest. Hobsbawm (1981, 33) asserts that ‘Though in practice social banditry cannot always be clearly separated from other kinds of banditry, this does not affect the fundamental analysis of social banditry as a special type of peasant protest and rebellion.’ In his reply to Blok’s critique, Hobsbawm maintains that there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bandits; his conception of social banditry is coterminous with – and only applies to – the ‘good’ bandit who is much more than just an ordinary criminal or robber. The ‘good’ bandit is a reformer who perceives indulgence in certain criminal activities as the only effective means to protest the crass exploitation of the poor. In this sense, Hobsbawm insists that social bandits are real and not just a figment of the imagination. He concludes his rejoinder with the following:
My work has not been concerned with banditry as such, but … more exactly with that variant of robbery which represents an element of social protest. It is not open to the criticism of ‘over-emphasising’ or under-emphasising this element, since its object is not to quantify it in relation to other kinds of banditry, but to analyse the complex nature of this type of protest and the social role of the men cast to represent it. (Hobsbawm 1972, 505)
Curott and Fink (2012, 471) provide empirical – economic and rationalist – evidence in support of the social banditry framework and contend that it is implausible to characterise the framework as a figment of the imagination because:
in the presence of a predatory government, bandits become folk heroes because they provide some benefits to the ordinary members of the societies they steal from. Bandits are violent, calculating, ruthless, and undiscriminating in their exploitation. But praising them is sensible if bandits help to mitigate harms stemming from dysfunctional and predatory governments. 3
Similarly, as I shall show, pastoral banditry is not coterminous with ordinary banditry. There are roving bandits in the northwest region whose activities do not qualify as social brigandage, precisely because these activities represent an element of social remonstration among some pastoralists who participate in them. In this article, I comprehend social banditry as illicit activities perpetrated by disaffected groups with the desire not so much to overturn the political order but to draw the state’s attention to their perceived unfair discrimination or exploitation, in order to fashion a state, economy or society attuned to their subjective well-being. Pastoral banditry qualifies as a form of social banditry not least because it is championed by aggrieved pastoralists who use extreme violence and terror as the means to draw the state’s attention to the plight of pastoralists, to revenge atrocities, and to eke out an existence in a dysfunctional structural system characterised by political corruption and economic dispossession. Pastoral bandits are the type of social bandits that Hobsbawm calls ‘avengers’ because their activities are a strategy to posit pastoralists as a people who can exert power and rectify social injustices.
However, I should emphasise that Hobsbawm himself hardly extends his framework to the African context. Furthermore, his conception of social banditry does not sufficiently locate social banditry as the direct consequence of the political economy of corruption and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003) perpetrated by political elites in collusion with ordinary people for the purpose of capitalist accumulation. This overlooked political economy dimension is significant to comprehend pastoral banditry as a form of social banditry rather than an ordinary crime in northern Nigeria. Pastoral banditry in the northwest is the product of the political corruption embedded in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Nigerian state that aggressively promoted and promotes agrarian capitalism with little or no consideration for the survival of the pastoral economy and the interests of Fulani pastoralists. This article critiques, and contributes to, the social banditry framework by incorporating the political-economic dimension that Hobsbawm does not sufficiently address in his original analysis.
Hobsbawm’s framework has been employed by many scholars to explicate resistance in various parts of the world. Indeed, social banditry is ‘one of the most universal social phenomena known to history, and one of the most amazingly uniform’ (Hobsbawm 1981, 18). The framework has been utilised to explain armed resistance in sub-Saharan Africa (Isaacman 1977; Austen 1986), China (Perry 1983), India (Wagner 2007), the Dominican Republic (Franks 1995), Lithuania (Balkelis 2008), Malaysia (Kheng 1985), Brazil (Singelmann 1975), Trinidad and Tobago (Pawelz 2018), and the Middle East and North Africa (Brown 1990; Cronin 2016; Chiti 2021), among others. In this article, I clarify how Hobsbawm’s observations about social banditry apply to pastoral banditry in the northwest geopolitical zone. In the next section, I explore the evolution of the conjugated oppression of pastoralists in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial northern Nigeria, focusing on the political economy of corruption and agrarian capitalism that marginalised – and still marginalises – Fulani pastoralists in contemporary Nigeria.
The political economy of the conjugated oppression of pastoralists in northern Nigeria
Pastoral banditry is the product of the political economy of corruption and exploitation in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. At the outset, I should state that Fulani are not the only pastoralists in Nigeria. By pastoralism, I mean ‘livestock-based production system where ruminant livestock freely graze in open grasslands’ (Momale 2015, 74). While many Fulanis are pastoralists, there are numerous pastoralists in Nigeria who are not – and do not identify as – Fulani. British anthropologist Roger Blench (1996, 112–113) observes that there are about 14 other pastoral peoples in Nigeria, including the Shuwa Arab, Tuareg, Kanembu and Yedina (also known as Buduma) around Lake Chad. Nor are Fulani pastoralists a homogeneous group: ‘In Nigeria there are many different Fulani clans, sub-clans, local Fulani cultures and dialects, and variations in herding practices’ (UNOWAS 2018). However, the Fulani are the largest pastoralist group in Nigeria where, as elsewhere in West and Central Africa, they are renowned ‘for their rearing of cattle, pastoral transhumance and nomadism’ (Higazi 2016, 368; de Vries 2020).
Nomadism and transhumance are two of the three main types of mobility which are central to Fulani and other pastoral production. Nomadism is where the ‘pastoral family and the livestock are involved in constant migration. There is no permanent settlement for the group. They may have a regular pattern of migration, or may sometimes keep moving in different directions’ (Momale 2015, 75); during transhumance, pastoralist movements are ‘dictated by seasonal variability in climatic conditions and availability of pasture and water’ (ibid.); while short-distance split movement is ‘mostly associated with sedentary pastoralists who migrate with part of the livestock and the family either during the wet or dry season to nearby areas, in search of better grazing conditions’ (ibid.). The historical context is key to understanding how the political economy of the conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists in the longue durée has left some of them feeling compelled to take up arms as a means of social resistance.
Fulani groups spread as nomads from the Senegambia valley to Hausaland in present-day Nigeria in the thirteenth century (Ibrahim 1966, 171; Adebayo 1991; Blench 1994). In Hausaland, a distinction gradually emerged between increasingly sedentary groups and others who continued to pursue pastoral livelihoods, with little integration into local host societies (Adebayo 1991). The nineteenth-century jihad of Usman dan Fodio ensured the political dominance of sedentary Fulani groups in Hausaland, while accentuating differences between pastoralists and sedentary groups. The latter, according to Ibrahim (1966, 171), ‘now form the members of the upper strata of society in the country and are generally found in positions of importance and responsibility’. Their mobile kin, on the other hand, have continued to pursue pastoral lives and livelihoods, maintaining sometimes extensive interactions with, but showing little willingness to be coopted into, more settled societies. Notwithstanding this distinction, sedentary Fulani have ‘retained a cultural bond with the pastoralists which persists up to the present’ (Blench 1994, 198). This distinction is coterminous with the conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.
Victor Azarya’s comparative historical study of pastoralism in Africa is a good starting point for an exploration of the political economy of the conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists in Nigeria. According to Azarya (1996), social stratification and marginalisation are entwined with sedentarisation, so that the discrimination of pastoralists in Africa is intimately connected to whether pastoralists fall into the state-forming/state-incorporated type or the segmentary-marginal type. In other words, sedentarisation can be implicated in excessive poverty or wealth creation. In the Sokoto Caliphate, the state-forming pastoralists – the sedentary Fulani – settled permanently with Hausa farmers and elites, accumulated wealth and knowledge, and appropriated lands, while the segmentary-marginal type – the pastoralist Fulani – were forced by sedentary groups to either give up pastoralism or face excessive poverty due to a rapid decline in available lands for grazing livestock, and an often corrupt tax system presided over by the sultans, emirs and tax collectors (wakilai) who governed precolonial northern Nigeria on a patron–client basis inflected by Islamic laws (Ezeomah 1987).
This patron–client form of governance produced a ‘class of landless labourers and another class of migrants who sold their land for cash for fear of losing them through pledging them to village heads, and finally, the scarcity of unused land because of permanent cultivation’ (Ezeomah 1987, 19). In such a political-economic context, Fulani pastoralists became an oppressed class and ethnicity. They could access grazing reserves, ‘areas of land demarcated, set aside and reserved for exclusive or semi-exclusive use by pastoralists’ (Muhammad-Baba and Tukur 2015, 199), but only after paying taxes and plugging themselves into the corrupt patron–client system presided over by sedentary Fulani. In particular, payment of the burdensome cattle tax (jangali) in exchange for livestock grazing rights was a social practice that was saturated with abuse and corruption (Adebayo 1995). Consequently, some Fulani pastoralists became sedentary and took up subsistence agriculture, while others tried to evade jangali by dispersing to various parts of present-day northern Nigeria where they were relegated to the margins of society. In several cases in precolonial and colonial northern Nigeria where abuses and corruption were part and parcel of jangali, mobility became – to borrow from American political scientist and anthropologist James Scott – Fulani pastoralists’ ‘art of not being governed’ as they engaged in tax evasion to preserve their lifestyle (Scott 2009). As Adebayo puts it:
Four main devices were employed by Fulani pastoralists to evade tax. First, they could migrate into a district where tax collection was lax, or where it would be possible to collude with tax collectors to defraud the colonial state. Second, they could move their cattle into … the forest (daji) to avoid being seen between July and October when tax was being collected. In colonial Nigeria, such deep forests not yet penetrated by settled agricultural communities existed, and many district heads would not venture too far into the bush for fear both of wild animals and of the wrath of the Fulani. Flight into the bush often proved successful in parts of Northern Nigeria where the grasses grow very tall in the rainy season. Third, they could cross the border into French territories where cattle tax was not levied, and return to Nigeria after the tax season. Fourth, the Fulani could split the herd into two unequal parts, pay tax on the smaller, and alter the receipt to cover all the animals in the herd. (Adebayo 1995, 131).
The exploitation of Fulani pastoralists through burdensome taxation continued in colonial northern Nigeria, where the sedentary Hausa and Fulani political elites and tax collectors collaborated with British colonisers to restrict Fulani pastoralist’s mobility by imposing multiple taxes on pastoralism (Adebayo 1995). The corrupt and unaccountable colonial order that absorbed the Sokoto Caliphate further institutionalised the established patron–client system in precolonial northern Nigeria by appointing ‘resident supervisors to oversee Fulani authority in the performance of their duties’ (Ezeomah 1987, 19). British colonialists regarded nomadic pastoralism as:
anathema to development and either tried to force changes on it or, more commonly, left it frozen in time. Throughout colonial Africa agriculture was preferred and encroached on pastoral land … Various ‘development’ schemes which tried to put pastoral lands into more intensive use while compensating the pastoralists with largely ineffective extension services ended in general failure and often led to further depletion of land resources. (Azarya 1996, 23)
British colonial laws such as the Land and Native Rights Law No. 9 of 1910 vested all lands in northern Nigeria in the colonial government and further restricted pastoralists’ grazing reserves in a bid to sedentarise Fulani pastoralists and to tax the livestock sector (Ezeomah 1987; Adebayo 1995; Muhammad-Baba and Tukur 2015). This meant that:
colonial political economy and exploitation, like their precolonial counterparts, threw up a vast array of economic inequality and social violence to which the different classes responded differently: the peasants and pastoralists by dodging tax, the old aristocracy and the new educated elites by abusing their offices to accumulate as much of state resources as they could, and the European officers by greater violence that completed one circle and initiated another. (Adebayo 1995, 136)
The result was that Fulani pastoralists perceived the colonial government contemptuously and sought myriad ways of resisting – and avoiding – colonial exploitation by way of perpetual mobility.
In postcolonial northern Nigeria, the conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists continued unabated as they remained on the margins due to agrarian capitalism. Azarya (1996) explains that the growing interest in wildlife sanctuaries, national parks and conservation centres combined with the drought and famine that struck African polities in the 1970s and 1980s meant that African pastoralists were increasingly barred from using grazing reserves, so much so that many pastoralists – and their cattle – died of famine. Other pastoralists became idle or were pauperised. Still others moved to urban areas in pursuit of wage labour. The abjection of pastoralists in postcolonial Africa is underscored by Azarya in the following way:
Whether accompanied by greater movement, as in the case of migrant workers, or less movement, as with those settled around relief centres, the result was usually the same: a further push to the margins of society. Having lost their livelihood, their culture and their self-respect, such groups found themselves at the outskirts of society where even bare physical survival was a matter of intense effort with uncertain results and depended, above all, on other groups’ willingness to offer them help or even tolerate their presence. Such pauperisation has become an increasingly common occurrence in large parts of Africa and is, perhaps the ultimate marginalisation of pastoralists in the postcolonial period. While no pastoralist group was immune … the phenomenon was still more predominant among those pastoralists who did not take part in the profound social changes, such as new stratification and large-scale sedentarisation that followed precolonial state formation. (Azarya 1996, 30)
Although there have been attempts by postcolonial governments in northern Nigeria ‘to formalise land tenure rights for the pastoralists, and to make possible the development of Nigeria’s livestock resources by institution of a ranching system’ (Awogbade 1987, 19) through grazing reserve laws – for example, the Grazing Reserve Law of 1965 – some scholars have noted that:
government efforts to establish grazing reserves are far from meeting the conditions of a successful grazing reserves policy, which … must include guarantee of financial commitment by the government for the provision of necessary infrastructure – dams, dips, veterinary clinics and drugs; outlawing setting reserves on fire; adequate supply of supplementary feeds; eradication of tsetse fly; adequate security against theft; and construction of market outlets and access roads. (Egwu 2015, 51)
The lack of access to land for cattle grazing, coupled with various forms of exploitation in postcolonial northern Nigeria, compelled Fulani pastoralists to establish an advocacy group called the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN, still active today) in the early 1970s to promote their interests and welfare. For instance, in a conference in 1980 at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ahmadu Bello University, MACBAN representatives highlighted Fulani pastoralists’ grievances on:
(1) Recognition of nomadic Fulbe as an integral part of the nation.
(2) Recognition of nomads’ land and herding problems.
(3) The need to secure cattle routes and provide grazing reserves.
(4) The need to prevent bush fires.
(5) The need to provide education and health services.
(6) The need for representation of nomadic Fulbe at Local, State and Federal Governments to enable them to put across their problems and seek solutions to them. (Ezeomah 1987, 29–30)
Given the political economy of exploitation of Fulani pastoralists in the postcolonial era, Adebayo (1991, 16) contends that Fulani pastoralists have not been well integrated into northern Nigeria and that the ‘result has been clashes between pastoralists and their hosts whenever animals stray into standing crops’ as pastoralists’ mobility is increasingly restricted by postcolonial development projects. The continued conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists has produced violent farmer–herder conflicts that affect local communities – especially in the northwest region. Grazing land in northern Nigeria has steadily declined since the 1960s due to a number of factors. These include resource scarcity due to climate change and desertification (Lenshie et al. 2021; Adebajo and Abdullahi 2022); inequitable allocation of land to sedentary groups, to the detriment of Fulani pastoralists, under the Land Use Act of 1978; the institutionalisation of indigeneity – autochthonic – policies (Maiangwa 2017; Usman and Nichol 2022); and demographic pressures stemming from population growth (ICG 2020). As a result, Fulani pastoralists continue to be relegated to the fringes of society, with inadequate access to grazing land. Additionally, endemic political corruption perpetrated by many northern politicians since Nigeria’s independence has seen elites and their cronies usurp and mismanage the vast resources of the state, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses, including Fulani pastoralists, and employing heavy-handed military tactics to quell any subversive mass protests proposing an alternative political order to ameliorate the deplorable social condition of ordinary citizens (Meagher 2013, 171).
Institutional decay, state fragility and porous borders have combined to worsen the security situation, as armed groups and light weapons from neighbouring conflict-affected countries pour into Nigeria (Egwu 2015, 44–47; Ojo 2020). In the context of these political-economic problems, as Fulani pastoralists struggle to access grazing land and social amenities to sustain their families and livelihoods, they have not only been blamed for most of the security problems in postcolonial northern Nigeria but also demonised and racially stereotyped as ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilised’, and an existential threat to the survival of other ethnoreligious and ethnoregional groups in Nigeria (Chukwuma 2020; Eke 2020; Chiluwa and Chiluwa 2022; Ejiofor 2023). Fulani pastoralists are thus increasingly forced to pursue alternative means to eke out a bare existence in northern Nigeria in general, and the northwest region in particular. Such marginalisation of Fulani pastoralists by way of immobilisation is lucidly captured by Vellturo (2020):
Pastoralists’ mobile nature has further marginalised them because most nation states are unpracticed in protecting the rights of, and providing services to, mobile people. Healthcare and education are often distributed in static buildings (hospitals and schools). Political representation is often closely tied to locality, as citizens engage in governance through local city councils or town halls, answer to law enforcement with a geographically limited jurisdiction, and vote on laws that impact their towns, districts, or provinces. Census data is notoriously poor in capturing the demographics of mobile populations. In this context, mobile groups like pastoralists struggle to access formal governance mechanisms for services like security, justice, and social support. Instead, they create their own mechanisms that are often regarded as illegitimate, antiquated, or backward by the state and the broader international community.
According to the ICG (2020), this quest for survival through nomadic pastoralism took an unprecedented turn in 2011 when pastoralists who felt exploited and abused by local sedentary communities, in collaboration with state security agencies and vigilante groups established by Hausa farmers, took up arms to protest their conjugated oppression. With regard to the proliferation of pastoral bandits in the northwest, it is the conjugated oppression of pastoralists through exploitation, immobilisation and social exclusion for the purposes of capitalist accumulation that engenders pastoral banditry, not least because pastoralists wish to maintain their nomadic culture and the economy intrinsic to it amid what appears to them to be an imminent threat to their very existence as Fulanis and as pastoralists. To that extent, pastoral banditry is a self-help mechanism to counteract the malaise of the postcolonial state that is manifest in the marginalisation of mobile groups.
This corroborates Hobsbawm’s (1981, 26) contention that social banditry is a form of self-help in peasant societies whose aim is the ‘defence of or restoration of the traditional order of things “as it should be” (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past) … In this sense social bandits are reformers, not revolutionaries.’ In the next section, I underscore how pastoral banditry constitutes social protest in the Hobsbawmian sense of social banditry by focusing on the pastoral bandits and their perceptions of the legality or otherwise of their activities in relation to the wider political, social and economic context in the embattled northwest region.
Pastoral banditry as resistance to the political economy of the conjugated oppression of pastoralists
Queried as to why some pastoralists have resorted to banditry, Ado Aleru – the pastoral bandit who was turbaned in Zamfara – remarked:
We only protest with guns. We know no journalists. We don’t know where to protest. Our protest is to take up arms and storm villages. That’s when the government will wake up and acknowledge our problems. If they ask, we will tell them our problems. (BBC 2022)
This sentiment is shared by Turji, the pastoral bandit who had earlier been lauded in song:
We believe they [government officials] think because Hausa people are educated, we can’t lodge complaints against them; because they … can go to the media to say whatever they want. They have access to government officials and … can tell them what they want. Since we are illiterate, no one will hear our side … Our people are killed, that’s why we take up arms to avenge. It is not just because we are merciless or we are unconscious of Allah who created us. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
Pastoral banditry is a form of social protest in the Hobsbawmian sense because these bandits see themselves – and are seen by some pastoralists who share their sentiments – as avengers. The question immediately arises: why do pastoral bandits protest? What do they resist when they take up arms to engage in kidnapping, armed robbery and killing? What are the problems that they feel should be addressed if they lay down their weapons? In this section, I explain how violence associated with pastoral banditry – although illicit and ostensibly misguided – is an attempt to contest conjugated oppression. Much like most forms of organised crime (Ellis 2016, 4), pastoral banditry has durable connections to politics and the state as it is essentially a by-product of the failures of the postcolonial Nigerian state to provide public goods.
Pastoral bandits as protesters against socioeconomic inequality
There are wide variations in nature, society and economy across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, with the northwest (Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara regions) – the epicentre of pastoral banditry – being the most socio-economically deprived. As the ICG (2020) notes:
Despite its economic potential, the [northwest] has the highest poverty rate in Nigeria. As of 2019, all seven states in the zone had poverty levels above the national average of 40.1 per cent, led by Sokoto (87.7 per cent), Jigawa (87 per cent) and Zamfara (74 per cent). Millions lack access to basic health care and clean water, and immunisation coverage is far below national goals. While the region has a long and proud history of Islamic and Arabic scholarship, apathy toward, and inadequate investment in, formal education over the decades have contributed to a literacy rate of 29.7 per cent. The zone currently has the highest number of out-of-school children in Nigeria. On top of those who do not attend school at all, millions of children are in the poorly resourced and ill-supervised Quranic school system, or almajiranci, which produces cohorts of unskilled youth. Much like the rest of the country, the region also suffers very poor local governance, characterised by the mismanagement of public funds.
These observations are corroborated by the United Nations Development Programme report on multidimensional poverty and human development in Nigeria, which records the highest levels of multidimensional poverty above the national Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) score of 0.303 in the northwest geopolitical zone: Zamfara (0.605), Kebbi (0.553), Jigawa (0.552), Sokoto (0.548), Katsina (0.52), Kano (0.434) and Kaduna (0.311) (UNDP 2018). Furthermore, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (2022, 25), overall:
65% of poor people – 86 million people – live in the North, while 35% – nearly 47 million – live in the South … a disparity between North and South is evident in both the incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty, with the North being poorer.
In addition, at 45%, extreme poverty in the northwest is the highest of any geopolitical zone (UNDP 2018). Turning to human development, which combines the three measures of life expectancy (health), education and gross national income per capita, all states in the northwest have Human Development Index (HDI) scores below the national average of 0.521, with Zamfara, Sokoto and Katsina performing the worst among the seven states in the region (UNDP 2018). Within the north, the northwest region is the poorest, with 45.49 million people suffering from multidimensional poverty, including 8 million multidimensionally poor children, the highest number of any region in the country.
Pastoralists are among the poorest of the poor in the northwest region. The conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists is particularly acute in the sphere of literacy and education. The children of nomadic pastoralists are less likely to be literate or to acquire formal education and are therefore more likely to be formally unemployed. Acknowledging the abysmally low school enrolment in nomadic communities, the Nigerian government established the National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) in 1989 to implement the Nomadic Education Programme (NEP) – an educational initiative geared toward providing access to basic education for pastoralists. Despite its potential, the NEP and wider educational system have not improved the lives and livelihoods of pastoralists. A recent survey of the NEP in the northwest shows that nomadic education is hampered by myriad woes, especially the dearth of teachers, funding and infrastructure. In Kaduna state, for example, ‘80 per cent of teaching and learning in the existing 318 nomadic schools occur under trees due to massive shortage of infrastructure’ (Vanguard 2018). These shortages are relatively consistent across Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, Zamfara and Sokoto states (Vanguard 2018). Lamenting the state of nomadic education, the Kebbi state chairman of MACBAN, Alhaji Muhammad Dan-Ali, remarked that:
The teachers we have in the schools cannot speak Fulani language; most of our wards don’t know how to speak Hausa and English language … it is difficult for teachers and pupils to communicate, making teaching and learning simply impossible. (Vanguard 2018)
It is against such a background that pastoral bandits conceive their illicit activities as the apposite means to draw the state’s attention to the plight of pastoralists in terms of illiteracy, lack of access to education, and ‘disemployment’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016, 44). For example, when asked about the rationale behind pastoralist participation in banditry, Shehu Rekep, one of the most notorious pastoral bandits in Zamfara, stated:
This whole agitation is caused by lack of education. None of us here is educated. Only in isolated cases do you have someone who would go and settle in another place and go to school … Anyone you see that has gone to school, it is possible it was because a minister or someone important is married to his sister and brought him close. The rest of us in the bushes are not educated. But there is also adult education and other training for trade. The law says they should empower … citizens and secure them and their property. None of that happens. We are not being secured. We don’t have anything to depend on; it is only us and the trees that are here, and the gun we are wielding. (Daily Trust 2021)
Moreover, Rekep contends that pastoralist illiteracy and lack of education are intimately connected to the fact that Fulani pastoralists inhabit a region that is not connected to global circuits of capital: ‘The government gives preference to crises in rich places. Maybe because there is no oil in the North we are considered as second-rate citizens. Herders are not being considered. We get attacked in the forests’ (Daily Trust 2021). For Rekep, the state’s neglect of Fulani pastoralists’ education is almost always combined with repression, as many pastoralists are imprisoned:
Any person who is kidnapped and detained in the bush eventually gets released, but Fulani men are detained perpetually in prisons. About 96 percent of prisoners in Nigeria are herders. Negotiators reach out to us here, but nobody visits those of us in prisons because they don’t have guns. The same way we think of ourselves here in the forests is the same feeling we have towards our brothers in the prisons. (Daily Trust 2021)
There is no credible evidence to corroborate the claim that 96% of prisoners in Nigeria are Fulani pastoralists. However, Rekep’s central contention is that the overall conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists derives from their lack of access to education, that precludes them from participating in conventional – and socially tolerable – modes of wealth production and accumulation. With little access to formal education, pastoral bandits feel that pastoralists do not have the cultural and social capital required for successful integration in the modern capitalist economy. Asked what can be done for pastoral bandits to lay down their arms, Rekep suggests that the education of Fulani pastoralists and their children is of paramount importance:
Our pastoralists should be employed, just like their children. Our children should also be enrolled in schools so that we become knowledgeable as well. In this country there is oil, gold and so many other natural resources, but we don’t know how they are managed. We know nothing other than spending time under trees. There is no difference between us and the animals we herd. (Daily Trust 2021)
Added to the issue of illiteracy is the conundrum of the precarity of nomadism in a universe of unrestrained primitive capital accumulation by sedentary groups. Since the 1970s, pastoralism has been existentially endangered due to the decline of grazing areas, collapse of cattle tracks or the burti system, and the allocation of lands to mainly Hausa farmers by local governments in ways that are antithetical to pastoralist interests (Blench 1994). For instance:
land available for grazing in the densely populated part of the Sudan zone surrounding Kano city in northern Nigeria has vastly reduced over recent decades when livestock numbers in Nigeria have increased by approximately 250% … The massive decrease in landscape connectedness, disappearance of fallow in Kano West, and very small and declining amount (<3 %) of grazing land in Jakara … both within 40 km of Kano, suggests pastoralists have been forced to find alternative grazing areas and route-ways. (Usman and Nichol 2022, 6)
Similarly, ICG (2020) vividly captures the allocation of lands to mainly farming communities in Zamfara state, to the detriment of Fulani pastoralists:
the government decided to clear large forests and grazing reserves in the Kuyambana forest and in parts of the Maru and Zurmi local government areas. This action disrupted life in Fulani hamlets, some centuries old, limiting the availability of pasture for their livestock. The allocation of land to farmers also resulted in encroachment on, and blockage of, livestock grazing routes, and created conditions for increased trespass on farmlands by herders and more demands for compensation for damaged crops. While farmers complained of herders trespassing on their farms and damaging crops, herders protested the compensation they had to pay for damaged crops, and complained that farmers, district heads, police and courts were colluding against them in a corrupt process.
From the 2000s:
farmers found that they often had tacit or explicit permission from local authorities to farm on restricted grazing lands. Certain politicians, newly empowered by the return to democratic rule in 1999, sold restricted land to farmers and developers for profit or distributed it as a form of political patronage. Certain emirs … did the same, brokering deals with farmers to encroach onto grazing lands. Retired civil servants or military officers who had accrued fortunes in the era of military rule also purchased large swathes of land in the northwest. (CDD 2022, 8)
‘The seizure of grazing land from reserved areas in Zamfara state affected an estimated 20,000 Fulani people, dispossessing many … and constraining their access to land’ (CDD 2022, 8). Hence, the ‘expansion of cultivations has led to massive encroachments on pastoral grazing areas such as hurmi (traditionally designated grazing areas around towns and villages), forest reserves, grazing reserves, watering points, migratory routes, and dry season fadama grazing areas’ (Momale 2015, 77). Such ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003) has plunged many Fulani pastoralists into poverty. As Rekep clarifies: ‘We are also deprived of keeping cattle because of lack of grazing areas. They have taken over the grazing areas; even the grazing routes are no longer there.… We have been rendered poor’ (Daily Trust 2021). For Fulani pastoralists, cattle – to appropriate French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s extension of the myriad forms of capital – are economic, cultural, symbolic and social capital. As cultural capital, cattle constitute the pastoralist’s social assets, their social status is typically gauged by the large herds of cattle they possess. As economic capital, cattle symbolise wealth, in large measure because cattle products like milk and beef generate income for the pastoralist’s household. As social and symbolic capital, cattle embed the pastoralist in durable social networks or relationships of mutual respect. In short, cattle are the ‘total social phenomenon’ (Mauss 1990) of the pastoralist in that they are ‘the medium of transformation, in a total economy of signs and practices, between a material economy of things and a moral economy of persons’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1990, 196, emphasis in original).
Given the value placed on cattle, pastoralists conceive of them, I think, as the apotheosis of human existence that structures social relations. Hence, Adebayo (1991, 2) opines that:
To the pastoral Fulani cattle are more important than anything else. They are a measure of wealth, a unit of account, a treasure, a property and yet not a property … Everything begins and ends with cattle. The [lives] of their men and women revolve around cattle. All activities, all conversations, and all thoughts centre on cattle. 4
To deprive the Fulani pastoralist of cattle through restrictions on mobility and arbitrary allocation of lands to sedentary groups for private profit or public development projects is tantamount to social death.
Hobsbawm (1981, 24, emphasis in original) contends that banditry tends to be rampant in times of pauperisation and economic crisis, so that ‘En masse, they [bandits] are little more than symptoms of crisis and tension in their society – of famine, pestilence, war or anything else that disrupts it.’ Given the widespread poverty and illiteracy in the northwest region, coupled with the loss of herds and grazing areas, pastoral bandits perceive banditry as a licit means not just to protest their conjugated oppression but also to transcend it. As avengers in the Hobsbawmian lexicon, pastoral bandits are driven by an ‘ethics of illegality’ (Roitman 2006) that portends ‘armed violence as a practical occupation’ (Debos 2011) with emancipatory potential in the context of socioeconomic deprivation. As Hassan Dantawaye – a pastoral bandit in Zamfara – outlined, recounting the impact of losing cattle on his decision to become a bandit:
I lost 372 cows and a large number of sheep. My family members have also lost many. That was my reason for leaving my village and moving to the forest as an alternative home and becoming a bandit, because I had nothing left to depend on … One day, an idea came to us that since … kidnapping … people for ransom was being done in some parts of this country and people were making money from it, we should adopt that to get money for our needs. (Altine 2019)
Likewise, in the BBC Africa Eye documentary the Bandit Warlords of Zamfara, a pastoral bandit underlines that such illicit activities constitute – in their view – legitimate resistance to the conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists:
In the rainy season you have to carry the cows on your head. You must walk on roads or take them on rocky paths where they fall and die. Even in the forests, warplanes chase us and kill our animals. How have the Fulani become so worthless in Nigeria? There is no veterinary hospital. We have nowhere for them to drink. Don’t cows have any value? Everyone needs meat. Everyone needs milk. Walk into town, it’s like they’ve seen a hyena. Many Fulani have university degrees, [but] the government never considers them. I swear, if 1,000 Hausas sit an exam alongside a single Fulani man, they will pass all the Hausas and fail the Fulani man. There is no one to help us. Only God. If you see Fulani resorting to so-called terrorism, it’s because of this. (BBC 2022)
Pastoral bandits as protesters against abuses
As avengers, pastoral bandits perceive their activities as counteractive of human rights abuses perpetrated against pastoralists by state and non-actors in the northwest. The pastoral bandit’s aim is thus to demonstrate that the poor – and ostensibly powerless – pastoralist can equally exert power and revenge atrocities. Amid an upsurge in criminal activity, including by youth from pastoralist communities, and the intensification of farmer–herder conflict pitting mainly Hausa farmers against mostly Fulani pastoralists, yan sakai (‘the volunteers’ or ‘those committed to protecting their area from criminals‘) ethnic Hausa vigilante groups (Yandaki 2023) were established by Hausa farmers in collaboration with local authorities to curb rural crime in the northwest region. There is scholarly consensus that Fulani pastoralists were maltreated by these vigilante groups (ICG 2020).
Like vigilante groups across the federation that have engaged in extrajudicial killings since Nigeria’s transition to democratic governance in 1999, the yan sakai were ruthless in their treatment of Fulani pastoralists and gradually fomented insecurity. According to the ICG (2020), the yan sakai ‘particularly targeted many town-dwelling [sedentary] Fulani who, because of their ethnic affiliation with the cattle-herding Fulani in the forests, were accused of complicity in criminal activity’ and ‘Sanctions included arbitrary arrests, torture, indiscriminate confiscation of cattle and extrajudicial killings, with suspects sometimes hacked to death in markets and other public places. Sometimes vigilantes burnt down Fulani settlements, forcing the victims to flee into the forests.’ This is corroborated by a Fulani pastoralist who was internally displaced by the yan sakai:
They [the yan sakai] say it openly, that they will eliminate the Fulani stock. We used to hear them with our ears, saying we are a toxic stock that must be vanished for peace to reign. That is why we felt that before they destroy us, we need to flee. (Yandaki 2023)
In many cases, the police were ineffective in imposing order as Fulani pastoralists feuded with Hausa farmers, and when pastoralists’ cattle trespassed on farmlands, pastoralists were charged excessive compensation fees. These everyday abuses fanned hostilities between both occupational and ethnic groups as pastoralists began to perceive the entire sociopolitical arrangement as inherently exploitative. Feeling unprotected by the state and persecuted by vigilante groups, pastoralists created bandit groups called yan bindiga (‘gun owners’ (ICG 2020)) with the aim of protecting themselves and their cattle, but also avenging the yan sakai’s atrocities. Further, the yan bindiga:
raised funds for arms acquisition from a combination of community contributions and a range of other activities allegedly including kidnapping for ransom. As violence escalated, they increasingly acquired more sophisticated firepower, much of it in the form of arms smuggled in from the Sahara and the Sahel via international routes. (ICG 2020)
Although the yan bindiga’s initial aim was ethnic defence and revenge against Hausa farmers and the yan sakai, their targets gradually ‘came to include the communities that sponsored vigilantes, other farming villages and even some Fulani settlements that they considered uncommitted to their cause’ (ICG 2020). Their main objective therefore shifted to counteracting everyday abuses.
A paradigmatic example is the yan sakai’s extrajudicial killing of Fulani activist Alhaji Isheyyi, who often negotiated conflicts between farmers and herders in Zamfara, in August 2012. 5
in the aftermath of Ishe’s murder and retaliatory attacks by Fulani youths armed with sophisticated guns, the murderous uprising spilled into all the states neighbouring Zamfara: Katsina in the east, Kaduna and Niger in the south, Sokoto in the north-west and Kebbi in the west. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
As bandit leader Hassan Dantawaye noted in an interview:
Many of our [Fulani] people were killed by these people [the yan sakai]. After realising that the government was not ready to stop the killing of our people … we decided to pay back with reprisals. From that day, we decided to kill at least 50 people whenever one of us was killed. (Altine 2019)
Ahmadu Katare – a pastoral bandit in Zamfara – contended that he was forced into banditry ‘by the extrajudicial killing of my parents, children and wives by the yan sakai. We are not thieves, we were law-abiding citizens, we are just fighting the injustice meted to us by the vigilante group’ (Maishanu 2021a,b). Likewise, due in part to the extrajudicial killings pastoralists faced, Shehu Rekep posited that there is barely a government in Nigeria:
Imagine that you had a brother who went to buy something, and without being caught with anything belonging to anybody, he got lynched and killed, would you be happy? Anyone who got killed had loved ones. And there is no authority in place; this country doesn’t have a government … Anyone who told you there is government authority is just making empty claims. If you have a gun with which you [can] protect yourself, that is just your government. (Daily Trust 2021)
This claim of indiscriminate violence against Fulani pastoralists is underlined by pastoral bandit Bello Turji:
If a farm is encroached on, one would be taken to the village head or the DPO [Divisional Police Officer] and the person would be fined beyond proportion. That enraged some of our people and some took up arms. What did the government do? They went ahead to legalise yan sakai groups. You will find a vigilante has become a leader in a town and has armed everyone – the lunatic, the sane person and [the] drug addict. How could they serve justice the same way? In all these happenings, the security agents looked on. They [yan sakai] will catch and slit the throat of a person in their [security personnel’s] presence. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
Turji opines that pastoral bandits are forced to take up arms on behalf of all Fulani pastoralists who are either silenced or oppressed by a corrupt and negligent political system in collusion with unaccountable vigilantes such as the yan sakai. He claims he became a pastoral bandit to revenge the yan sakai’s atrocities:
We are forced into banditry. Before, we only carried sticks and rear our cattle. We didn’t care about [Western] education, or indeed any other education, but we were educated enough to know how to pray. We don’t claim to know what people are doing, we know how to rear our cattle, and we have Islamic education. That is what our parents taught us. Because of that, we are being killed. They [Fulani pastoralists who have been killed by the yan sakai] were innocent. That is why we carry out reprisal attacks on their behalf. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
When asked what could be done to ameliorate the situation and halt pastoral banditry in the northwest region, Turji asserts that the yan sakai should be abolished but also that the state should step in to extirpate the tensions between Fulani pastoralists and Hausa farmers:
What we want is to remove politicians from the issue of security. There should be fairness in protecting the lives of innocent people who are being killed, and to ban the yan sakai. When they are banned, leaders should then step in to end banditry and let the security agents take control of the situation under the laws of the country. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
As avengers in the Hobsbawmian lexicon, the objective of pastoral banditry, at least initially, was to demonstrate that the seemingly feeble Fulani pastoralist can also be ruthless and powerful. This is evident in the assertions of a Fulani traditional ruler in Zamfara: ‘the Fulani wanted to show that they are the superior ethnic group in Africa, so they sent a message that no Fulani can be targeted with impunity’ (CDD 2022, 11). For example, pastoral bandits justify kidnapping, murder or taxing farmers as ways to avenge the abuses they had experienced:
soldiers killed our fellow herdsmen. They know about it. Ask them. They killed our people in their houses; innocent people … The soldiers, just because of cornstalks, went about killing people. That’s why we organised and took revenge. (Daily Trust 2022a,b)
Over time, however, the yan bindiga have replicated the very same abuses of the yan sakai by indulging in extrajudicial killings and economic opportunism; so much so that the
line between economic necessity – ‘I must rustle some cattle to buy guns to defend my people from yan sakai’ – and economic opportunism – ‘The more cattle I rustle, the more guns I can purchase, the more powerful and wealthy I become’ – is thin, and many herders who first took up arms out of self-defence have since adopted a more criminal modus operandi. (CDD 2022, 13; see also Adeyemi 2022)
It remains to be seen how this armed resistance evolves in the volatile northwest.
The impact of pastoral banditry on local communities in northern Nigeria
That pastoral bandits are analysed here as social bandits does not mean that pastoral banditry has not negatively affected lives and livelihoods in the northwest region. Pastoral banditry has had many social, economic and humanitarian consequences for both the postcolonial Nigerian state and its citizens. Victims of pastoral banditry have had to relocate or close their businesses after paying hefty ransom fees; victims experience physical, sexual and psychological abuse during captivity; several schools in the northwest have been shut due to anxieties that pastoral bandits may attack; internally displaced people and camps have skyrocketed in the northwest and northcentral regions, as has human trafficking; and resources that could have been invested in building infrastructure and improving educational and medical standards – areas in which the state and the northwest zone are extremely deficient – are diverted to military and defence expenditures. Internally displaced people struggle to eke out an existence. As a displaced person in Kebbi explains: ‘We all have to rely on support from random people. There’s no food and almost no way to source it’ (Sahara Reporters 2022).
Sexual violence against women and girls due to pastoral banditry is an everyday occurrence. A female survivor of sexual abuse in Zamfara recounted:
our husbands ran away for their lives. We were left at our homes with children crying as sounds of gunshots were greeting our ears. It made us further confused and shattered. These armed men … gathered us all. They demanded sex so that we can secure our lives and escape with our husbands. (Abubakar 2021)
Another female survivor lamented pastoralist demands for sex in Zamfara:
Many of us had sex with these people in our rooms, some in the open spaces, others were taken into the bush to dance the tune for the whole day. After the incident, they all left us. This is heartless! (Abubakar 2021)
Nigeria’s security agencies are overstretched owing to the proliferation of insecurity in virtually all parts of the country. Food insecurity in the northwest region has become acute as farmers have abandoned their activities and communities for security reasons. Some local communities taxed by pastoral bandits have become bankrupt as they pay exorbitant sums to access their farms, ward off attacks from non-pastoral bandits, and secure their livelihoods (Adeyemi 2022). This has seen pastoral bandits accumulate enormous wealth by dispossessing farming communities (Adeyemi 2022), and in so doing, participate in the prevailing modes of capitalist accumulation despite their claims of being freedom fighters contesting the longstanding conjugated oppression of Fulani pastoralists. It is worth noting that some Fulani pastoralists are themselves victims of pastoral banditry (Wuyo 2021), negating any attempt to suppose that all Fulani pastoralists benefit from the activities of pastoral bandits.
It is also worth emphasising that what makes pastoral banditry a quintessential form of social banditry rather than ordinary banditry is first and foremost the perception not only of pastoral bandits about their violent activities, but also of the local communities about the activities of pastoral bandits. The pastoral bandits, as I have shown, perceive themselves to be more than mere criminals. Additionally, some pastoralist communities, as well as local farming communities where pastoral bandits levy taxes, differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bandits, with some pastoral bandits considered peacemakers. For example, Ado Aleru is considered by residents of the emirate as a peacemaker and ‘good’ bandit whose turbaning ceremony is conducive to the community. As one resident put it: ‘We in the communities who have witnessed the worst of it know that the turbaning was not bad. People who are not involved in the conflict are the ones who say it was bad’ (Dahiru 2022). This corroborates Hobsbawm’s contention that social bandits may be perceived as ordinary criminals by the state but concurrently lauded by peasant communities where they maintain some legitimacy.
Pastoral bandits in the northwest are also social bandits from the economic–rationalist standpoint advanced by Curott and Fink (2012): for, not only do they simply accumulate wealth by thieving from local communities, but they also mitigate the governance lapses of the dysfunctional Nigerian state by providing some public goods, including security, to communities. In short, some pastoral bandits behave like state-like sovereigns: they protect local communities, punish petty crimes, pay zakat to emirs (see Adeyemi 2022), build mosques and settle communal disputes. This suggests that pastoral bandits are social bandits, despite their participation in prevailing modes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). Barnett’s analysis clearly views some pastoral bandits as being social bandits in the Hobsbawmian sense:
Some bandits have purely extractive relationships with the local populace: Give the bandit money, cattle, wives or boys for his gang, and he won’t torch your village. In other instances, the protection racket is more proto-state, as the bandit assumes responsibility for security, arbitration and the means of production in his region. One bandit leader, Dogo Gide, regulates farming through neo-feudal sharecropping arrangements. Another, Turji, builds mosques in local villages while dispensing harsh justice against petty criminals. In another part of Zamfara, the bandit Dankarami holds court with local politicians, hearing their petitions like a Saxon king. (Barnett 2021)
Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that pastoral banditry is much more than ordinary crime; it is a social protest in the Hobsbawmian sense of social banditry. As avengers who employ extreme violence and terror to achieve their aims, pastoral bandits’ illicit or illegal activities constitute resistance to pastoralists’ conjugated oppression in terms of social marginality, economic deprivation and everyday abuses produced by the dysfunctional Nigerian state. Of course, we should point out and condemn the negative impacts of pastoral banditry on lives and livelihoods. The use of extreme violence on ordinary civilians – including women and girls – by pastoral bandits is counterproductive as it neither contributes to peace nor resolves disputes in a holistic, transformative, way. Nonetheless, we risk miscomprehending the insecurity crisis in the northwest region if we do not pay close attention to pastoral bandits’ ethics of illegality – one that portends pastoral banditry as a symptom of the broader contradictions in the political economy of a postcolonial state that exploits the masses and appears incapable of protecting its citizens, of curtailing corruption and abuses, and of providing public goods to marginal mobile groups. As social banditry, pastoral banditry is a search, albeit misguided, for an alternative; a search for social justice in a political, economic and social context that caters to the profit-making proclivities of the privileged classes to the detriment of pastoralists at the fringes of society.
Pastoral bandits are at one and the same time perpetrators and victims of a political economy of class exploitation. Like the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast region, pastoral banditry is ‘the misguided cry of a disgruntled youth crushed by the socio-economic system on the one hand and then repressed by the state on the other’ (Mustapha 2012). Further – and this is Hobsbawm’s contention – because social bandits are not revolutionaries but reformers, it is hard to see how pastoral bandits in the northwest can transform the existing social order without reproducing the very same systemic malaise that they repudiate. It thus seems to me that to address pastoral banditry, the state must begin by addressing pastoral bandits not so much as ordinary criminals but as marginalised groups with grievances that should be tackled through social interventions. This is why military measures alone cannot resolve the menace without the ruling classes coming to terms with the conjugated oppression that drives some disaffected young pastoralists to armed violence.