When President Bola Tinubu met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom to discuss bilateral cooperation on security, he regurgitated a familiar and lazy explanation for Nigeria’s deepening Fulani herders’ violent attacks against farming communities across Nigeria. Climate change in the Sahel, he said, had pushed Fulani herders southward of the country, thereby intensifying competition over land, and fuelling deadly “clashes” between herders and farmers.

This argument is not new to Nigerians. It formed a central plank of the security narrative under the incompetent regime of late President Muhammadu Buhari. Then, as we’re witnessing today, the violent attacks by marauding Fulani militias on farming communities were framed less as a failure of government policies and more as an unfortunate but understandable consequence of climate change.

Agreed, there is truth in the premise that the Sahel is changing. Desertification, erratic rainfall, and shrinking grazing routes have disrupted traditional pastoral systems across West Africa. However, acknowledging that reality is not the same as accepting it as a sufficient explanation for organised violence by Fulani militants. Climate change may explain the movement of Fulani herders southward, but it does not justify the systematic attacks on farming communities that have become a recurring feature of Nigeria’s insecurity landscape.

As Nigerians saw in the Buhari regime’s handling of these attacks, the danger in President Tinubu’s framing is not that it is entirely wrong; it is that it is conveniently incomplete. By leaning on climate change narratives, President Tinubu is choosing to sidestep the uncomfortable truth that the persistent violence by Fulani militias against farmers is, at its core, a failure of policy and enforcement of the law.

Across large parts of the country, farming communities are not merely experiencing “clashes.” They are enduring repeated, often coordinated violent attacks where women and girls are raped and murdered, and indigenous Nigerians are chased from their ancestral lands by nomadic Fulani herders. Despite the scale and frequency of this violence, accountability remains elusive. Arrests are rare, and prosecutions are even rarer. The result is a pattern that suggests not just incompetence, but a troubling reluctance to confront the problem decisively.

If environmental pressure alone were sufficient to produce this level of violence by Fulani militias against peaceful farming communities, similar patterns would be visible across other countries of the world facing comparable ecological stress. They are not. This is where Nigeria’s continued reliance on outdated pastoral practices becomes impossible to ignore.

Consider Saudi Arabia, for example, a country whose environmental conditions are far more extreme than those of Nigeria. With vast stretches of desert and limited grazing lands, it would, by the logic often deployed by the federal government, be a hotspot for constant conflict between cattle herders and farmers. Yet, it is not. The reason is that Saudi Arabia has used a mixture of policy, technology and law enforcement to address the issue head-on. 

Saudi Arabia long ago moved away from open grazing as a dominant system for livestock management to instead investing in sedentary, technology-driven models that rely on controlled feeding, irrigated fodder production, and large-scale ranching. Livestock are raised within defined systems, not moved across the country in search of pasture, and in such a manner that has allowed for coexistence with other forms of land use.

Nigeria, by contrast, remains trapped in a model that is increasingly incompatible with its demographic, economic, and political realities. Open grazing persists not because it is efficient, but because the transition to modern livestock systems has been repeatedly delayed, politicised, or abandoned altogether. Suggestions by Nigerians that Fulani herders explore ranching like fellow livestock owners in Saudi Arabia have been met with outright rejection, in some instances by no less a stakeholder than the federal government.

The irony is difficult to miss. Nigeria imports dates from Saudi Arabia, a country that has successfully adapted its agricultural and livestock systems to a harsher climate. Yet, when it comes to adopting the policies and technologies that underpin that success, the government hesitates. This just goes to show that we don’t have a lack of examples, but the political will to do what is needed to end the incessant violent attacks by Fulani militias against farmers.

This reluctance raises deeper questions about governance and political incentives. The persistent failure to decisively confront armed pastoralist violence, despite its devastating impact on rural communities, points to a broader problem of selective law enforcement. In a country where the government has demonstrated its capacity to act swiftly in other security contexts, the inconsistency in response is difficult to explain away as mere incompetence.

There is a pattern of hesitation, one that has allowed a preventable crisis to fester. Driven by political calculations in their unwillingness to disrupt entrenched Fulani interests within the country’s political establishment, successive Nigerian governments have ignored the violent attacks on peaceful farming communities by marauding land-grabbing Fulani militias.

For a fact, Nigeria does not lack the capacity to address these attacks. The solution is straightforward: a clear national framework for ranching and livestock management, investment in infrastructure to support sedentary systems, and, above all, consistent, just and fair enforcement of the law. 

What has been missing for years is the political will to truthfully define these attacks for what they are: violence by Fulani herders against peaceful farming communities, and to confront the criminals with the full weight of the law.

The UK meeting could have been an opportunity for President Tinubu to signal a shift in his government away from inherited talking points and to articulate a more decisive strategy for addressing one of Nigeria’s most persistent security challenges. Instead, it offered a reminder of how little he’s willing to detach his own government’s policies and actions from the failed and incompetent Buhari regime.

For nearly a decade, the federal government has leaned on the language of desertification and displacement while ignoring the harder task of restructuring a livestock economy that is visibly in conflict with settled agriculture. Countries facing harsher environmental constraints have had the political will to prioritise policy, technology, and law enforcement over excuses. Until Nigeria does the same, the violence will continue, not because the Sahel is changing, but because our leadership has refused to change with it.

Ojo Maduekwe is a communications professional. Write him: mrmaduekwe@gmail.com