Farmers, Herders, Policemen, Lawyers, and Judges -By Uddin Ifeanyi

Ifeanyi Uddin

Over the last one year, what was moot in the new debate over rising threats to the nation’s food security was not how important Adamawa, Benue, Nassarawa, Plateau, and Taraba States are. Rather, the question was by how much the new, and increasingly blood-thirsty, divide between pastoralists and farmers, which has the latter abandoning their farmlands, and seeking safety in internally displaced persons camps, was going to be hard on the economy. Corollary concerns include questions such as: “In which directions will this new threat hurt the economy?” And: “For how long will the economy abide this hurting?” Indeed, some commentators already blame the return of food inflation on this dynamic. Focused on the positive gauges from the year-on-year movement in the consumer price index (CPI), it is easy to miss what is happening with the more important monthly measure of price rises.

According to the most recent available numbers, the “food sub-index” of the CPI rose by 1.57 per cent (month-on-month) in June this year. Up, according to the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS) “by 0.24 percent points, from 1.33 percent recorded in May 2018”. Monthly, then, the food sub-index of the CPI has been trending up since the beginning of this year. From this vantage, all that the more supportive (of the domestic output growth narrative) headline inflation numbers tell us, therefore, is that compared with the same period last year, prices have risen much more slowly over the same period this year.

Food prices are rising — and with some prejudice.

Factor in the lag that is the period between the sowing and harvesting cycles of farmers who ought to be active in the nation’s breadbasket and add the beneficial effects of drawdowns from whatever was left in storage from the last harvest (including seedlings meant for the next harvest), and it is fair to be frightened by where food prices might be by year-end. Besides, it really does not matter which foodstuff one focuses on, because the NBS’ explanation for the food sub-index price rise since January 2018 implicates just about every food item.

The question is: By how much should rational Nigerians be worried about this?

If the recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) (“Stopping Nigeria’s Spiralling Farmer-Herder Violence”) serves any purpose, then the answer to this question is “By very much!” In part, this is because the ICG estimates that “In the first half of 2018, more than 1,300 Nigerians have died in violence involving herders and farmers”. Thus, at the most basic, we are suffering net welfare losses across the affected states.

Partially, too, a dismal outlook follows from the ICG belief that the new tension accounts for a bigger toll on the nation in terms of lives and property lost than has the longer-running Boko Haram Islamist bid for a share of the Nigerian State. Tellingly, the ICG believes this new conflict has claimed “six times more civilian lives than the Boko Haram insurgency”. Again, we have another credible, if illegitimate, claim on the Nigerian State’s monopoly for allocating violence.

For the most part, however, the bigger worry is that we have seen the Boko Haram insurgency fester, as a severely handicapped state struggles to come to terms with the myriad threats to its existence (only last week the wires reported that the federal government had named its fourth commander in less than two years to lead the battle against Boko Haram). Were the Nigerian state to prove as inept in dealing with this new source of conflict as it did with the restiveness in the Niger Delta, then with the Islamist insurgency, we would have on our hands, a killing excuse deadlier than the Boko Haram has been, for as long as the Boko Haram has been.

Now, that’s a worry. For most assessments of the force capabilities of the Nigerian Army in its campaign against Boko Haram suggest that it is currently stretched beyond capacity. Opening a second front against a new enemy would thus be the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Thankfully, the ICG report suggests that both in its antecedents and in its management, the new crisis is but one for the nation’s criminal justice system. Of the many causes of the clashes between farmers and herders, arguably the most damning is what the ICG refers to as the “poor government response to distress calls and failure to punish past perpetrators”. Better policing and court processes would have been enough to prevent the escalation of the crisis and, even now that it may be near or past the tipping point, remains the way out of this cul-de-sac.

Doubtless, there is a strong case for looking very seriously at how a global climate that’s getting warmer may be changing the domestic conversation around these flashpoints. This perspective, it must be stressed, is not just because a more responsible government should be seeking solutions to the increasingly important question of how much environmental degradation in the far north may have contributed to this crisis. It is as much a matter of how rising sea-levels will alter Lagos State’s value proposition, and how this could feed into nascent tensions between Lagosians, and migrant folks. Just as it is about how degradation in the mangrove swamps have changed the dialogue between the denizens of the Niger Delta and the rest of us crude oil-dependent folks.

But how easy is it for a country to address these strategic challenges that otherwise has balked at carrying out the more quotidian reforms to its criminal justice system — especially given that without a half decent police force and law courts, we cannot address the examples of impunity that have inflamed inter-ethnic tensions country-wide?

Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.