Systemic violence in Nigeria’s northwest: banditry, state failure, and global extractive pressures fuel insecurity

The violence in Nigeria’s northwest is not an aberration but a convergence of historical injustices, climate collapse, and extractive capitalism, where colonial-era land tenure systems collide with IMF-mandated austerity and 21st-century mining booms.

Fulani herders, displaced by drought and land grabs, are criminalized as 'bandits' while multinational firms and northern elites profit from gold concessions and cash-crop enclaves—a dynamic replicated across the Sahel, from Mali’s *artisanal mines* to Kenya’s *Laikipia conservancies*. The state’s militarized response, modeled on colonial 'pacification,' exacerbates cycles of displacement, as seen in Plateau State’s 2001–2004 clashes, which displaced 500,000 people. Yet indigenous systems—from Fulani *habe* councils to Hausa *yan dora* oral histories—offer blueprints for restorative justice, if only elites and donors would cede power. A systemic solution demands dismantling the extractive economy, restoring customary governance, and treating climate adaptation as a security imperative—not a humanitarian afterthought.