Plateau State’s cycle of violence, explained

Plateau State keeps making headlines for the same reason. Gunmen storm into a village at night, farm burns, the cattle are poisoned or stolen. Bodies are counted in the dozens or hundreds. Each attack gets covered as its own story, but they aren’t isolated. They form a cycle that has gotten much worse. This piece looks at who the recurring actors are, how the violence has played out over the past two years, and why the pattern keeps starting over instead of ending.

For context, the farming side is mostly Christian. It includes the Berom, Irigwe, Mwaghavul, and Tarok communities, concentrated in areas like Barkin Ladi, Riyom, Bassa, Bokkos, and Mangu. The other side is mostly Muslim, semi-nomadic Fulani herders, whose cattle routes cross farmland that has grown as Plateau’s population has grown. The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association (MACBAN) speaks for herders nationally. It pushes back on the “farmer-herder” label and argues that Fulani communities are victims too.

Why the cycle repeats

What makes this “recurring,” rather than a string of separate events, is a pattern that shows up again and again. Cattle are stolen or poisoned, or a herder or farmer is killed on disputed farmland. The side that was hurt, or an armed group claiming to act for them, strikes back with a raid on a village. That raid gets avenged in turn, often weeks later, and sometimes against a community only loosely connected to the first incident. A retired commander of Operation Safe Haven, who led Plateau’s Special Fact-Finding Committee, has pointed to this back-and-forth as a key driver, along with land disputes, illegal mining, youth unemployment, weak borders, and a weak justice system. He’s said that trust-building steps, like paying people back for stolen cattle or damaged crops, worked for a while but fell apart once the people in charge changed, letting tensions build again.

Different explanations, different politics

How the violence gets described usually signals a source’s politics. There are roughly four ways it gets framed: The most common view treats it as a fight over resources shrinking grazing land and farmland, made worse by climate pressure and population growth.

Some Christian and Berom advocacy groups reject that framing completely. The Movement for the Emancipation of Nigeria calls the killings a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, pointing to people being pushed off their land and, in some accounts, churches destroyed and replaced by mosques. State and security officials increasingly lean on a third explanation: criminality and banditry, arguing the conflict has moved past grazing disputes into a broader security problem.

And Mutfwang himself has recently pushed a fourth explanation: political sabotage. He argues that the timing and location of major attacks points to political sponsorship, not ethnic or religious motives, a claim critics say is a way to deflect from the state’s own security failures. These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive, but they lead to very different responses, which is part of why nothing has really worked so far.

Why it keeps resetting

Plateau has a standing military task force, a state Peace Building Agency, a land-grabbing law passed in 2022, and occasional dialogue efforts, including one recently run with the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and GIZ’s Peacecore II project. But the same complaints come up after nearly every deadly attack: security forces show up after the fact even when there were warnings, arrests rarely lead to real prosecutions, and emergency meetings tend to follow an attack instead of preventing the next one.

Underneath the day-to-day coverage, a few root problems keep showing up: competition over land made worse by a growing population and shifting grazing patterns, almost no accountability for attackers on any side, and a security system that reacts instead of preventing. Until one or more of those things change, Plateau’s attacks will likely keep following the same shape: an incident, a revenge attack, a government response, a quiet period, and then another incident.