Solutions to herders-farmers conflict in Nigeria: the academic perspectives and business implications

The solution to herders-farmers violent clashes in Nigeria has remained elusive due to lack of consensus, especially between the Federal Government of Nigeria and affected northcentral and southern states’ Governments, regarding the right methodology for curbing the menace. This lingering lack of consensus is attributable to the sentimentalization of this sensitive national issue given the wide ethnic and religious differences between two warring groups – the ‘herders’ who are predominantly Muslims and Fulani, and the crop farmers who are predominantly Christians from the middle-belt. The quest of this paper, therefore, is to identify any key stakeholder group that uses scientific methods devoid of sentiments to study any phenomenon before concluding fact-based findings. It is against this backdrop that this study strives to examine academics’ recommendations on the sustainable panacea to Herders-Farmers conflict in Nigeria. The paper is empirical in nature to the extent that it employed library-and-desk research methods for data collection. The population of the study constitutes journal articles on Herders-Farmers clashes in Nigeria. Twenty-eight papers were sourced and analyzed using content analysis. The study found that the majority of the academics recommended conflict resolution mechanisms, mass orientation, and ranches as the sustainable panaceas to the constant herders-farmers conflict in Nigeria. The study, therefore, recommends that the ranches proposed by the Federal Government of Nigeria should be piloted in some affected states to be able to appraise its real potentials rather than totally rejecting it without subjecting it to any form of experimentation.