The prevailing security discourse in Northern Nigeria frequently employs the term “banditry” to describe a complex web of rural violence. This article argues that such terminology constitutes a significant category error, trivializing a crisis that is fundamentally a low-intensity, non-state civil conflict. By reframing this insecurity within the context of radical land and tenure reform, the author posits that the violence is a symptom of structural contradictions in the agrarian economy. Through an analysis of factor dislocation, land, labour, and capital, and the reordering of agrarian class relations, this paper asserts that durable stability can only be achieved by addressing the strategic center of gravity: comprehensive land reform.
For too long, the insecurity ravaging Northern Nigeria has been analytically quarantined within the framework of criminality. Labelled colloquially as “banditry,” the phenomenon is, in reality, a diffuse insurgency involving armed agrarian actors, pastoral militias, and fragmented rural communities. While these belligerents lack formal sovereignty, the material consequences of their actions approximate those of interstate warfare: territorial denial, economic strangulation, and mass population displacement.
To treat this crisis as a mere policing matter is to misdiagnose its origin. It is analytically unsound to examine Northern Nigeria’s instability outside the framework of radical land and tenure reform. What we are witnessing is not a temporary breakdown in law and order, but a profound theatre of irregular warfare marked by asymmetric tactics and the erosion of the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.
From the perspective of agricultural economics, the implications of this conflict are unambiguous: it represents a total collapse of the productive base of the agrarian economy. The phenomenon of kambultu, a cycle of raiding, pillage, and forced displacement, has evolved into a mechanism of systemic supply shock.
When conflict can halve agricultural output or reduce extractive production by as much as two-thirds, it ceases to be a localized security “incident.” Instead, it becomes a wholesale dislocation of the primary factors of production:
Land: Rendered inaccessible or contested through coercive occupation.
Labor: Displaced, proletarianized, or forced into flight.
Capital: Eroded through the destruction of assets and the cessation of rural investment.
In this context, the agrarian economy is not merely underperforming; it is being fundamentally dismantled.
The deeper, perhaps more permanent distortion caused by this conflict is the violent reordering of rural social structures. The “banditry” crisis is actively forging a new and precarious class hierarchy:
Smallholder Farmers: Formerly the backbone of the rural economy, these actors are being systematically proletarianized or pushed into the precarious peripheries of urban centers.
Pastoralists: Traditionally mobile livestock producers are being militarized into highly mobile, armed formations, shifting from nomadic production to coercive extraction.
Local Elites: Traditional intermediaries and rural leaders find themselves in a binary of survival, either co-opted by armed groups or neutralized entirely.
The New Coercive Class: A dominant rent-seeking class of armed groups now sits astride rural value chains, extracting “taxes” and controlling access to resources through the threat of violence.
The current policy emphasis on state policing as the primary solution addresses only the symptoms of a much deeper malaise. Policing operates on the assumption of a functioning order that requires protection; it cannot, by definition, resolve the structural contradictions in land access and tenure insecurity that underpin the violence.
A comprehensive land reform, one that courageously redefines property rights, establishes clear grazing corridors, and reconfigures agrarian settlement patterns, is the only viable path forward. This reform must be viewed as the strategic center of gravity for national security.
If the state succeeds in addressing the structural roots of land competition and tenure, the operational necessity for continuous, expensive, and reactive counterinsurgency will diminish. However, should we continue to ignore the land question in favor of a “security-first” approach, the Nigerian state will remain locked in a cycle of attrition with limited prospects for durable stability. The path to peace in Northern Nigeria does not begin at the armory; it begins with the soil.
* Tanimu Yakubu
Director-General,
Budget Office of the Federation.
