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FARMERS-HERDERS CONFLICT AND NIGERIA’S QUEST FOR FOOD SECURITY: THE IMPERATIVE NEED FOR INFORMATION COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
Abstract
Although Nigeria is best known for its oil and gas production, agriculture employs roughly 70% of its workforce. Nigeria has experienced a severe farmer-herder conflict that has negatively influenced its agricultural production capacity, resulting in severe food insecurity. Tensions have risen in recent decades, with increasingly violent clashes between farmers and herdsmen sweeping the country. In recent times, many scholarly studies and inquiries into the impact of information and communication technologies, particularly with respect to promoting food security in Nigeria, have been engendered mainly by the need to ensure greater agricultural outputs among farmers and other agriculturists. However, only scant attention has been devoted to understanding the imperativeness of the use of information communications technology in the quest to proffer solutions to the incessant farmers-herdsmen conflicts that have also contributed to the unpalatable state of food security in Nigeria. The study adopts Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory as a framework of analysis and elicits qualitative data through content analysis of desktop data. Hinging on this theory, this study contends that the farmer-herdsmen conflict is inevitable, like every other conflict, due to the competition for limited land resources. On the other hand, the study discovered that the failure of relevant stakeholders to leverage the capabilities of information and communications technology to address the technological gap in the conflict is one of the reasons why the farmers-herdsmen conflict has persisted, among many other factors. While further findings suggest
that the principal causes and aggravating factors behind the escalating conflict are climatic changes, population growth, technological and economic changes, crime, political and ethnic strife, and cultural changes, the lack of the use of information and communications technology in the areas of educating both the farmers and herders, awareness creation, crime reporting, and conflict resolution further compounds the farmer-herdsman conflict. This study advocate for the proper and improved use of I.C.T. in the processes of resolving farmer-herdsmen conflicts.
Keywords—Farmers-herdsmen, Conflict, Food Insecurity, Information and Communications Technology, Nigeria.