By Tanimu Yakubu
As I have argued consistently, the protracted banditry menace has two interrelated points to bear:
First, it is analytically unsound to treat northern Nigeria’s insecurity—commonly labelled “banditry”—outside the framework of radical land and tenure reform.
What is described as banditry is, in fact, a low-intensity, non-state civil conflict: a diffuse insurgency involving armed agrarian actors, pastoral militias, and fragmented rural communities.
Though the belligerents lack sovereignty, the material effects approximate interstate warfare—territorial denial, economic strangulation, and population displacement.
Second, the term banditry itself is a category error. It trivialises what is better understood as a theatre of irregular warfare, marked by asymmetric tactics, coercive extraction, and the erosion of state monopoly over violence.
The phenomenon aligns more closely with rural insurgency and warlordism than with criminality.
From an agricultural economics standpoint, the consequences are unambiguous: this is a collapse of the productive base of the agrarian economy.
When “kambultu” (raiding, pillage, and forced displacement) can halve agricultural output or reduce extractive production by two-thirds, what we are observing is not mere insecurity but systemic supply shock and factor dislocation—land, labour, and capital rendered inoperative.
The deeper distortion is sociological. The conflict is reordering agrarian class relations:
– Smallholder farmers are being proletarianised or displaced into precarious urban peripheries;
– Pastoralists are militarised into mobile armed formations;
– Local elites and intermediaries are either co-opted or neutralised;
– A coercive rent-seeking class—armed groups—now sits astride rural value chains.
In such a context, to prescribe state policing as a primary solution is to misdiagnose the problem. Policing addresses symptoms within a functioning order; it does not resolve structural contradictions in land access, tenure insecurity, and resource competition that underpin the conflict.
A comprehensive land reform—redefining property rights, grazing corridors, and agrarian settlement patterns—constitutes the strategic centre of gravity. Address that, and the operational necessity for continuous policing diminishes substantially. Ignore it, and the state remains locked in an expensive, reactive counter insurgency with limited prospects of durable stability.
— Yakubu is Founding President of the 46-year-old National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS)
