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PHOTO: AP Photo/Fatai Campbell
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First Blood, Now Floods: These Farmers Are Battling Bandits and Climate Change

Devastating floods have killed more than 600 people and displaced 1.4 million. Nigeria’s food basket was already suffering from problems with armed bandits, but now swathes of it are underwater.

LAGOS, Nigeria – Chia Joy often had to wake before sunrise to make the journey to her rice farm under cover of darkness with her husband, Persoo. Sometimes, she needed to go in the dead of night. 

Joy, a 27-year-old mother of four, lives in a village in Gwer West in Benue, known as Nigeria’s food basket. She and her husband cultivated rice, which they sold for distribution across the country. It should have been a simple arrangement, but it wasn’t.

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The worsening security situation in Nigeria’s north – where armed herders, commonly referred to as bandits, have been battling farmers for increasingly scarce agricultural resources – meant every trip to her two-acre farm, taken by public transport, was fraught with danger. The bandits are responsible for thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions of people in the past decade.

Early one morning in June this year, despite their caution, Joy and Persoo ran out of luck when a group of herders armed with guns and cutlasses invaded nearby farms. The couple fled their land, leaving their freshly planted yam and maize to die. They stayed away in another village until the end of July for their safety, but they were forced to return to plant rice, their major crop, under threat of immense danger.

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PHOTO: AP Photo/Fatai Campbell

“We could not enter our farm boldly because if [the herders] caught you, it would not be funny. They destroy everything, everything we planted,” Joy told VICE World News.

The couple were running massive losses, between 250,000-300,000 naira (£507-£608) a year since 2018, because they were unable to work the farm normally, but still they trudged on, regularly shuttling the 54 kilometres between Makurdi, the state’s capital, and Gwer West. 

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This was until four weeks ago, when their farm was hit with flood waters. Now, there is nothing left. 

The flooding across Nigeria has killed 603 and displaced 1.4 million people, the worst in a decade, and has impacted 33 out of 36 states. In addition to the human toll, the floods have exacerbated the already shaky supply of food across the country of 206 million. 

The poor security situation had curtailed farmers' capacity to produce food, causing food shortages and a spike in prices across the country, which have risen by more than 40 percent. Now, the floods have wiped everything away.

Climate change has caused rapid desertification in Nigeria, a rise in sea level and drought. As global temperatures continue to increase, all of these are expected to increase exponentially, and the farmers’ plight will worsen.

“I am just confused right now, I don’t even know what to do,” Joy, who is traumatised by their loss, told VICE World News. She and the children are staying with her sister-in-law while her husband travels to look for work.

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PHOTO: RADENO HANIEL/AFP via Getty Images

The scale of the flooding disaster in Nigeria is mind-boggling. One-third of Africa’s most populous country is still underwater since the floods started in September, and the numbers of the dead and displaced continue to climb. In a single incident, a boat capsized while passengers were fleeing floodwater, killing at least 76 people in Anambra, in the south-east of the country.

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Over 82,000 houses are believed to have been completely destroyed, along with 110,000 hectares of farmlands. Hundreds of communities across a dozen states have been cut off by floodwater for weeks, and are now completely inaccessible and without electricity and fuel.

The floods have compounded Nigeria’s ailing economy, and billions of dollars are expected to be wiped off the steeply declining naira. The currency has lost 94.87 percent of its value over the past five years, and four out of every ten Nigerians live beneath the poverty line, according to the World Bank.

The climate crisis is compounding the precarious security situation in the north and Middle Belt regions of the country.  

The gangs of “bandits”, men from multiple, amorphous terrorist groups, and jihadist sects operating across the country’s northern region, have killed 60,000 people in the past 10 years, according to the Centre for Democracy and Development. In the South, thousands of people have similarly lost their lives in attacks in the past decade.

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Resources that the herders and farmers rely on have depleted in recent years due to expanding urbanisation and climate change, and the conflict has morphed into a more complicated cycle of violence between farmers and armed herders across the north of Nigeria.

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Farmers in central Nigeria protest against the attacks in 2018. PHOTO: STRINGER / AFP

Local communities in Kaduna, Kastina, Zamfara and other states have resorted to paying “taxes” to the terrorists, sometimes amounting to tens of millions of naira, to work on their farm and harvest their crops in peace.

Kwaghna Jerry does not have the luxury of security either. He operates a registered 20-acre farm growing rice and yams, in Gwer and is forced to live 60 kilometres away in Makurdi for safety. 

On New Year Day in 2018, he went to harvest the crops he’d threshed the previous day when he realised all his farm equipment had been destroyed overnight. 

“You cannot imagine how I feel, going to the farm to harvest and see that sight,” Jerry, 34, told VICE World News.

Five years down the line, nothing has changed. The destruction keeps spinning and blood continues to flow.

Speaking to VICE World News on Tuesday immediately upon returning from his farm where he had gone for inspection, he said he saw three dead bodies of farmers close to his land.

“Today, just today, I saw three bodies lying close to the road and they were killed by the herders,” he said, angrily. “There is fear going to the farm every day. Even today, when I saw the bodies, I thought to myself, nobody knows who is next. 

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“Witnessing those things is like hell. Those people who were killed today woke up and thought they were just going to their farm. When you see scenes like that, your morale is always down. Eventually, one day I will stop.”

To make things even worse, the entire farm is now underwater and his harvest is gone. He will lose 21,600,000 naira (£43,753) to the floods.  

Jerry could not conceal his anger and disappointment, especially at the government, which is doing little to tackle insecurity and help farmers out.

“Going forward is just picking up the pieces… [the government] is not coming to anybody’s aid,” he said.

Nigeria’s food security is already precarious partly because of the widespread violence. Last month, inflation hit a record 17-year high, rising to 20.5 percent with food inflation surging to 18.4 percent, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s April Economic Report. 

Experts say there has been heavier rainfall as a result of climate change. However, heavy rainfalls have aggravated the lack of government action.

On the 13th of September, the Cameroonian authorities released excess water from the Ladgo Dam which flowed into Nigeria through the River Benue, a major river. The overflow of water and heavy rain combined to cause the catastrophic flooding.

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PHOTO: AP Photo

Cameroon and Nigeria both agreed to build a dam on either end of the River Benue decades ago to contain the overflow of water, but only Cameroon held up its end of the bargain. The River Benue rises in northern Cameroon and flows into Nigeria through Adamawa in the north-eastern part of Nigeria. 

In 2012, after a similar flood killed 363 people and displaced over 2.1 million others, the countries agreed to a memorandum of understanding stating that Cameroon has to inform Nigeria before the release of the dam every year.

Manzo Ezekiel, a spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), confirmed to VICE World News that Nigeria was informed the dam would be released, but he said the Cameroonian dam wasn’t the only factor contributing to the floods, and that Nigeria’s rivers are full and local dams are also releasing water.

“As soon as we received the warning, we escalated it to everyone that needed to know about it including the state governments in order to prepare relocation plans for the communities,” he said.

But experts say the flooding could have been avoided if Nigeria had kept its promise.

“Our non-commitment to building the dam symbolises our level of preparation for climate change. It also highlights that we have been weak in our engineering response to floods,” Taiwo Ogunwumi, a flood risk researcher and founder of Geohazard Risk Mapping Initiative, told VICE World News. 

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Despite the scale of devastation, President Muhammadu Buhari has yet to address the nation, but in a tweet posted on Sunday, he said “all federal agencies dealing with rescue and disaster management have been directed to scale up response and intervention efforts.”

Peter Obi, the third-party election candidate with huge youth appeal, has suspending campaigning for the 2023 vote to visit flood victims in Benue.

The flooding is expected to continue to wreak havoc for at least another month, with more heavy rainfall on the way. 

NEMA doesn’t know when the floods will subside.

“All the scenario analyses are indicating that the warming will continue and intensity of events like this will continue to amplify,” professor Emmanuel Oladipo, a professional fellow at the Centre for Climate Change and Development. told VICE World News. “We are expecting worse situations towards 2050. We need to plan.”