Nigeria — Transhumance Tracking Tool Report — Early Warning Dashboard 5 (May 2022)

Farmers-Herdsmen conflicts are propelled by multi-causal factors, such as limited resources in the face of population increment and its attendant increment of needs, weakened traditional conflict resolving mechanisms and shortage of land, and climate change. These narratives and profiles have aided aggressive encroachment and reprisal aggression between the parties leading to mutual hostility and reverse-violent attacks. Further, tensions have grown with reports of violent clashes becoming more frequent, and in recent years, disputes over crop damage, livestock theft, and water pollution have increasingly turned violent.

To analyze the causes of the farmer-herder conflicts in Adamawa state, TTT Early Warning deploys a network of Key Informants selected from members of the Community Response Network (CRN) in the 5 operational LGAs in order to identify the pattern of alerts related to the use of transhumance movement.

Two hundred and eighty-seven (287) alerts were recorded by the TTT Early Warning tool for May 2022. These alerts were triangulated to consist of 255 (89%) events and 32 (11%) massive/sudden movements. The coverage of event alerts spread across 79 percent of the wards in the five (5) operational LGAs. Demsa LGA has the highest rate of events alert (36%), followed by Numan, Lamurde, Girei, and Mayo-Belwa at 26%, 21%, 10%, and 7%, respectively. Kodompti and Gyawana wards in Numan and Lamurde LGAs have the highest recorded event alerts of 38 and 23, respectively.

Areas identified as a high risk of conflict occurrence for the month under review are Jada1 and 2, Bare, Bille, Betso, Demsa, Gumti, Gwamba, Kodomti, Kpasham, Konkol, Lafiya, Lamurde, Mayo Farang, MayoInne, MayoKalaye, Shelleng, Vulpi, Yeli, Bebel, Gengle, Mbilla, Pallam, Guyuk wards. These present an essential early warning opportunity to monitor early or massive transhumance events and mitigate potential Agro-Pastoral conflicts in these locations.