Ranching Cannot Be Built on Unhealed Graves
By Vincent Tortsugh, Esq.
The Federal Government has named Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, Adamawa and the Federal Capital Territory as pilot sites for its National Ranching Policy. The stated logic is straightforward: these are the places where farmer-herder violence has been worst, so these are the places where ranching — as an alternative to open grazing — should be tried first.
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That logic collapses on contact with the facts on the ground. These are not merely “conflict-affected” states in the abstract. They are states where hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their ancestral land by the very violence the policy claims to be solving, and where those people have not returned. In Benue alone, over half a million citizens remain in IDP camps, without homes, farms, or livelihoods. To introduce a new, permanent land-use regime — ranches, grazing reserves, RUGA settlements, whatever name is chosen — onto land that its rightful owners cannot yet safely occupy is not conflict resolution. It is the quiet completion of the displacement.
THE SEQUENCE MATTERS
Every serious framework for resolving mass violence and land conflict — from truth commissions to restitution programs — rests on a sequence: accountability first, return and resettlement second, permanent land-use decisions last. You do not build new economic infrastructure on land whose ownership is still violently contested. You do not ask the dispossessed to negotiate their return against the backdrop of ranches already fenced and stocked.
Reverse that order, as this policy proposes to do, and something irreversible happens. A temporary wrong — forced removal — hardens into a permanent one: loss of land, this time by policy rather than by machete. The displaced would return, if they return at all, to find their fields reassigned to a purpose they never agreed to and a process they were never consulted on. Political administrations end. Land allocations, once made, tend to outlive them by generations.
WHOSE LAND IS THIS TO ALLOCATE?
Under the Land Use Act, land in these states is held by the Governor in trust for the benefit of all residents — not to be redirected because violence emptied it of its owners. Extinguishing a community’s customary rights of occupancy requires lawful process: proper revocation, compensation, and consultation. It does not happen by default because armed attacks made a village impossible to live in.
If ranches are sited on such land without that lawful process — without the free, informed consent of the displaced communities who still hold customary title — the allocation is vulnerable to challenge on the same grounds we would use to challenge any unlawful revocation of land rights secured under force or duress. A community chased off its land at gunpoint has not surrendered its title. Government cannot treat the resulting vacancy as an invitation.
A POLICY THAT REWARDS THE WRONG ACTORS
There is a harder question beneath the legal one, and it deserves to be asked plainly: why should the very geography of an atrocity determine where the perpetrators’ economic interests are next accommodated? Selecting a state for a ranching pilot because it suffered the worst violence risks sending an unmistakable signal — that displacing a farming community is, in the end, a path to unlocking land for someone else’s livestock enterprise. That is not a signal any government should be willing to send, however unintentionally.
Nor is this merely a moral hazard for the future. It is a live insult to communities still burying their dead. Benue’s socio-cultural organisations — Mdzough U Tiv, Ochetoha k’Idoma, Omi Ny’Igede — have said as much without equivocation: establishing ranches in this atmosphere, before justice, before resettlement, before so much as a comprehensive mediation of the conflicts that emptied these communities, will be read by the people who buried their families here as government rewarding the violence rather than answering it.
THIS IS NOT OPPOSITION TO RANCHING
None of this is an argument against modern livestock husbandry, nor against ending open grazing, which has real and legitimate security benefits. Benue’s own professional associations have said clearly that they are not opposed to ranching in principle. Their objection — and the objection made here — is to the where and the when: ranching imposed on unresolved, unhealed, and legally unsettled land, ahead of the people who still own it.
If ranching is to succeed as policy, it must be domesticated to the realities of the communities it touches — built with their consent, staffed by their own people where possible, and, above all, built after they have been allowed to come home. A ranching policy that cannot wait for its host communities to return is not a peace policy. It is a land policy wearing peace’s clothing.
WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN INSTEAD
Before any pilot ranch is sited in Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, or Adamawa, three things must happen:
1. Security and return. The displaced must be resettled on their ancestral land, with verified, monitored return — not a government announcement, but a lived fact.
2. Investigation and accountability. The killings and land seizures that emptied these communities must be investigated, with findings made public, before any new land-use commitment is layered on top of them.
3. Free, informed consent. Any ranch sited on community land must be negotiated directly with that community — not with intermediary associations, and not by administrative fiat — and the terms of ownership, benefit-sharing, and duration must be transparent.
History is watching where these ranches are built, and on what terms. Government should ask itself, before it acts, whether it wants that history to record consultation and justice — or convenience, taken from the graves of the people who could no longer object.
Vincent Tortsugh, Esq. is a legal practitioner and BOT Secretary of the Tiv Elites Association.
