There was a time when farming in Nigeria was considered noble a profession of dignity, the pulse of the nation’s rural economy, and the beating heart of food security. Today, that nobility has turned into a fight for survival. Across Nigeria’s north and central farmlands, from Kaduna to Borno to Benue, the fields that once echoed with the hum of work are now guarded by men with rifles. Not to fend off wild animals, but jihadists. The simple act of cultivating the land has become an act of defiance and a gamble with death.
It is a shameful reflection of the state of our nation that farmers, the very people who feed us, must now hire or become armed guards just to stay alive. What started as sporadic attacks by bandits has transformed into a sustained campaign of terror. Jihadist groups, bandit militias, and self-proclaimed insurgents move through rural Nigeria with impunity, torching villages, abducting farmers, and extorting “taxes” from the poorest people in the country. These attacks are not random. They are systematic. They target food producers, the backbone of the economy, in a bid to destabilize communities and weaken the state. And it’s working.
Nigeria’s government, meanwhile, appears to be in a permanent state of paralysis. Statements of condemnation have become routine; promises of “decisive action” are as frequent as they are hollow. The gap between rhetoric and reality has never been wider. The rural population no longer trusts the police or the army to protect them and in many places, for good reason. Reports of security forces either turning a blind eye or actively cooperating with the very militants they are meant to fight have become disturbingly common. When the protectors become the compromised, chaos fills the vacuum.
The truth is bitter: corruption has hollowed out Nigeria’s security apparatus from the inside. A soldier earning little to nothing in the middle of nowhere can be easily tempted by a bribe or swayed by ideology. A police checkpoint can be bypassed with a small “gift.” An informant can leak plans for a few thousand naira. The jihadists know this. They exploit it masterfully. What we are witnessing is not just a security crisis but a moral collapse, a state slowly losing the monopoly on violence to men who wield it with no accountability.
And so, the farmers have taken matters into their own hands. In communities across the north, groups of men now patrol the fields with AK-47s slung over their shoulders, scanning the horizon as they sow seeds or harvest crops. It is a tragic image: the tiller and the rifle, side by side. In the absence of a functioning state, self-defence becomes the only option. Yet, this path is unsustainable. When everyone carries a weapon, the line between defence and vengeance blurs. What begins as protection can quickly spiral into reprisal, and the cycle of violence deepens.
The economic toll of this insecurity is staggering. Nigeria’s agricultural output, once a source of pride, is shrinking under the weight of fear. Food inflation has soared, markets are empty, and transport routes have become death traps. Every tomato, every bag of rice, every yam now carries a hidden cost, the cost of blood, of danger, of scarcity. The urban elite, insulated in their air-conditioned offices, might not feel it immediately. But hunger has a way of finding its way to everyone’s doorstep, eventually.
And what of the government’s response? Committees, task forces, and strategy documents, all dressed in bureaucratic language that says much but does little. The real work, the protection of citizens, rarely leaves the paper it’s printed on. In too many rural areas, the presence of the state is limited to tax collectors, not defenders. Meanwhile, officials posture about progress from podiums in Abuja, detached from the reality that Nigeria’s countryside is bleeding.
Some will argue that this is merely a phase, that with time and “new initiatives,” the tide will turn. But the hard truth is that Nigeria is facing an existential question: who truly controls its territory? A country that cannot guarantee safety in its farmlands cannot feed itself, cannot prosper, and cannot claim to be sovereign in any meaningful sense. It becomes a state in name only, a collection of borders, not a functioning nation.
The jihadists understand power better than our politicians do. They fill voids of governance, of justice, of security and in doing so, they earn loyalty, even from those they terrorize. When the government is absent, fear becomes authority. A farmer who must choose between paying a jihadist “tax” and losing his family will pay it. And so, the insurgency funds itself, grows, and entrenches. This is not mere terrorism; it is territorial conquest in slow motion.
What Nigeria needs is not another speech or symbolic deployment of troops. It needs integrity. It needs a security sector purged of corruption, properly paid, properly equipped, and loyal not to ethnic lines or envelopes of cash, but to the republic itself. It needs leadership willing to face the uncomfortable truth: the state is failing its citizens in the most fundamental duty, the protection of life and livelihood. Without security, there can be no development, no democracy, and no future.
Farmers with guns should never be normal. It is a sign of a broken social contract. These are not men seeking war; they are men abandoned by their own government, cornered into militancy by necessity. The tragedy is not just that they must defend themselves, but that they do so knowing no one else will.
In the end, the image of the armed Nigerian farmer is not one of strength but of despair, a symbol of a country that has allowed fear to take root deeper than any seed could grow. If Nigeria does not reclaim its farmlands, its people, and its integrity soon, the harvest it reaps will not be of grain or fruit, but of chaos.
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