On the night of 13 June 2025, gunmen moved through the farming community of Yelewata in Benue State and began shooting people in their beds. Those who ran out were shot in their compounds. Those who hid were burned inside their houses. By morning, Amnesty International had confirmed at least one hundred dead. By Monday, survivors placed the toll at one hundred and fifty.
Yelewata was one strike in a long sequence before and after. On the night of 2 April 2025, gunmen had entered five communities in the Bokkos district of Plateau State in the early hours before dawn, killing fifty-two people, including children burned alive inside their homes. Less than a fortnight later, a fresh attack in the Bassa district killed fifty-one more in a single incident.
In May 2025, coordinated night and dawn assaults across Benue communities killed forty-two. As recently as 30 March 2026, motorcycle-mounted gunmen killed at least twenty in Jos North. Last week, raiders struck Kahir village in Southern Kaduna at midnight, killing thirteen, wounding ten, and abducting twenty-eight others into the surrounding forests.
The events share a precise pattern, and the target was the rural, agrarian settlements. The attackers arrive on motorcycles at night in coordinated entry points, heavily armed with automatic weapons. After the shooting, they burned down the homes so that survivors could not return. Sometimes, they strike the same districts (Guma, Bokkos, Bassa, Kagarko) again the following season. Displacement follows every attack, and the displaced rarely come back. The killers face no equivalent accountability.
This is the lived reality that the phrase “farmer-herder clashes“ has been used to describe. Across the villages of the Middle-belt, hundreds of people are killed by the same pattern of violence, and they are generally described as casualties of farmer-herder clashes, in local and international reporting.
The phrase has achieved remarkable institutional usage. It appears in peer-reviewed journals, United Nations situation reports, and international donor frameworks. It appears in newspaper coverage because it is legible to editors and comprehensible to foreign audiences.
And because it appears everywhere, it is reproduced everywhere. Researchers cite researchers who cite the same frame. Journalists reach for language their editors will recognise. Policy documents inherit the framing from their institutional predecessors. When one frame achieves dominance across enough outlets and institutions, it does not merely describe a dominant interpretation. It becomes the filter through which new events, even those that do not fit, are processed.
This is how a descriptive error calcifies into received wisdom. In the study of knowledge, this process is called epistemic capture. The frame no longer serves as evidence. The evidence is made to serve the frame.
The word clash performs a specific analytical function. It implies two parties that are simultaneously in motion toward each other, trading blows in mutual aggression. It distributes moral responsibility bilaterally. It implies rough equivalence: two sides, each with grievances, each with agency, and contributing to the violence.
That picture is irreconcilable with communities that absorb coordinated armed assaults from mobile attackers equipped with automatic weapons communities that cannot counter-attack because they have no equivalent capacity. Unfortunately, the word clash ignores this pattern and conceals it.
The deeper intellectual error or dishonesty beneath the frame is the assumption that Nigeria’s violence constitutes a single, nationally uniform phenomenon. It does not. The Northeast is the theatre of an Islamist ideological insurgency. The Northwest hosts armed bandit-led criminal predation, now acquiring an explicitly ideological character. A February 2026 Reuters investigation found that groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State significantly intensified operations in 2025, with heightened lethality and growing risks to civilians. The Southeast presents a separatist insurgency with its own political genealogy.
The Middle Belt is the most complex and the most misrepresented. The region does harbour genuine resource tensions. But those tensions do not describe the coordinated, nocturnal, armed assaults on fixed civilian communities that have killed hundreds of people. This dimension cannot be seen clearly through the farmer-herder lens; the lens was never designed to reveal it.
Every serious security analyst understands that language determines response. Frame the Middle Belt violence as farmer-herder clashes, and the instinctive policy response is mediation, dialogue forums, land use commissions, inter-ethnic reconciliation, and grazing route negotiations.
Frame the same events as atrocity crimes (as the evidence actually shows), and an entirely different policy logic applies – intelligence operations, criminal prosecution, arms interdiction, civilian protection frameworks, and systematic dismantling of supply chains sustaining organised violence.
The wrong instrument, consistently applied to a population under sustained armed assault, quickly fails. It also signals to perpetrators that organised violence will be met with negotiation rather than accountability. That is a perverse incentive structure. It rewards violence and penalises the communities absorbing it.
A nocturnal raid on a sleeping village should be called what it is: a militia assault, an armed attack on civilians, or an atrocity crime. This is harder, demands region-specific knowledge and incident-level analysis. It demands honesty as a moral obligation because when the framing is dishonest and wrong, the response will likely be wrong, too. And when the response is wrong, the people being killed in the dark continue to be killed.
The communities of the Middle Belt are not asking for a semantic debate. They are asking, in the most elemental terms available to the living, to be seen accurately. Seeing them accurately begins with the recognition that the phrase most widely used to describe their experience is not designed to protect them. In many crucial respects, it has done the opposite.
Dr Richard Ikiebe is a Media and Management Consultant, Teacher and Chairman, Board of Businessday Newspaper
