When the Powerful Devour the Poor: Who Destroys More - Herdsmen or Government?

Nigeria’s poorest citizens are locked in a silent contest of survival against two very different but equally destructive forces. On one side stand the unregulated pastoralists whose cattle roam freely into farmlands. On the other side stand the political elites: governors, commissioners, and agencies, who bulldoze homes and seize ancestral lands in the name of industrialization, road expansion, and “development.”

One group carries sticks and machetes: the other carries constitutions, bulldozers, and state power. Yet the outcome for the poor is strikingly similar: dispossession, hunger, and despair.

The Pastoralist Problem: When Cattle Become Weapons

Across many rural communities, herders release their cattle into farmlands as though the crops were planted for the animals. Maize, cassava, rice, yam leaves, legumes, everything becomes fodder. These are not just crops; they are the lifeline of families who depend on them for food, school fees, and survival.

Humans eat crops. Humans eat cattle. Both are essential to life. But why should one human meal destroy the other? Why should cattle be allowed to wipe out the very crops that sustain the people who raise them?

If cattle continue to destroy farmlands unchecked, a grim cycle emerges. Farmers lose their livelihoods. Hunger spreads. People abandon farming. And eventually, even the cattle will have nothing left to eat because the humans who plant the crops have been starved out of existence. It is a slow, painful erasure of rural life.

The Government Problem: Development as Displacement

On the opposite end of the spectrum lies a more polished, more official, and far more devastating force: government‑sanctioned land grabbing. Under the banner of “industrialization,” “urban renewal,” or “road expansion,” state governments seize vast tracts of land from the poor, often without adequate compensation, consultation, or alternatives.

Consider a state that already has a functioning international cargo airport. Instead of improving it, the governor decides to build another one, this time on the farmlands of poor communities in Orumba North. Thousands of families lose the only asset they have: land.

What is the logic of building two massive airports in a state with limited land mass? What is the wisdom in turning every village into a concrete jungle of airports, estates, and industrial zones? Bricks do not grow food. Cement does not feed children.

When farmlands disappear, so does food security. When ancestral lands are seized, so does identity. And when the poor are pushed aside for “development,” their future collapses.

The Poor Are Not Protected - They Are Preyed Upon

Nigeria has no meaningful safety net. No welfare system. No structured support for displaced farmers. When the government takes land, the poor are left with nothing but grief and generational poverty. Their children inherit not land, but loss.

The tragedy is not only that the government fails to provide for the people. It is that the same government now covets the little the poor have managed to build for themselves. The national treasury has been looted dry; now the political class turns to the land of the powerless.

The divide is staggering. The rich and politically elevated do not feel what the poor feel. They do not go to the same markets. They do not queue in the same hospitals. They do not drink from the same wells. They live in another world entirely: one where bulldozers erase homes with the stroke of a pen.

Who Destroys More?

The herdsmen destroy crops.
The government destroys futures.

One destroys with cattle.
The other destroys with policy.

One is unlicensed.
The other is licensed.

But the poor suffer under both.

The real question is not who destroys more, but why the poor must always be the ones destroyed. Why must their land be the battlefield for every contest of power: whether pastoral or political?

A Call for Justice and Humanity

Nigeria cannot continue this path. A nation that eats its poor is a nation that starves its future. Development must not be synonymous with displacement. Security must not be synonymous with silence. Governance must not be synonymous with grabbing.

The land belongs to the people who live on it, farm it, and depend on it, not to those who see it as a trophy for political legacy projects.

Until the poor are protected, Nigeria will remain a country where the powerful: whether herdsmen or governors destroy without consequence. The people who feed the nation will continue to be the ones most easily sacrificed.