Fields of Fear: Militia attacks in Benue force women off farmlands

“Every morning, I pray to God that I won’t give birth at the hospital, because I won’t be able to pay the hospital bill,” says Terguhe Akpaku as she wipes mucus from the nose of one of her twin children.

Mrs Akpaku is pregnant with her ninth child. Normally, by this time, she would either be working on her cassava farm in Tse-Vinde, a community in Ukum, Benue State, with her fingers deep in the red earth, or transporting her produce to the market in Zaki-Biam to sell. But since armed men invaded her community in January, in an attack she said left more than fifty people dead, Mrs Akpaku hasn’t returned.

“It was a Tuesday morning. I had just bathed my children and was pushing a wheelbarrow to go sell akamu when I heard gunshots,” she recalls. “They burned my farm and killed about eight people in my compound.”

“I still hear gunshots in my dreams,” she adds. “And now I’ve lost everything.”

Mrs Akpaku is one of thousands of women farmers in Benue whose lives and livelihoods have been shattered by a wave of violent attacks sweeping through farming communities in Benue and other states across Nigeria’s north-central region.

In Benue, Nigeria’s food basket, at least 17 of its 23 local government areas have reported incidents of armed militias raiding villages, burning farms, and driving residents into displacement camps. According to the International Organisation for Migration, as of January 2025, the documented number of internally displaced persons stood at 210,876 persons from 54,476 households across 14 local government areas, with 56 per cent of them women.

Mchivir Terkende, one of such women, remembers the morning of 5 March 2024, in Tyoluv in Ukum. “It started around 3 a.m. We heard gunshots and ran to hide. By 5 a.m., just when we thought it was safe to come out, another round of shooting began,” she narrated.

She, her co-wife, and some of their children crawled on their stomachs through the back of their house into the bush. They waited there for about an hour, then trekked for nearly five hours to Zaki-Biam, where their husband lives.

“We left everything,” she says. “We didn’t take a single thing. It happened so fast. Everything … gone.”

She says she left behind her groundnut harvest, her cassava and water yam farm the size of about five football fields.

Women at the Frontlines

Women are the backbone of subsistence farming in Benue, says Damilola Olajubutu, a rural development and public policy expert. “They handle everything from production to post-harvest processing, and they contribute between 70 to 80 per cent of agricultural labour.”

Paradoxically, despite their role, most rural women receive little to no recognition or support. “They lack access to resources, financial empowerment, and land ownership. Only about 10 per cent of landowners in rural areas are women,” Ms Olajubutu, who is also the executive director of Rural Nurture Initiative, notes.

Basil Abia, a policy analyst and co-founder of Veriv Africa, a research advisory and business intelligence company that tracks food price and production data across Nigeria, underscores the disproportionate economic impact of these displacements. “In the North-central, especially in Benue, women are central to both food production and processing. When conflict displaces these women, it hits production directly. You’re essentially removing a significant portion of the active farming population.”

He adds that their absence from informal markets destabilises local economies. “Women are also critical in food marketing. They’re the traders and market sellers. So when they’re displaced, you don’t just lose producers—you also lose market actors. This affects supply chains and drives up food prices.”

Benue is one of Nigeria’s agricultural powerhouses, but the rising insecurity is disproportionately affecting women farmers.

“Women are more vulnerable because they don’t have the means or skills to defend themselves,” Ms Olajubutu adds. “When women abandon their livelihoods and flee from violence, it disrupts the entire farming cycle.”

Timing, she explains, is everything in agriculture. “If attacks force women to flee during planting season, it affects what gets harvested. That eventually leads to food shortages.”

Even communities not directly attacked are affected. “The fear alone is enough to keep people from farming.”

Worse still, the toll of the crisis extends beyond the farm.

“When violence erupts, schools close down, and children are forced to stay home,” Ms Olajubutu says. “Women end up shouldering additional caregiving responsibilities, further limiting their ability to engage in farming.”

Impact on Food Prices

Ngizan Chahul, president of the Association of Women Farmers, agrees that the displacement of women farmers has caused significant disruption in local food chains, reduced production, and led to rising food prices. “When demand is high and the product is not available due to the farmers displaced due to insecurity, what do you think will happen?”

Benue State is the largest producer of soybeans, cassava, mangoes, and oranges in the country. The state is also the leading producer of yams and ranks among the top rice producers in Nigeria.

Terkumbu Terzumgwe, a mother of six, was preparing seed yams for planting when her village, Tse-Dajo, in Ukum, was attacked. While she escaped, her husband did not.

“They took us by surprise. They used machetes to cut him, burned our houses, and took all our farm produce. The ones they couldn’t carry, they set on fire.”

She now lives with her brother’s family in Zaki-Biam, too afraid to return to farming, the only work she’s ever known.

The ripple effect is clear in local markets. At the Yam Market in Anyi, Logo Local Government Area of the state, the price of a 100-tuber bundle has more than tripled since 2020, says Msughter Orayo, a shop owner.

“Before the attacks, farmers brought thousands of tubers daily. We’d sell, keep our commission, and give them their share,” he explains. “Now, we barely get any. We have to go and find yams ourselves.”

Mr Orayo says that he used to get between 4,000 and 5,000 tubers daily, but all that has dried up.

Forty-nine-year-old Msughshima Ortamem-Ibo, who once supplied yams to Mr Orayo’s shop but now buys and resells produce, explains why: “Going to the bush to farm is a suicide mission,” she says. “So we’ve all moved to town, and getting land here doesn’t come cheap.”

The crisis is reflected in national data. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, food inflation hit 21.26 per cent nationwide in April 2025.

In Benue, however, it soared to 51.76 per cent, the highest in the country. Experts attribute the spike directly to insecurity that has disrupted farming and displaced thousands of smallholder farmers, many of them women. A recent study by researchers at the Benue State University and the Federal University of Lafia found that a one per cent increase in insecurity leads to a 0.211 per cent decrease in crop output and a 0.311 per cent drop in livestock production, further weakening already fragile food systems.

“As this violence forces women off the farms, we must understand that we are no longer dealing with just a security issue but also a national economic crisis,” says Ms Olajubutu. “We are weakening local food systems by ignoring rural women’s safety.”

She warns that prolonged displacement could trigger intergenerational food insecurity, as children now grow up without agricultural skills or stable nutrition.

Government’s slow response

Despite the scale and frequency of attacks, residents say government response has been painfully slow or nonexistent. “We feel left alone, like no one cares,” Mrs Terzumgwe says.

For over a month, between June and the first week of July, efforts to reach James Iorpuu, head of the Benue State Emergency Management Agency, were unsuccessful. Calls to his phone went unanswered, and a text message sent to his number received no response. Similarly, attempts to contact the State Ministry of Agriculture yielded no results. During a visit to the ministry, a staff member asked this reporter to return on another day. But when the reporter returned as advised, he was informed that the commissioner had not yet resumed work and that his date of return was uncertain.

On 30 July, Benue State Governor Hyacinth Alia dissolved the State Executive Council (SEC), rendering all efforts to seek official response from appointees futile.

However, Mr Alia has blamed the violence on foreigners, describing the attackers as land-grabbers.

“We are under siege as a state. We are under attack, and those who are attacking us are land-grabbers. They displace our people,” Mr Alia says.

Following reports that about 150 people were killed in Daudu, near Makurdi, the governor claimed some progress in fighting back: “Seventeen local governments were under attack. We fought it down to nine local governments. We fought it down to six local governments. Now we have fought it down to three local governments.”

The attackers are often believed to be armed Fulani militia who seek to ensure Fulani herders have unrestrained access to arable grazing land in the state, which brings them into conflict with sedentary farming communities. Although such violence has been ongoing in Benue and many other Nigerian communities for decades, the effects of climate change, such as desertification in the far north, mean more migrant herders (often Fulani) are grazing their cattle into communities in the north-central like Benue.

While Mr Alia sees the attackers as foreign land-grabbers who should be treated as criminals, President Bola Tinubu believes negotiations will bring about peace in the state.

PREMIUM TIMES reported that Mr Tinubu, during his visit to Benue in June, following another attack, advised Mr Alia to set up a peace committee in the state.

“Let us meet again in Abuja. Let’s fashion out a framework for lasting peace. I am ready to invest in that peace. I assure you, we will find peace. We will convert this tragedy into prosperity,” PREMIUM TIMES reported the Nigerian leader as saying during his visit.

He urged Mr Alia to allocate land for ranching and directed the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security to follow up.

Across Nigeria, food insecurity is deepening. According to the 2024 Cadre Harmonisé report, over 31.5 million Nigerians face acute food insecurity, with nearly 6 million at emergency levels—many of them in the North-central and North-east regions, including Benue

“We can’t talk about food security in Nigeria without addressing insecurity,” says Ms Olajubutu, “Every woman displaced from her farm is one less producer contributing to national food supply. It’s a national emergency.”

Mr Abia believes a two-pronged solution is needed. “Short-term, we must empower displaced women with conflict-resilient farming techniques and provide land near IDP camps,” he says. “Long-term, the government must invest in trained agricultural extension workers and implement serious land reforms. Right now, most interventions are charity-based and not scalable. We need systemic, government-backed investment to rebuild agriculture in these communities.”

This reporting was completed with the support of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID)