Wukari98,000 have fled violence in Nigeria’s southern Taraba State, the Catholic Diocese of Wukari documented.
The diocese counted over 100 killed and 217 churches destroyed in attacks since September 2025.
It called on Abuja to enable the displaced to return; armed groups have seized ancestral farmland.
Sources: Premium Times Nigeria
THE MIDDLE BELT
Nigeria's geography is a layered fault line: a Muslim-majority north, a Christian-majority south, and a transitional 'Middle Belt' where the two meet. Taraba sits inside this belt — the zone where most of Nigeria's communal violence has clustered for four decades.
FARMERS AND HERDERS
The structural conflict pits settled farmers — mostly Christian, ethnically Tiv, Jukun, Berom — against semi-nomadic Fulani herders moving south as the Sahel dries. What began as a resource dispute over grazing corridors has acquired religious and ethnic dimensions, with armed groups on both sides.
THE COLONIAL INHERITANCE
The British amalgamated Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914 — a clerical decision uniting Muslim emirates with Christian and animist south under one administration. Lord Lugard's indirect rule preserved the emirate system in the north while the south integrated colonial institutions, embedding the asymmetry that still shapes federal politics.
WHY THE DIOCESE COUNTS
Nigeria's federal data on communal killings is unreliable; rural attacks are systematically undercounted. Catholic dioceses, with parish networks reaching villages the state does not, have become de facto casualty registrars — much as church bodies were in 1990s Rwanda and Sudan.
LAND IS THE PRIZE
The diocese's note that armed groups have 'seized ancestral farmland' is the core of the conflict. Once displaced communities cannot return, occupation hardens into possession; under Nigeria's customary land tenure, abandoned land can be reassigned by traditional rulers. Displacement is not a side effect — it is the strategy.
ABUJA'S DILEMMA
The federal government is caught between a northern political base sensitive to anti-Fulani framing and a Christian south demanding protection. Successive presidents — Buhari, a Fulani himself, and now Tinubu — have been accused of slow responses to Middle Belt violence, fueling separatist sentiment in the south-east and south-south.