“Internal social conflicts are becoming endemic in Nigeria… Peace is a necessary condition for development. We will seek a new covenant with the people by giving adequate attention to long-standing grievances… We shall establish viable mechanisms, including structures, institutions and processes for conflict management and resolution as well as maintenance of peace and stability.”
— Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, Yar’Adua for President: Summaries on Policy Papers (1992)
Recent events underline how unfinished that covenant remains. In Yelewata, Benue State, gunmen swept through the settlement in the early hours of 13 June, killing at least 150 people, burning homes and the market where displaced families had been sleeping. Barely a week later a mob in Plateau State’s Mangu district attacked a bus of wedding guests who had lost their way, leaving a dozen dead and prompting the arrest of twenty-two suspects. The shock of these killings is heightened by their familiarity: they echo earlier massacres, reprisals and rustling raids that have become grim markers of the national calendar.
To grasp why violence persists, it helps to recall that Nigeria’s map was drawn through colonial coercion rather than mutual consent. What emerged from that process was not a single jurisdiction but a patchwork of overlapping sovereignties — federal commands, state authorities, emirates, chiefdoms, faith hierarchies, market unions and other informal formations — each with its own rules of legitimacy. Independence gave the new state a central seal, yet it never erased the local compasses by which millions navigated land, pasture, marriage and sanction. Today, that polycentric reality still governs everyday life, even though the post-colonial imagination often treats it as a historical footnote.
When clashes erupt, they occur along the seams where these jurisdictions intersect. The recent Benue massacre followed years of disputes over farmland that farmers see as ancestral and herders view as seasonal lifelines. Anti-open-grazing edicts promise protection for crops but rarely deliver the water points or feedlots that would make settled ranching feasible, so itinerant herds keep moving and fences keep falling. Each side then frames the next skirmish through its own archive of grievance: farmers recall trampled harvests and razed granaries; pastoralists recall cattle seized and routes closed. Into this mix flow older fears of domination. In some villages, the night raid is read as evidence of a slow, deliberate push by pastoral elites to claim territory. Whether such an agenda is fact or folklore, the suspicion itself shapes how communities arm, whom they trust, and how they hear offers of reconciliation.
A sustainable peace, therefore, requires more than emergency deployments. It demands a settlement that persuades each authority to recognise the other as a necessary partner in ordering public life. Classical thought offers a useful framing. Glaucon pictured justice as a compromise: a truce between the dread of being harmed and the temptation to harm with impunity. In a society with many centres of power, that compromise cannot be imposed from above; it must be negotiated at the points where rules collide. Yar’Adua’s idea of a covenant speaks to precisely this task — designing structures that lower friction, institutions that carry shared legitimacy and routines that allow grievances to surface before they harden into violence.
Progress begins when state patrols, traditional councils and civil associations share intelligence rather than compete for it. Disputed corridors need more than barbed statutes; they require boundary trees, marker wells and grazing schedules jointly supervised by those who live near them. Village peace forums require not just elders and clerics but police officers who can guarantee that agreements carry legal weight. Compensation funds must move fast enough that a farmer who has lost a hectare of maize receives restitution before anger ripens into retaliation. Over time such practices weave a culture in which law and custom are no longer rivals but strands of the same rope.
Equally vital is a credible threat of punishment for organisers of violence. Bandit leaders calculate risks as carefully as profits; each failed prosecution lowers the cost of the next raid. Public trials — and, crucially, convictions — that span the social spectrum signal that no title or uniform confers immunity. Where justice is visible, rumours of official collusion lose their bite and citizens gain reasons to choose courts over guns.
The dividend of peace is measured not only in lives saved but in lives allowed to proceed. Farmers plant with confidence, traders reopen highways at dusk, pupils return to classrooms that no longer double as camps for the displaced. None of these gains can be stockpiled; they depend on continual maintenance of the covenant that secures them.
Nigeria stands again at the juncture Yar’Adua described. The task is to acknowledge the country’s many jurisdictions not as threats to national cohesion but as its living foundation. By negotiating clear terms for their coexistence and by honouring those terms with the even-handed application of sanction and repair, the state can transform latent competition into coordinated stewardship. Justice in this sense is not an abstract ideal but a practical bargain — one that converts mutual fear into mutual restraint and turns overlapping sovereignties into overlapping responsibilities.
When that bargain holds, massacres cease to be predictable headlines and return to being unthinkable events. The covenant, long drafted in principle, awaits enactment in practice. Its ink is respect, its stamp accountability, and its promise a peace robust enough to let diverse histories share a common horizon.