A peace agreement was supposed to have ended this. Instead, farmers in Kaduna State’s Birnin Gwari district are burying their dead again, this time after bandits killed at least nine people, and by one local account as many as 10, in a raid on farmland outside Kakangi village on Saturday.
The trigger, according to a security report prepared for the United Nations and seen by AFP, was retaliation. Farmers had killed a bandit earlier that same day during a failed robbery attempt on their fields. His accomplice went and gathered reinforcements, then came back to punish the community for it. “Nine bodies have been recovered so far, with six of the victims identified by local authorities,” the report said. Kabiru Ishaq, a community leader from Birnin Gwari who travelled roughly 60 kilometres to offer condolences, said the toll had actually reached 10.
The November 2024 peace agreement, brokered by local authorities between Birnin Gwari residents and the bandit groups operating there, was meant to end exactly this kind of bloodshed. It hasn’t. Last month alone, a separate attack on Danauta village in the same district killed at least six farmers and left 20 more kidnapped, according to local sources, evidence that whatever protection the agreement offered has not held consistently across the district.
The broader pattern is familiar across northern and central Nigeria, where jihadist groups and criminal gangs, known locally as bandits, have escalated attacks on farming communities as the rainy season gets underway. Villages that fail to pay the levies these groups impose become targets, facing raids that combine killing, kidnapping for ransom, and looting before homes are burned. Kaduna is just one of several states caught in that cycle, but Birnin Gwari’s experience, a peace deal signed, then repeatedly tested by violence anyway, captures how fragile these local arrangements can be once a single incident, like one dead bandit, is enough to reignite them.
