Paper short abstract:

Land as a vital factor of production has limited supply and opportunity cost in terms of its acquisition and usage. How peacefully has land been used, and what does this portend for Leadership and Nigeria?

Paper long abstract:

Land as a vital factor of production has limited supply and opportunity cost in terms of its acquisition and usage. In Nigeria, the choices for land use are between productive and social purposes, with each choice having attendant different economic results. How peacefully has land been used, and what does this portend for Leadership and Nigeria? Land users have competing needs and choices, leading to clashes. Most rural lands in Southern Nigeria are for farming because of the fertile soil and the agrarian culture of the people. The herders from Northern Nigeria crave grazing land and have found the Southern lands attractive and thus migrate en mass with their animals from the North to the South, destroying crops and farmlands as they go, leading to incessant deadly clashes with trails of blood. The Southern Farmers have defended their lands, but the herdsmen also lay claim to the right to land as co-citizens. The Nigerian Leadership who has had no specific answers to these clashes finally came up with a grand idea to provide grazing areas for the herders all over Nigeria, but this has been rejected as a ploy to steal Southern peoples land for the Northern herders. Is this a failure of Leadership in land control? How can the impasse be resolved? These are what this study set out to determine.

With the limited existence of literature in land leadership in Nigeria, this qualitative study deployed field interviews and Focus group Discussions on which the study's recommendations rest.