Paper short abstract:

This study unveiled the nuanced interface of skewed power relation in local land grabs by political elites in Nigeria. Overriding powers in land laws are used by Governors to grab land for commercial farms which create economic, social, & cultural intersections and disruptions with gendered impact.

Paper long abstract:

This study digresses from the dominant standpoint of extant literature on the phenomenon of large-scale land investment or 'land grabbing' which is preoccupied with skewed analysis of the role of foreign agribusiness investors as the key actors. Therefore, the study breaks with this dominant narrative by interrogating the asymmetric interfaces of power underpinning the politics of land via examining the multifaceted and overlapping role of Nigerian political elites in reinforcing the appropriation of local farmlands. Since Nigeria's return to democratic system in 1999, there have been a surging trend of numerous power-wielding State Governors delving into agribusiness, thus, acquiring vast swathes of agrarian farmlands to establish private commercial farms. Ominously, the superimposing powers provided by the Land Use Act of 1978, in tandem with deeply-rooted patriarchal system have been deployed by these elites to exacerbate land grabbing. Fundamentally, these processes have birthed new and shifting political, economic, social and cultural intersections and disruptions. This study therefore interrogated the multilayered and nuanced interfaces and disruptions occasioned by this trend using vulnerable smallholder women farmers of the agrarian region of Northern Nigeria as primary emphasis. Drawing on instrumentalities of historical and exploratory research design rooted on qualitative methodology—In-Depth Interview, Focused Group Discussions and desktop review—findings from this study revealed shifting economic connections between politicians and women peasants; disruption to customary land rights and historical livelihood-sustaining farming patterns; disconnection from ancestral farmlands occasioned by dispossession; disruption of the system of food-crops planting; and the establishment of new agency of resistance among women peasants.