UMVA has learned that the Fulani militant campaign is the deadliest source of violence against Christians in the world, responsible for more deaths and kidnappings than ISWAP or Boko Haram, leaving a trail of bloodshed and devastation in its wake.
The sheer scale of the violence is staggering, with 47 percent of 36,056 civilian killings in Nigeria between 2019 and 2024 directly linked to Fulani militias, and Christians being murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to population size, with three Christians killed for every Muslim.
According to information obtained by UMVA, Fulani militants were responsible for 55 percent of recorded Christian deaths between 2019 and 2023, nearly seven times the number killed by Boko Haram and ISWAP combined, and kidnapping is a primary funding mechanism, with 29,180 civilians abducted between 2019 and 2024, including 287 students seized in a single attack.
The kidnapping-for-ransom economy has become a vital source of funding for Fulani militant operations, with Nigerians paying $1.42 billion in ransoms from May 2023 to April 2024 alone, and after attacks drive Christians from their villages, Fulani groups often occupy the abandoned land, reinforcing claims that territorial expansion is a key objective of the violence.
UMVA has uncovered details about the original funding sources of the Fulani militant campaign, which include wealthy Fulani cattle owners, northern political and military patronage, and cross-border jihadist networks, with cattle profits being converted directly into weapons, and Christian communities surviving at a subsistence level often unable to afford firearms.
The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) has been identified as a key player in financing the transformation of Fulani fighters, with its institutional reach extending to the highest levels of northern Nigeria's Islamic establishment, and its life patron, former President Buhari, having publicly declared that Fulani herdsmen "carry sticks and not dangerous weapons," a position that created a permission structure that guaranteed impunity.
The foreign-fighter dimension further complicates the picture, with infiltrators within Fulani militant networks including nationals of Mali, Guinea, Chad, and other West African countries, and the U.S. House resolution naming MACBAN and its affiliate, Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, and calling for both organizations to be designated as Entities of Particular Concern.
The weapons financing documented through MACBAN and the cattle economy underwrites a territorial campaign whose scope is now measurable, with at least 950 locations across 770 to 800 of the South East's 1,940 Igbo communities under occupation or threat of attack by armed Fulani jihadists and allied forces, representing approximately 40 percent of all communities in the region.
The trend is rising, with the number of jihadist locations increasing from 10 in January 2015 to 139 by August 2019, 350 by early 2020, 700 by April 2021, and 950 by June 2025, and the federal government's own figures confirm the scale of the infrastructure supporting this expansion, with plans to rehabilitate 417 grazing reserves into "Renewed Hope Livestock Villages."
The mechanism by which these programs dispossess Christian communities is grounded in Nigerian law, with Section 28(2) of the Land Use Act of 1978 allowing governors to revoke existing rights of occupancy for "overriding public interest" and issue Certificates of Occupancy to new holders, often Fulani herders, and the seizures are documented at the community level, with traditional rulers and community leaders reporting that herdsmen have acquired large tracts of land in strategic border communities.
The cattle economy functions not only as a funding source but also as a money-laundering vehicle, with Nigeria's Financial Intelligence Unit documenting a confirmed case in which two individuals used a cattle business as cover for illegal arms trading linked to terrorist financing, and cryptocurrency has emerged as a parallel channel, with the UAE convicting six Nigerians of funneling more than $780,000 to Boko Haram through cryptocurrency.
Nigeria's peer-to-peer cryptocurrency market processed $59 billion in trades between July 2023 and June 2024, much of it outside traditional Know Your Customer controls, and the problem was compounded by Nigeria's 2021 banking crackdown on cryptocurrency, which pushed transactions onto peer-to-peer platforms and made financial flows more difficult to monitor, with regulators freezing more than 1,100 bank accounts linked to terrorist financing in 2024.
The NFIU has identified a network in which a point-of-sale agent was connected to a terrorist leader, and real estate and bogus consultancy firms have also been identified as money-laundering vehicles, reflecting the country's structural deficiencies in combating financial crime, with Nigeria remaining under FATF enhanced follow-up for anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing deficiencies as of November 2024.
