The Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) has pushed back sharply against a United States government report estimating that tens of thousands of armed Fulani militants are operating across the country, insisting that an entire ethnic group of more than 14 million people must not be judged by the actions of criminals in its midst.
MACBAN issued the rebuttal in response to findings by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which put the number of armed Fulani militants at approximately 30,000, organised into cells of between 10 and 1,000 members, and identified them as significant drivers of religious freedom violations in Nigeria.
Speaking on Friday, the association’s national president, Baba Ngelzarma, said the figure bore no meaningful relationship to the reality of Fulani life in Nigeria. The militants cited in the report, he said, “do not, and will never, represent the 14.5 million peaceful Fulani citizens of this country.”
Far from being perpetrators of violence, Ngelzarma argued, many Fulani pastoralists were themselves among the most vulnerable victims of Nigeria’s worsening insecurity crisis—exposed to cattle rustling, mass abductions, and retaliatory attacks carried out by the very criminal networks the report describes.
MACBAN stopped well short of minimising the scale of the violence, however. The association condemned terrorism, banditry, and killings across Nigeria in unequivocal terms and said it would neither shield nor make excuses for anyone engaged in violent criminality. It has also directed its state and zonal branches to formalise intelligence-sharing arrangements with federal security agencies and local traditional rulers, with the aim of identifying and rooting out criminal elements sheltering in forests and border communities.
The association’s response reflects a broader anxiety within Nigeria’s Fulani community over what it regards as the dangerous conflation of ethnicity with criminality at a time of acute intercommunal tension. MACBAN warned that generalising criminal behaviour to an entire ethnic group risked inflaming those tensions further and undermining the very security operations intended to address them.
Beyond the immediate security question, the group renewed its call for structural reforms to Nigeria’s livestock sector—particularly the development of ranching infrastructure—as a durable alternative to open grazing, which has long been a flashpoint for deadly clashes between herders and farming communities. Lasting peace, MACBAN said, would require not only security collaboration but also dialogue, justice, and economic investment targeting the root causes of violence.
