On a Tuesday in late June 2019, most Nigerians had never heard the word “RUGA.” By the following week, it had become the most explosive acronym in the country’s politics invoked in state house press conferences, cited in ultimatums from northern youth groups, denounced from the pulpit by Wole Soyinka, and suspended by the federal government before a single settlement had broken ground. Understanding why a rural land use plan detonated that fast requires understanding what many Nigerians believed it actually was: not an agricultural reform, but the clearest evidence yet of an ethnic project running underneath the Buhari administration.
This is the case that RUGA’s critics made laid out with the evidence they cited, the government’s rebuttal, and what actually happened once the dust settled.
What RUGA proposed
RUGA, a Fulani term rendered officially as “Rural Grazing Area” was a plan to carve out reserved settlements across Nigeria’s states where nomadic Fulani herders could base their cattle permanently, ending the seasonal, cross country migration that had increasingly put herders in violent contact with farming communities. The idea wasn’t new: versions of it trace back to the Obasanjo and Yar’Adua administrations. What made the 2019 iteration different was how it arrived, approved through the National Economic Council, publicly announced in June 2019 as a plan to allocate land in every state of the federation, with the federal government initially describing it as something states would be expected to implement rather than opt into.
It followed directly on the heels of an earlier, equally short lived proposal: the 2018 “cattle colonies” plan, which had already been rejected by the great majority of Nigeria’s 36 states before RUGA revived the same basic concept under a new name.
The case critics made
The allegation that RUGA represented a Fulani ethnic agenda, rather than neutral agricultural policy, rested on several specific pieces of evidence that opponents pointed to at the time.
Land, and who controls it. Under Nigeria’s Land Use Act, land is vested in state governors, not the federal government. RUGA’s initial design, federal land allocation across all 36 states was read by many governors and civil society groups as a direct federal override of that constitutional arrangement, for the specific benefit of one ethnic group’s economic activity.
The Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum did not mince words, accusing the administration of “seeking to colonize Nigeria through the establishment of Ruga settlement.”
Afenifere in the southwest, Ohanaeze Ndigbo in the southeast, and the Middle Belt Forum in the north central states organizations that rarely agree on much all came out in unified opposition within days of each other.
The Benue anomaly.
Coercion dressed as consultation.
The violence gap.
The government’s defense
That last point has some real support: eleven northern states voluntarily contributed roughly 55,000 hectares toward the Plan, while most southern states simply declined to participate which is closer to an opt in structure than a federally imposed land grab, at least on paper.
Separately, investigative reporting has since raised further questions about the RUGA program’s finances specifically, including documented allegations that billions of naira in RUGA linked contracts were awarded to newly registered, thinly documented companies adding a second, corruption shaped layer of scrutiny on top of the original ethnic agenda controversy.
Sources consulted for this piece include contemporaneous Nigerian reporting (AllAfrica, Vanguard, ThisDay, TheCable, Sahara Reporters, Guardian Nigeria), the International Crisis Group’s 2022 report “Ending Nigeria’s Herder-Farmer Crisis: The Livestock Reform Plan,” and background on the policy’s history and controversy.