Bashir Bello
From a Marxist perspective, the current wave of rural–urban migration in Nigeria is not a demographic accident nor a cultural phenomenon. It is a concrete expression of the disintegration of the peasantry under capitalist social relations. The growing influx of “’Yan ci-rani” (able-bodied men and women migrating seasonally to urban centres in search of menial labour), represents the gradual transformation of independent producers into landless or semi-proletarian labourers. Alongside them are refugees displaced by banditry, insecurity and climate disasters; forms of violence that are themselves rooted in material contradictions.
The visible army of beggars occupying the streets of Kano, Kaduna, and other major cities is not evidence of individual moral failure. Rather, it is the reserve army of labour produced by a system that has destroyed rural livelihoods without creating sufficient productive employment in the urban economy. As Marx observed, capitalism continuously produces surplus populations that exist on the margins of production, ready to be absorbed when profitable and discarded when not.
At the heart of peasant revolts, banditry, and rural insecurity lies the struggle over land, the primary means of production for the peasantry. In pre-capitalist and early post-colonial Nigeria, land functioned largely as a communal resource tied to subsistence production. However, with the expansion of capitalist relations, land has increasingly been subjected to commodification, state control, and elite appropriation. The number of landless peasants have increased fantastically within the last couple of generations.
Rapid population growth, (from roughly 56 million at independence to over 230 million today) has intensified pressure on land. Yet population growth alone does not explain the crisis. The real issue is that capitalist development in agriculture has been uneven, extractive, and ecologically destructive, displacing peasants rather than improving their productive capacity.
Deforestation, desertification, climate change, and the breakdown of traditional bush-fallow systems are not merely environmental problems; they are consequences of capitalist penetration into agriculture, where short-term profit and increased output override long-term sustainability. The extensive use of chemical fertilizers to compensate for declining soil fertility reflects this contradiction: productivity is forced upward while the ecological base of production is steadily destroyed.
The massive construction of dams in the 1980s exemplifies what Marx termed primitive accumulation, the violent separation of producers from the means of production. Under the guise of “development,” large-scale state projects submerged fertile lands, displaced farming communities, and disrupted local agrarian systems. Promised irrigation schemes and economic benefits largely failed to materialize, while peasants were left landless and proletarianized without alternative means of survival.
This process did not integrate the displaced population into productive capitalist employment. Instead, it created a mass of surplus rural labour, forced either into precarious urban informal work or into criminalized survival strategies. Banditry, cattle rustling, and armed rural conflicts thus emerge not as deviations from the system, but as social responses to dispossession.
What is commonly labelled as “banditry” should be understood as a distorted and reactionary form of class struggle. Deprived of land and excluded from stable wage labour, sections of the dispossessed peasantry resort to violence as a means of accessing resources. While lacking revolutionary consciousness and often reproducing brutal and predatory relations, these acts nonetheless reflect real material grievances rooted in land alienation and rural impoverishment.
The Nigerian state’s response to militarization and repression directly addresses the symptoms while preserving the underlying relations of exploitation. By treating insecurity as a purely military problem, the state obscures its own role in facilitating land dispossession, ecological destruction, and the pauperization of the peasantry.
In Marxist terms, Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is fundamentally an unresolved agrarian question. The peasantry has been destroyed as an independent class without being fully absorbed into a productive proletariat. The result is a swelling mass of semi-proletarians, informal workers, beggars, and armed outcasts, what Marx described as a population “redundant” to capital.
Without a radical transformation of land relations through democratic control of land, ecological restoration, and planned agricultural development, rural insecurity will persist. The struggle over land is therefore not marginal; it is central to any revolutionary project aimed at resolving Nigeria’s social contradictions and dismantling the material foundations of violence, poverty, and displacement.
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