Fulani transhumance corridors — the slow criminalisation of mobility from Senegal to Sudan

<p>Across roughly 5,000 kilometres of Sahelian rangeland — from the Ferlo in northern Senegal to the Butana east of Khartoum — Fulani pastoralist households move cattle and small stock between dry-season and wet-season pasture along established corridors. These are not migratory drifts. They are routed, surveyed, and remembered: each household head can recite the sequence of water points, the customary *jowro* (water manager) who controls passage at each, the seasonal exit and entry months, and the fines for fields trampled in violation of corridor markings. The ECOWAS Protocol on Transhumance (1998) recognises this mobility legally. The reality on the ground in 2026 is that the corridors are narrowing, hardening, and in places criminalised.</p> <p>Three pressures have stacked. First, agricultural expansion: the area under cultivation in the Sudano-Sahelian zone has roughly doubled since 1990, fed by irrigation pumps, improved seed, and a steady advance of sorghum and millet onto land that used to be marginal grazing. Fields planted across what used to be a *burti* — a corridor — generate predictable conflict when herds pass through. Second, climate variability: wet-season rainfall onset is later by two to three weeks compared with 1980s baselines, compressing the window in which herders must reach northern pastures, and increasing the probability that an arriving herd encounters a still-standing millet crop on what should already have been harvested ground. Third, security operations: Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have all imposed transhumance restrictions framed as counter-insurgency measures, on the theory that mobile pastoralists provide cover for armed groups. The theory is partly correct — there is documented infiltration of pastoralist networks by JNIM and ISGS recruiters — and almost entirely the wrong way to address it, because the restrictions push the herders into exactly the precarity that makes recruitment economically rational.</p> <p>The Tabital Pulaaku federation, which I work with, has documented over 1,400 lethal farmer-herder incidents across the central Sahel between 2020 and 2025. The ethno-economic diagnosis matters here. These are not random. They cluster on the southern Burkinabé and Malian frontiers where field expansion is fastest and where the colonial-era *peulh*/*sédentaire* legal distinction was never fully dismantled. The French colonial administration codified the *sédentaire* (farmer) and *nomade* (herder) as legally distinct populations with different tax obligations, different administrative interlocutors, and — critically — different presumptions of land title. Independence governments retained the categorical architecture; they replaced the colonial chef de canton with a *prefet* or *sous-prefet*, but the underlying legal asymmetry continued. The farmer&#x27;s claim to a field is presumptively legitimate. The herder&#x27;s claim to passage along the *burti* is presumptively suspicious. Once that asymmetry exists, no quantity of subsequent ECOWAS protocols will dissolve it.</p> <p>The political-economy story is also worth telling. Cattle in the Sahel are not just an income source for the pastoralist household. They are the principal store of wealth, the bride-price currency, the social-status display, and the buffer against drought-year shocks. A household that loses its herd to forced sale during a movement restriction is not just losing income; it is losing the institutional infrastructure that allowed it to function as a household. The dispersal of pastoralist households into peri-urban Bamako, Niamey, and Khartoum slums after sequential drought-and-restriction cycles is one of the great unexamined urbanisations of the twenty-first century — unexamined because the destination cities classify the arrivals as economic migrants, not as climate-and-policy-displaced pastoralists with a specific land claim to defend.</p> <p>The water-points question is its own subject. Sahelian transhumance depends on a spine of permanent and seasonal water points — boreholes, ponds, dam pools — maintained by a mix of state, customary, and donor authorities. The customary *jowro* system in the Mali Niger Inner Delta, documented carefully by Karen Marie Greenough, allocates water-point access by negotiated rotation, with the *jowro* collecting a small tribute from each herd as payment for the maintenance of the well and the adjudication of disputes. Where the state has displaced the *jowro* — either by drilling new boreholes outside the customary network or by formalising water management under a state agency — the dispute-resolution function does not transfer. The result is more conflict, not less, even though the engineered water supply has improved.</p> <p>What does a humane policy look like? It looks like a corridor registry with legal force, mapped at sub-prefecture resolution and updated annually with input from pastoralist associations and farmer cooperatives jointly. It looks like restored and adequately resourced customary mediation councils — the *dina*, the *cofo*, the *hakika* — whose decisions are recognised by national courts as binding on first-instance disputes. It looks like a deliberate decision *not* to drill new boreholes outside the customary water network, and instead to channel water infrastructure investment through the *jowro* and equivalent institutions. It looks like national livestock policies that treat the cattle herd as productive capital worthy of insurance, drought relief, and credit instruments — not as a developmental anomaly to be reduced. None of these are utopian. Variants of all of them exist somewhere in the region. What is missing is the political coalition that would mainstream them in practice.</p> <p>A workable solution exists in outline. The ECOWAS pastoralism code, the AU&#x27;s policy framework on pastoralism, and the various national livestock acts add up to a workable legal architecture for protected transhumance corridors. What&#x27;s missing is implementation capacity at the prefecture level — registered corridors marked on maps, water points maintained, customary mediation councils funded, and (most importantly) the political will at the national level to treat pastoralism as a legitimate land use rather than as a transitional inconvenience on the path to a sedentarised agricultural modernity. That political will has been thin. The current Sahelian regimes — post-coup Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger — are emergency states preoccupied with insurgency; pastoralist policy is at best secondary. The ECOWAS withdrawal of those three states has further weakened the regional-protocol architecture. Without a reconstituted regional commitment to corridor protection, transhumance becomes what colonial administrators tried unsuccessfully to make it: a form of mobility the state cannot recognise, and therefore one it represses by default.</p>