Transhumance security in the Sahel — what cattle taxes and grazing corridors signal

<p>The Sahelian transhumance corridor system — the seasonal cattle-movement routes linking Sahelian dry-season grazing in southern Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger with Sudanian-zone wet-season grazing further south in Côte d&#x27;Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria — has functioned for centuries as the substrate of West African pastoralist livelihoods. The post-2010 security crisis has progressively degraded the corridors&#x27; viability in ways that the headline-conflict reporting has under-stated.</p> <p>The ECOWAS Protocol on Transhumance (1998, revised 2003) established a regional legal framework for cross-border cattle movement, including the ECOWAS International Transhumance Certificate (CIT) and harmonized rules on transit fees, veterinary certification, and corridor demarcation. The Protocol&#x27;s implementation depended on national-level corridor demarcation work that was carried out unevenly: Niger&#x27;s *couloirs de passage* network is the most developed; Burkina Faso&#x27;s was substantially implemented before the 2014 post-Compaoré transition disrupted maintenance; Mali&#x27;s was less developed and has been further eroded since 2012.</p> <p>The Tabital Pulaaku association — the Fulani cultural-and-pastoral organization with chapters across the Sahel — has documented the corridor-erosion process. The 2023 Tabital Pulaaku general assembly resolutions called for the AES (Alliance of Sahel States: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger) to honour the ECOWAS transhumance protocol despite the AES withdrawal from ECOWAS, on the grounds that pastoralist mobility is a cultural-and-economic right that pre-dates and outlasts state-level political alignments. The AES governments have not formally responded.</p> <p>Adam Higazi at SOAS, Jeremy Keenan at the University of London, and the work of the Royal African Society&#x27;s Sahel programme have documented the political economy of cattle taxation. Pastoralists pay informal *tax* to multiple authorities along corridors: state veterinary officers, customs agents, gendarmerie, and increasingly armed groups (JNIM, ISGS, Macina Liberation Front in northern Mali; ANSARUL ISLAM in Burkina Faso; Boko Haram and ISWAP in the Lake Chad Basin). The cumulative tax burden has risen substantially since 2015 even as the security-of-passage has deteriorated. Pastoralist net income per head of cattle has fallen accordingly.</p> <p>The slow criminalization of pastoralist mobility is the deeper story. In a context where the state cannot guarantee corridor security, the pastoralist who moves cattle is increasingly framed as a potential combatant rather than as a rights-holder. The Plateau-State (Nigeria) and Tigray-Wollo (Ethiopia) cases show comparable dynamics in different geographies — pastoralist mobility criminalized as a side-effect of the security state&#x27;s inability to manage the corridors. The Sahelian conflict economy has accelerated the process; the post-ECOWAS-departure political fragmentation has formalized it. The next decade&#x27;s pastoralist political mobilization — whether through Tabital Pulaaku, through the broader pastoralist civil-society networks that ROPPA coordinates, or through armed-group recruitment in the absence of political voice — is the question that the West African political-economy debate has not yet seriously addressed.</p>