The Fulani militant campaign is the deadliest source of violence against Christians in the world. Of 36,056 civilian killings across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, 47 percent were directly linked to Fulani militias, according to the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa. In states where attacks occur, Christians were murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to population size, with three Christians killed for every Muslim. Fulani militants were responsible for 55 percent of recorded Christian deaths between 2019 and 2023, nearly seven times the number killed by Boko Haram and ISWAP combined.
Kidnapping is also a primary funding mechanism. ORFA documented 29,180 civilians abducted between 2019 and 2024, with individual raids regularly exceeding 100 victims, including 287 students seized in a single attack in Kuriga, Kaduna State in March 2024 and more than 300 taken from St. Mary’s Catholic School in November 2025, the largest school kidnapping on record.
Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics found that Nigerians paid $1.42 billion in ransoms from May 2023 to April 2024 alone. Those payments helped finance the next round of attacks while forcing Christian families to liquidate farmland and other assets to secure the release of relatives. Victims and community leaders report that after attacks drove Christians from their villages, Fulani groups often occupied the abandoned land, reinforcing claims that territorial expansion is a key objective of the violence.
The kidnapping-for-ransom economy that now partly sustains Fulani militant operations is a later development, not the original funding source. Three streams capitalized the campaign before kidnapping became viable: wealthy Fulani cattle owners, northern political and military patronage, and cross-border jihadist networks.
Since the 1980s, wealthy Fulani cattle owners have supplied fellow tribesmen with AK-47 assault rifles. Cattle profits are converted directly into weapons, while Christian communities surviving at a subsistence level often cannot afford firearms. Even when they can afford them, assault rifles are prohibited under Nigerian law, which is rigorously enforced against sedentary Christian farming communities while being largely ignored in the case of nomadic Fulani herders.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study by Texas Southern University researchers states directly that Fulani militants’ access to sophisticated weapons “is not surprising because they are financially supported by cattle owners through Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN),” the organization the study identifies as financing the transformation of fighters who once carried knives and bows into units deploying assault rifles and AK-47s.
MACBAN’s institutional reach extends to the highest levels of northern Nigeria’s Islamic establishment. Founded in 1979 with the support of the Sultan of Sokoto, the Emir of Zazzau, the Emir of Katsina, and the late Emir of Kano, the organization counts former President Buhari, the son of a Fulani chieftain and a retired army major general, as its life patron.
Hellbound and Down 