LAND DISPUTES IN AFRICA: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE INTER-ETHNIC WARS IN CROSS RIVER STATE, NIGERIA

Eteng Eloma Usang (PhD)

Abstract


The scale and importance humans, attached to land acquisition in different parts of the world is assuming an unimaginable proportion, resulting to various environmental threat and challenges. Realizing that land as a commodity, does not grow, but fixed, had made the struggle or its acquisition and control more strenuous, thereby giving way to the rising inter-ethnic skirmishes in Nigeria, particularly Cross River State, where so many known communities had gone extinct from the surface of the earth. This study therefore, was carried out basically to investigate the relationship between land disputes in Nigeria and inter-ethnic wars. An expost-facto design was adopted for the study. The population of the study was drawn from all the communities affected by inter-ethnic wars in Cross River State between 1980-2019. A combination of both cluster and simple random sampling techniques were adopted. A total of 220 respondents were selected from the population as sample size for the study. A questionnaire titled "Land disputes in Africa and Inter-ethnic war (LDIAITW) was structured and administered to generate data for the study. The findings from the study revealed that, the major cause of inter-ethnic wars in Africa is land struggles, ownership and acquisition. A statistical analysis of the generated data shows that there is a significant relationship between land acquisition and inter-ethnic wars in Cross River State. Nigeria. The analysis further revealed that there is a high presents of small arms and light weapons in circulation among warring communities in the study areas. The paper therefore, attempts an exploration of various opinions of land gladiators in the causes of land disputes and attendant inter-ethnic wars resulting to pockets of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria.

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