Photo Source: Wall Street Journal By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Up Front In the fertile Middle Belt of Nigeria, Benue State has long been celebrated as the nation’s food basket, yet it has also become the epicentre of one of Africa’s most troubling internal conflicts. Within the village of Aya Mbalom, Christian farmers and Muslim Fulani herdsmen once lived in relative harmony, their livelihoods tied to the land and its rhythms. That fragile coexistence has unravelled in recent years, replaced by violence, displacement, and destruction. The April 2018 attack on St Ignatius Catholic Church, where gunmen killed two priests and at least seventeen worshippers, marked a grim turning point. Reuters and Premium Times reported the incident as part of a wider wave of assaults across Benue, underscoring the vulnerability of rural communities. Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal later described Nigeria’s farmer–herder clashes as cumulatively more lethal than Boko Haram’s insurgency, ...