By Gufu Oba

Ever since the 1982 Nairobi conference on the “future of the nomadic peoples” a good deal of research into different aspects of Pastoralism has produced some valuable results. Yet, after nearly three decades, there is as much uncertainty about the future of the pastoral peoples as we were during that first conference. This paper is interested in understanding the extent to which mobility, one of the critical assets of pastoral production, has been undermined by development through losses of key resources such as floodplain seasonal pastures and the extent to which population growth, changes in land use policies among numerous factors contributed to lack of sustainability. A persistent argument particularly in the development literature is about too many livestock or alternatively, too few livestock and too many people in the rangelands. These contradicting dichotomies have not been dialogued adequately and reconciled. Using results from key studies, this paper will aim at synthesizing our knowledge of the factors that undermined the sustainability of pastoral production (and equally those factors that contributed to pastoral resilience). This would be in terms of displacements from more dependable resources that previously served as fall back either by conservancies, floodplain developments or privatizations of key resources that exposed the pastoralists to greater vagaries of climate impact. The shrinking resource base and reduced mobility as well as breakdown in the traditional system of land use are among the classical failures that will be re-examined. This paper will also try to dialogue on pastoral continuity and discontinuity. Pastoralists continue to survive and maintain economic viability under policy pressures but a greater proportion of non-viable pastoralists continue to fall out of the system. Is the sloughing off of the poor from the pastoral system, relieving pressure on the range and also on direct dependence on Pastoralism and therefore invariably creating a self-regulation in the system or is it a symptom of a system with no future left? In discussing the main issues of population growth, changes in land tenure, national and regional partition of pastures and the alternative land use systems, an additional aim of this paper will be to understand why the knowledge of the rationality of mobility produced by researchers have not been integrated into pastoral development, while the policy on pastoral development continue to advocate pastoralists settlements as well as finding them alternative means of survival.