Communication Strategies for Managing Farmers/Herders' Conflict in Oyo State

Conflicts are neither constructive nor disruptive, but the ways they are handled make them either positive or negative. The farmers/herders’ conflict between crop farmers and cattle breeders has reached unprecedented levels, with the enormity of destruction to lives and properties. Considering that effective communication techniques are viable in preventing and scaling down conflict, this study seeks to examine the decentralized nature of the media as a support mechanism to physical advocacy in conflict resolution. It seeks to analyse the use of social media by the government in dousing farmers/herders’ conflict, and its implication for good governance. The expansion of the media as an agent of communication through which government engages its citizens from its traditional forms to digitalized media has become personalized today with the proliferation of social media. This has created diverse and multiple platforms for government to disseminate and, on the other hand, receive immediate feedbacks that facilitates instant response and action. Adopting a qualitative method, data is obtained through secondary sources, and content analysed. Through discourse analysis of government responses of the executive leadership of Oyo state on Twitter, the study revealed that the government values the importance of social media as a dispute resolution technique, especially on volatile issues such as the farmers/herders’ conflict, which in most instances takes on ethnic and religious undertone. Though some farmers and herders may not engage in tweeting, since most of them are usually illiterate and may not bother to take on sophisticated sections on their gadgets. However, considering the unlimited reach of social media and that conflicts of this nature are usually escalated by other groups on social media, the importance of social media as a support strategy for resolving conflict is apt. On the way forward, it recommends that upward communication through social media with appropriate channels of response will facilitate feedback information that will douse the conflict and help promote good governance.