The debate about large-scale land investments, particularly in Africa, appears to centre on the scale of dispossession that characterizes land deals. Although the World Bank has always viewed international capital’s interest in Africa’s land from the perspective of development through sales, leases, employment and new cropping patterns, the investments in African farmlands may have created false expectations as rural enclosures lead to dispossession of farmers of their land and livelihoods. In Nigeria, the dominant perception by the state is that large-scale land investment is crucial to ‘modernizing’ agriculture, job creation, increasing export earnings and transferring of technologies. The Nigerian state therefore attracted investments in agricultural land for the production of food crops and biofuels, primarily for export. Although, accurate figure of the land deals is difficult to get, available records suggest more than half a million hectares of farmlands have been acquired by investors through the Nigerian state since 2004. The contexts in which these land deals were concluded may have cast a long shadow over the land rights/use and livelihoods of rural people. It is against this background that large-scale land investments may have become part of the continuing processes of primitive accumulation through the underlying political and economic forces that shape the reconfiguration of land use and rights. Drawing on evidence from the activities of the White Zimbabwean farmers and Wilmar International in Nigeria, the study brings out the linkages between the larger dynamics of development and the processes of land alienation.