03 Dec 2008 |
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Beyond One Black Friday in Jos Chris Ngwodo Jos, the usually serene city in central Nigeria has been in the news for all the wrong reasons this past week. In the aftermath of local government elections in Plateau State, a violent protest by some youths spread like a bushfire in harmattan assuming a religious hue along the way. The immediate cause of the violence was the election in the Jos North Local Government Area, a particularly contentious electoral contest which pit the Hausa Muslim community against the Christians. The day after the election, a group of Hausa youths went on a rampage protesting what they alleged to be plans to rig the election results. In short order, a fireball of sectarian violence tore the city apart with Christians finding themselves at risk in mostly Muslim areas and Muslims at risk in mostly Christian neighbourhoods. News reports suggested as many as 300 dead and about 10,000 persons displaced. The local and international media have been quick to describe the violence as yet another religious conflict with Muslims and Christians at each others’ throats. This is a simplistic definition of a fairly complex picture. What happened in Jos this past week is sadly not unique to the city. Ethno-religious violence is a common occurrence in Northern Nigeria. In Jos, as in most parts of the region, an incendiary mix of factors including politics, ethnicity, religion and class combine to create ideal circumstances for sectarian violence. Jos North is the most “lucrative” local government area in Plateau State and is at the heart of the capital city. It has been a bone of contention between the Hausas on one side and the Berom, the Anaguta, and the Afizere ethnic groups on the other. The bone of contention is basically who “owns” Jos. The answer to this question is customarily decided by who wields political control over Jos North. On this occasion these divisions found expression in the rivalry between the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). In the lexicon of contemporary Nigerian politics, the Hausas are regarded as “settlers” while the other ethnic groups are “indigenes.” This categorization has been a subject of intense debate for years. The Hausas of Jos argue that they are as much a part of Jos history as the other groups. Under these circumstances, the chair of the Jos North local government is the symbol of an ethnic and cultural claim on land. Furthermore, in Northern Nigeria, religion, ethnicity and politics are intimately bound up in ways that Nigerians living south of the Niger may find difficult to understand. This is compounded by deep rooted animosities that date back two centuries. In Northern Nigeria, Islam is the religion of the politically dominant Hausa and Fulani peoples. It is the religion of the Fulani Jihadists from the far north who once plundered the Middle Belt for slaves and then subsequently dominated hundreds of ethnic minority groups in the area. Stories of wars with Hausa and Fulani Muslim invaders and of people taking refuge in the hills endure in the cultural memory of many Middle Belt tribes. For these ethnic minority groups, Christianity is the faith of emancipation, liberty and progress. In these parts, religion is as much a badge of cultural, political and social identity as it is a form of spirituality. Consequently, churches and mosques are not simply places of worship; they are talismanic symbols of identity charged with immense cultural meaning. This explains how a political fight or a marketplace altercation quickly degenerates into a religious war with churches and mosques being torched. The number of Muslims and mosques or Christians and churches in a community informs its socio-cultural character. The arsonists that attack churches and mosques intend far more than the destruction of physical structures – they are attacking the identities symbolized by these places and proposing the primacy of only one identity in a particular geographical space. In such a setting, people are attacked for who they are. People are wont to ponder the dramatic increase in the incidence of ethno-religious violence since the return to civil rule in 1999. Under military rule, the threat of violent suppression by various juntas kept ethnic and religious tensions simmering beneath the veneer of calm. Occasionally, they erupted into disturbances, notably in cities like Kano and Kaduna but never with as much frequency as they have since 1999. The return to civil rule with its attendant lease of expression and opening up of the public space has allowed those tensions to bubble up to the surface. Combine this with the fact that our public institutions are failing. Elections are rigged with impunity. People cannot choose their own leaders and lack control over their political and social destinies. Eminently justifiable doubts as to the integrity and fairness of the electoral process helped spark off the recent violence in Jos. Our population is exploding and increasing population density in urban areas like Jos. Bad governance and ill-conceived policies have impoverished our people to the point where all they feel that they have left is their religion and their land. Land is the primal economic resource and is also a cultural inheritance just like religion is. People fight over them because these are their last remaining assets. There are two ways of addressing ethno-religious violence in Nigeria. The first is to make a great public show of flailing away ineffectively at the symptoms. Nigerian regimes tend to favour this superficial approach because they are too lazy or lack the political will to address the root issues. President Obasanjo dramatically demonstrated this approach when he declared a state of emergency in Plateau State in 2004 – a short term measure that bought only temporary reprieve while ignoring the historical and fundamental animus that led to the crisis in the first place. The second approach is to address the flaws in the concept of Nigerian nationhood and citizenship that make these eruptions of violence inevitable. The latter approach requires a willingness to think outside the box, to jettison tired clichés and opt for bold set-pieces in leadership and statesmanship. In this light, we must consider our failure to articulate and defend the concept of Nigerian citizenship as a tent large enough to accommodate our ethnic and religious diversity. Because of this, Nigerians are ever ready to retreat into the trenches of ethnic and religious identities. This is not because we are virulently parochial or tribalistic as a people but because little attempt has been made to define Nigerian citizenship as an umbrella identity for all of our people. The indigene/settler dichotomy is a manifestation of this syndrome. In theory, our constitution proclaims the right of every Nigerian to reside in any part of Nigeria and seek his or her fortune therein. In practice, Nigerian citizenship is abbreviated by so many contraptions – quota system, federal character, zoning, state of origin and the indigene/settler dichotomy among others. Politicians customarily use these contraptions to carve out fiefdoms for themselves and to cement their own power. There is no point even pretending that this practice originated from Plateau State. It is a pan-Nigerian tradition. Beroms living in Kano have no more rights than Hausas in Jos. Both are “settler communities” that must live peaceably and within limits imposed by the so-called indigenous communities. This design has long been part of our political reality. A Christian running for election in Katsina is as anomalous as a Muslim seeking office in Jos. If these formulations sound like categorizations of Nigerian citizenship, it is because that is exactly what they are. “Settlers” in Nigeria are second class or third class citizens regardless of their contributions to the community and local economy. These are the tragic bitter truths of life as a Nigerian citizen. Unless we are ready to address these blights on our civic life, we will find that ethno-religious violence will continue impervious to the remedial powers of presidential sermonizing and political homilies. We must also resolve the role of religion in our public life. Politicians have been especially disingenuous in employing religious sentiment to divisive effect. In theory, Nigeria is defined as a secular and multi-religious state. Section 10 of the constitution affirms the essential secularity of the Nigerian federation. In practice, successive regimes have mixed politics with religion in dangerous ways. General Babangida’s surreptitious smuggling of Nigeria into the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), the enactment of Sharia law by some northern states, and the Obasanjo administration’s foolish involvement in the building of the National Mosque and the National Cathedral are prime examples. The arena of governance has become a theatre of competition between religions. The Federal Government must work on erecting a wall of separation between religion and politics. It should cease sponsorship of pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem. It is an abuse of public funds and may well qualify as religious discrimination. (Islam and Christianity are not the only religions in Nigeria so why must they get special treatment?) With justification, one could question our sense of priority. It is absurd that we can subsidize religious pilgrimages but cannot find the will and the funds to subsidize healthcare, education or even agriculture so that we can feed ourselves. Serious failures in the intelligence and security administration paved way for last week’s outbreak of violence. That no one apparently foresaw the possibility of violence in a historically volatile area calls into question the credentials of the security services. Much of this failure is rooted in the deficiencies of our federal system. A state governor is presumably the chief security officer of his state but has no control over the police or the domestic security service. A state police commissioner answers to the Inspector General of Police in Abuja. The National security and law enforcement bureaucracy as it is presently constituted is too cumbersome to rapidly respond to threats to public safety. For this reason, some have called for the creation of state police agencies. And yet one must consider that under the canons of the present political climate, state police authorities controlled by state governors would be used to enforce electoral heists and intimidate the opposition. Thirdly, Nigeria’s dysfunctional federal structure is the background for ethno-religious conflicts across the country. A clash over a local government chair or a gubernatorial seat is about more than just prestige. Most of our states and local government areas have no internally generated revenue. With the notable exception of Lagos, most of these states depend almost entirely on federal allocations derived from oil exports from the Niger-Delta. This monthly avalanche of unmerited petrodollars eliminates any incentive for productivity in the states. In essence, politics and political contests revolve around who controls the freebies of oil money. Nowhere else are the ghastly consequences of this cult of dependency more obvious than in the north. With its vast acreage of arable land, the region ought to be the food basket of the country and the answer to all of our food security challenges. Instead it is ground zero for poverty, illiteracy and disease. Nigeria’s development indices are generally bad but those of the northern region are even more abysmal than the national average. I submit that if the Nigerian federation operated on the principle of 50 – 100 percent derivation with states earning based on what they produce, what we often describe as ethnic and religious violence would be severely limited as there would be little or no oil money to fight over in many states. The impetus for productivity would be so urgent that politicians and the public would be united in a resolve to be self-reliant. The fundamental nature of our politics would be dramatically altered since elective offices would cease to be fast tracks to personal enrichment and become real jobs for people with ideas. Politics in Northern Nigeria as in other parts of the country is fundamentally elite parasitism in demonstration. The difference is that in the north, this parasitism is fraudulently conflated with religion, and portrayed as being in consonance with the aspirations of millions of ordinary Nigerians for a better life. Until we remedy our flawed system of wealth distribution by adopting fiscal federalism, politics will remain rooted in the basest rungs of self-interest. Poverty will continue to increase and our people will continue to find ethnic and religious trenches attractive. This point leads us to a factor that is often understated in the reportage of ethno-religious violence in Northern Nigeria. A frightening number of our young people are unemployed, unschooled and unskilled. They live on the margins of the society from where they can be recruited to torch churches and mosques or to blow up oil pipelines. The dynamic is the same whether we are discussing fanatics and terrorists in the north or militants in the Niger Delta. The fact is that young people who perceive a future for themselves and are reasonably equipped to face it rarely join rioting mobs. Whether they are Muslims or Christians, they have no reason to burn churches and mosques. Our society is mass producing millions of people who have no future and who have nothing to lose. Whether we call them Almajiris, area boys or street urchins, they constitute an army of malcontents that can be readily mobilized to unleash death and destruction. This is the often understated class dimension of ethno-religious violence. One is not likely to find middle class and upper class Nigerians among the casualties of these conflicts. Only the least of our people, those illiterate enough and poor enough to be controlled by religious and political demagogues will fight and die for illusory causes. One will also find that in these episodes of violence, the worst-hit areas are the slums and the ghettoes of the dispossessed while the upscale neighbourhoods of their paymasters remain remarkably secure. Our society’s most vulnerable groups are also potentially the most dangerous persons. Until we as a society commit decisively to eradicating poverty for the majority of our people, there will be no peace in Nigeria. Finally, the humanitarian and social costs of these eruptions of violence are inestimable. Jos, Kaduna and Kano are cities that already bear the scars of divisive politics. These cities have been fractured along sectarian lines. Many have lost loved ones, property, and peace of mind; many have narrowly escaped death at the hands of neighbours. The psychological and psychic effects of such trauma will haunt communities for a long time. Life will never be normal for many. Walls of distrust have been erected that will take several decades to take down. Hatred and mutual suspicion have become generational and such deep-rooted sentiments are often the seedbed of ethnic cleansing and genocide. These catastrophes are not cast in stone and are by no means inevitable. But we need honest and intelligent statesmen who can craft the right policies and promote healing and recovery. I have no doubt that Nigerians can live together regardless of creed or ethnicity. Human beings fundamentally want the same things regardless of tribe or faith; they want to dwell in peace and safety, and raise their children, with the basics of life provided. Politicians who have no clue how to deliver these common aspirations cling to power by rehashing the old tactic of dividing and conquering. In the north, as in the whole country, this pattern of elite behaviour can be easily summarized: some politicians come in the name of Allah; others come in the name of Jesus. The end result is the same – the plunder of the treasury and the impoverishment of the people. This formulation is strongly verified by the condition of the north. The domination of the northern elite at the highest levels of national politics has only set the region back several decades. The material fortunes of the Hausa and the Fulani peoples of the north have not improved over the years in spite of the hegemonic tendencies of their elite. The same could be said of any of the Middle Belt peoples whose surfeit of retired military generals has scarcely improved the material conditions of the ordinary folk. While the elite ride on the aspirations and the faith of their people into office to fatten themselves; the masses and the Talakawa remain bent double under the burdens of squalor, pestilence and illiteracy. One peculiar occurrence in the recent disturbance struck me as being a moral parable. A good deal of the arson in some neighbourhoods was quite accidental. Mobs trying to burn down the homes of their perceived enemies would inadvertently burn down those of their friends as well. This was because the neighbourhoods are typically tight clusters of homes. No one had thought beforehand to separate the homes of the “enemies” from those of the allies. The moral is that religious segregation is not an option nor is ethnic cleansing of communities. The relationship that exists between our diverse peoples is often closer and more interdependent that some might wish to admit. There is no way of attacking the other without violating ourselves in the process. Nigeria is a diverse and a pluralistic society. It will never be a religious, ethnic or a political monolith. It will never be a theocracy. No leader will ever achieve pan-Nigerian credibility by appealing to a narrow band of sectarian interests. It is up to us to make Nigeria that big tent where all of us can dwell in peace and safety. The alternative to this is the nightmare scenario in which the country hurtles towards self-destruction; in which none of us, regardless of ethnicity, creed or class, will be safe from a sectarian holocaust. We need forums where interfaith and inter-ethnic relations in Nigeria can be discussed with candour with a view towards renewing trust and fostering communal healing. We need to promote the spirit of forbearance in these times. The challenge for our political and religious leaders is to abandon the tiresome rhetoric and the stale doctrines of our dysfunctional politics which usually characterize public discourse. For a change, let them address the issues with realism and honesty. Our public space is crying out for people who can frame Nigerian reality in more inclusive language. Only the truth can set us free.
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