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.

Nwodo writes from Lagos