Category: Tuesday

The struggle between the predominately Christian Berom/Anaguta/Afizere (BAA) ‘indigenous’ groups and the overwhelmingly Muslim Hausa-Fulani ‘settler’ group over the right of ownership of – or control over – land, power and resources has been the major driver of the Jos crisis. Scarce resources have generated fierce competition and, no thanks to unbridled and self-centred politicisation, cyclical violence. The latter has been defined and worsened by both local and national dynamics. Because of the country-wide indigene-settler question, inter-communal conflicts have tended to take on national character and expression. The Jos crisis, precisely because it is more a national than a local issue, will most likely be resolved only when the citizenship of all Nigerians is constitutionally guaranteed and faithfully implemented.

Since 1994, Jos, a foremost ethnic melting point in Nigeria with its attractive year-round semi-temperate weather, has been rampaged – along with much of Plateau State – by identity politics overtly encapsulated by both ethnic affiliation and religious confession. The city’s long-standing and enviable cosmopolitanism which had, for decades, evinced a culture of intimate cross-cultural relations, including marriages, between Christians and Muslims lies, today, in tatters. Due to its apparent interminable cycle, violence has become tellingly more frequent and deadlier since September 2001 when the first major episode of inter-communal violence broke out.

At the origin of the indigene-settler dispute in Jos are the claims and counter-claims to the ownership of the city on the basis of first migration arrival. Indigene-settler conflicts have appeared fiercer and more endemic in Jos because of the historic and bitter struggle between the two groups. Memories of deprivation, subordination and exploitation since the slave raids, between the 16th and the 18th centuries, by the Emirate North on the Middle Belt remain evergreen in the region.

The BAA groups have been further aggrieved not only by the spirited attempts of the Hausa-Fulani group to subjugate them through the early 19th century, Usman dan Fodio-driven Jihad but by the perceived support of the Hausa-Fulani politico-religious elite by the British colonial authorities to establish its hegemony over the Middle Belt. Reclaiming their rights, as the indigenous peoples of Plateau State, has been the dominant narrative that runs through the BAA’s contemporary politics of reverse discrimination against their perceived ancient oppressors. Conversely, the Hausa-Fulani community has been aggrieved about its lack of access to power despite being the majority in Jos North, the city’s biggest, richest and most contentious local council. They also decry their disenfranchisement and perceived lack of political inclusion in Plateau State.

The maiden 1994 crisis, during which long-standing disagreements over land and chieftaincy titles, stoked violence, pales into relative obscurity in comparison to large-scale inter-communal violence in 2001, 2004, 2008 and 2010. The uptick in bomb attacks, suicide bombings and bomb plantings since December 2010, a manifest indication of Boko Haram’s infiltration of the ancient tin city, has exacerbated existing inter-communal tensions. Increasingly well-trained militants, loosely organized along religious and ethnic lines, have proliferated. The internecine conflict has often been very bitter precisely because privileges and entitlements, guaranteed and under-written by the issuance and possession of the certificate of indigeneity, are a zero–sum game: the gain of one group is the loss of the other. Like other ‘settler’ groups across the country, the Hausa-Fulani community, bereft of this certificate, is deprived of meaningful citizenship. It suffers discrimination in recruitment into federal institutions, admission to most of the federal universities and education at military academies and access to schools and jobs. The door to effective participation in local politics is virtually shut against its members.

Poor governance at all levels of government; economic deregulation (that hurts all save the thieving ruling elite and its objective and subjective allies) and rampant corruption have compounded ethnic, religious and regional fault-lines in Nigeria. The notion of national citizenship and its material manifestation on the ground, appear to have been largely abridged by both ethnicity and ancestry. By, thus far, demonstrating political weakness and unwillingness to holistically and decisively address this problem, the federal government and the Plateau State governments appear to sanction the perception, in informed quarters, that there is an elite conspiracy against peace on the Plateau and elsewhere. Yet, government alone, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot find a permanent solution to the crisis.

Nigerian leaders – political, traditional, religious, civil society, community and others – working in tandem with informal peacemakers like elders, youth and women groups should urgently devise a calibrated response to the various challenges posed by Jos’ indigene-settler conflict. The onus is on the political elite to set the pace, tone and tenor both in general and specific terms. Their class interest – as well as common sense – should egg them on.

At the general level, urgently needed is the construction of a template for proper, transparent and accountable management of public funds in Nigeria. There is the need to put to good social use, the country’s daily oil receipts, foreign reserves and the excess crude account. This will stymie the current practice of allowing a few villainous public officials to squander the billions of dollars involved. Governments at all levels have the responsibility to reverse “the notorious phenomenon of Nigeria being immensely endowed yet having one of the poorest citizens in the world”, as a Nigerian editorialist recently lamented. The governments should fully embrace genuine democratic ethos, reduce the physical, emotional and policy gap between them and the people and carry on in a manner that will convince Nigerians that their core interests – security and welfare, according to the 1999 constitution – matter to their leaders. They should develop, use and mobilize the country’s rich human capital and articulate and implement policies capable of enhancing equality, reciprocity and social justice across the board.

At the specific level, the first thing the federal government should do, working with the Plateau State government, is to begin to reverse the entrenched impunity in the Jos crisis. It can do this by naming, shaming, prosecuting and jailing instigators and perpetrators of violence. Many of them – individuals and groups – have already been identified by the judicial and other commissions of inquiry set up in the past by both governments. Trials should duly observe the rule of law and be informed by the need for deterrence. The governments should bolster law and order without embracing an exclusivist physical security agenda. Operation Rainbow (OR)’s unique human security agenda on the Plateau, at the instance of that state’s government, needs and deserves all the funding and encouragement it can muster.

An inclusive political system is arguably the best antidote to entrenched reciprocal fears between the two antagonistic communities in Jos – as well as in other parts of the country. Peaceful means should be used to promote political inclusion. Rights and duties should be allocated on the basis of social justice.

The federal government should work with the National Assembly to give Nigeria’s acute settler problem a constitutional solution by replacing the moribund indigene provisions in the constitution with a common citizenship for all Nigerians based on residency. The National Assembly should quickly revise and pass into law the Residency Rights Bill sponsored in 2004 by a group of senators. Thereafter, the federal government should organize and fund a nation-wide civic education programme that would inculcate in Nigerians the significance and virtue of a common notion of citizenship, based on respect of ethnic and religious diversity, national unity and cohesion. All of the above should be capped by sustained political and cultural work in the many communities already torn apart by the indigene-settler dispute.

• Professor Amuwo, a governance, conflict and development consultant, contributed this piece from Dakar, Senegal.