About "Communal Violence"

Conversations and discourse about Nigerian politics usually revolves around sociocultural identity, whether it be region, ethnicity, geopolitical zone, senatorial zone, religion, local government or town of origin. Debate about the presidency is about whose turn it is in the "geopolitical zone" rotation (and whether or not certain zones are "ripe" to produce the presidency). Gubernatorial discussions are about which "senatorial zone" has yet to produce the governor.

It is not just federal offices that are "zoned" or subject to "federal character"; the concepts are applied even within states where everyone ostensibly belongs to the same ethnicity and religious faith, within local governments too  -- and are as controversial at these levels as at the federal level.

Discourse tends to be geared towards facilitating divide-and-rule. And while commentators in the southern half of the federal republic tend to portray the northernmost fifth of our landmass as being "feudal", the truth is politics everywhere in Nigeria is "feudal", insofar as it is designed around a spiderweb of patron-client networks, each network pyramid-shaped, each client of a patron serving as the patron of his own set of clients, each of whom have their own clients, and so forth.

The same type of politic discourse that serves divide-and-rule also serves neo-feudal politics. Each apex network (or wannabe apex network) strives to define itself as the official representative of a "marginalized" sociocultural subgroup that must be placated with federal largesse -- channeled of course through the network. This process tends to be relatively orderly under periods of "military" rule, and inevitably violent and chaotic when "civilians" are in the Presidential or Prime Ministerial mansion.

And this discourse helps our governments abdicate their responsibilities without having to explain why they have failed to fulfill their duties. Take for example the recurrent clashes, year-after-year, between farmers and pastoralists in certain parts of the country. At the root, this is about land, about land use; the violence of the confrontations is linked to the fact that this is life or death for the protagonists -- losing even one cow is a serious "financial" blow to the pastoralists, and losing a field of crops to cattle will ruin a farmer. There is no safety net for either of them (and I am saying that as a statement of fact, and not of advocacy), nor will the government or society step in to help either one of them if they should suffer catastrophic loss. Significantly, neither the farmer nor the pastoralist counts on the police or the judiciary to protect them, knowing that neither institution does or will.

There are things that could be done to avoid this entirely PREDICTABLE annual event.

But all three tiers of government, all law enforcement and public security agencies, all of them do exactly NOTHING ....

.... except participate, fuel and sustain the political climate in which these events are interpreted as "ethnic" or "religious" clashes between people who are portrayed as fundamentally hating each other because of each other's ethnicity or religion.

Describing these clashes in this manner frees the government from its responsibilities, and allows the government to avoid accepting responsibility for its failure to prevent these violent clashes. An economic problem of land use is something the government can fix, but once you invoke the theory of "tribal hatred" as your explanation, you are deflecting people into the discourse that blames every problem in Nigeria on the fact that X number of ethnic groups were Amalgamated, a discourse that ends with the argument that splitting Nigeria would solve all of our problems.

The fact that solutions exist to the land use problem do not factor into the conversations. In fact, in all my decades of life, I have not once witnessed a political debate on potential solutions to the annually recurrent issue. The people of the affected areas, and the people of Nigeria at large, have never faced an election where the governments' handling of the issue was at stake, or where alternate suggestions of how to handle the issue were offered. "Tribal hatred" is the conclusion, and that is the end of it.

The "tribal hatred" gimmick works for the media about as well as it works for politicians. The media treat us to screaming headlines when any event of mass violence can be given an inter-ethnic or inter-religious colouration, but I can tell you of many incidents of political and "communal" violence that have occurred in places I am intimately familiar with that never showed up in any media report, because there was no "tribal hatred" angle to report.

In fact, one of the reasons why insecurity, violence and the dysfunction in our public safety agencies has never attained the importance in policy discourse that it should is we tend to treat the outcomes of dysfunctional security agencies as though they were outcomes instead of "tribal hatred".  Something that has a solution is talked about as though it were something that couldn't possibly be solved.

There are lots of places in this world where violent gangs draw membership from specific linguistic, regional, cultural and racial groups. Indeed, many organized crime groups are known as "families" or "clans", and they build their internal loyalty systems by creating distinctions between themselves and their rivals on those same lines.

There is usually an unwritten understanding between such groups and the governments of the countries in which they operate -- they can do this, this and this, and the government will look away, but if they do this, this, or this, the government will bring down a hammer on them.

Among the things that the government wouldn't allow happen is a White Supremacist gang going on an unchecked, unopposed killing rampage in a predominantly Black neighbourhood. By the same token, an African-American gang would not be allowed to go on an unlimited killing spree in a Hispanic neighbourhood. And Hispanic gangs do not get to spend 12 daylight hours randomly killing people in White-majority neighbourhood.

If any of the events I mentioned in the paragraph above ever actually happened, the citizens would be outraged at the government! Questions would be asked about where the police were, why their response times were so slow, etc.  Politicians would scramble to find scapegoats within the police and/or the bureaucracy, and to burnish their reputations as being tough on crime.

True, their media would create screaming headlines, just like ours, but people wouldn't sweep the failure of the government under the carpet by concluding that "tribal hatred" was the reason for the violence and then moving on. Nor would their media cover it as though the entirety of the respective racial groups took a secret vote and authorized the killers to do the killing on their collective behalves.

Seriously, why do we consider these incidents of mass violence to be "communal"? Why do we discuss them as though one entire ethnic group of twenty million people had attacked another entire ethnic group of twenty million people?  All of our focus is on blaming ethnic groups and regions, with little focus on identifying the specific individuals responsible.

Haven't we learned the danger of this?  What happened when an entire ethnic group was blamed for the actions of a relatively small band of 1966 coup plotters?  And while the subsequent pogroms against people from that ethnic group were unjust (and that is putting it mildly), why was an entire ethnic group blamed for that too? You can arrest 15 people, but you cannot arrest 20 million people -- this is the problem, that we keep discouraging ourselves from solving small problems by allowing the people who should be solving the problems convince us that the problems are too large for them (or us collectively) to solve.