Communal violence in various forms is a sadly regular occurrence in Nigeria. On the weekend of February 21-22, there was an outbreak in Bauchi, resulting in the deaths of at least 11 citizens.
As usual we focused on the ethnic and religious differences, forgetting that this form of needless, senseless murder happens WITHIN socio-cultural groups and geographic regions as well as BETWEEN them. At least eighteen citizens were killed in 2008 violence between the Ezillo and the Ezza, two Christian and Igbo-speaking communities in Ebonyi State. The “war” between Ezza and Ezillo mirrored the clash years ago between Ife and Modakeke – the “indigene” and “settler” issue that gains more urgency as populations grow, opportunities dwindle, and land supply remains constant.
But communal violence also emerges from the silliest of issues, like the 13 football fans murdered execution-style as part of a rivalry between two cults, the “Highlanders” and the “Greenlanders” in Yenegoa, the Bayelsa State capital.
Violence in Nigeria only gets banner media headlines if there is a juicy ethnic or religious angle to it, and the basic underlying issue of pervasive public insecurity gets little or no substantive attention in our political discourse. We talk about it a lot, but not in any kind of way that leads to any kind of resolution. Communal violence has become a “dog bite man” story. Incident after incident, we shrug our shoulders and carry on, with zero hope of change, zero belief in our political and societal leadership and zero expectations from ourselves.
With so much experience of this needless, senseless killing, Nigeria’s institutions of governance should long since have created or adapted systems to deal with the scourge, yet we still have no substantive intelligence network, no early-warning capability, no undercover agents embedded in radical organizations and no rapid-response mechanism either to stem outbreaks or to deal with the humanitarian problems in the aftermath. Most importantly, we have no leaders willing and able to step up and end this ceaseless era of “communal violence” – nor have we had any such leaders in the past.
We all pay the price for this. A super-majority of Nigerians have never lifted a hand of violence against our neighbours, and never would, but we nevertheless live in a country where the statistically insignificant violent few have had (and still have) a greater effect on socio-politics than the rest of us. We effectively allow them to shape the agenda, and the consequent weakness in our federal union makes it near impossible to join our strengths in common developmental cause.
Our political and societal leaders have proven uninterested in leading a charge against communal strife. There are too many reasons for this, more than can be adequately addressed in this post, so I’ll focus on three that important ones.
Firstly, communal violence does not affect their strategic interests. No politician or militician, no police commander or religious leader, no intelligence officer or traditional ruler has ever lost their job because of a failure to stop communal violence. It has no negative impact on their legal and illegal wealth accumulation, poses no difficulty to on their manoeuvring for political power, position and influence, and their properties, possessions and relatives are under no threat. Honestly, if telephony was something well-to-do persons could do for themselves (like boreholes, generators and flying abroad for medical care) we would not have GSM phones. Our leaders do not fundamentally care about communal violence, whatever rhetoric they spew. The only way violence in Nigeria affects them is through assassination or execution following failed coups-de-tat. You might think this would lead to more interest in law enforcement and public security, but our leaders prefer lawlessness; it allows them to do illegal, unconstitutional and unethical things without facing sanction. They can assassinate each other, beat up each other’s supporters, jail each other, use institutions of state (like the EFCC) as personal weapons against each other, or do anything else they want with no fear of repercussion.
Secondly, at a certain level communal violence is “beneficial” to the interests of our political, societal and even religious leadership. From the pre-Independence struggles of the1950s, to the smuggling-cum-insurgency in the 21st century Niger-Delta, the first rule of Nigerian politics has always been to position yourself as the defender of “your people” against the supposed desire of the rest of Nigeria to dominate or marginalize them. If it isn’t “they want to destroy us”, it is “they blame us and will seek revenge if we let them get power”. Our mode of politics creates violence, perpetuates violence, and tends to create leaders who have no vested interest in stopping violence, as the continuing existence of violence serves as continuing “proof” of the leaders’ indispensability.
Finally, the “solution” to communal violence lies in doing many things that singly and collectively run contrary to the interests of our political and societal leadership. Creating any kind of social contract that ends the pervasive mutual-distrust of the Nigerian citizenry and binds the teeming millions of federal republic to a common developmental purpose would mean an end to the style of leadership that has dominated our land before, during, and after colonialism.
The sad part is our religious leaders are just as guilty of this. They are more scared of losing their respective flocks to other religions than they are of living in a land that does not function in any way reflective of the principles of Islam, Christianity or any modernized version of our Traditional faiths. They could have used their spiritual bully pulpits to galvanize a united public into fighting for positive developmental change; in fact they should have done this decades ago – had they done so, our country could have been so much closer to its true potential today. But no, they have invested their energies in demonizing fellow citizens who happen to worship the same Almighty in a different way. Nigeria is ranked as the world’s most religious country, yet a massive fraud like the 2007 elections can just happen in broad daylight, with no discernible reaction from the alleged moral majority. Healthcare is bad. Education is bad. Electricity is bad. Where is our belief? Our faith? Our moral stance? I forgot, we are using it for communal violence. We have born-again Presidents and pro-Shariah governors who are about as trustworthy as “419” conmen.
It is OUR fault as citizens. We know better. Do not pretend for one second that we do not know better. We do. All of us do, regardless of ethnicity or religion.
We take the easy route and point fingers of blame at entire ethno-cultural and religious communities, rather than face the difficult task of dealing with the core issues underlying our shared insecurity. Dangerously we are prone to reprisals, in thought (firmly held hatreds) or in deed (revenge attacks), directed at anyone who shares a language or religion with perpetrators of violence – a mode of response that creates previously non-existent bonds of mutual-defence between the statistically negligible guilty few, and the tens of millions of innocent people who had nothing to do with the planning and execution of violence.
We the people know this rigmarole is crap. We know the cycle of mutual-fear, mutual-distrust, and incessant communal violence is killing the potential dividends of federal republic.
None of us are safe. None of us are getting the public goods we deserve from our institutions of state. None of us are safe or secure. Frustration about today and uncertainty about tomorrow are unnecessarily high across the land.
These acts of violence are not signs of strength. They are signs of weakness and fear, acts of men who have little or nothing, and are scared that someone else will take what little they do have. It is why “indigenes”, whose only asset in this world is their ancestral land, strike at “settlers” they think are taking the land. It is why herdsmen (cattle is all they have) and farmers (their crops are all they have) clash. It is why religious leaders keep their followers aggressively primed against perceived encroachment by other faiths.
It is not necessary. It is simply not necessary. We can change it, but not until we the people get over our mutual distrust, and mutual fear.
Believe it or not, we are in this together. We will rise together or we will continue to languish together. The choice is ours.
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