The City of Jos is important to any
analysis of all three tiers of governments' response to the trend. Violence in
Jos has been entirely predictable, year-on-year, for 13 straight years, and
continued getting worse for 13 straight years. We should know by now that we have to prevent it
from happening, that we have to heal the city. Yet, not only do we allow
violence to recur year after year, but each time it happens our three tiers of
government belatedly react as though caught unaware by something unpredictable.
The different communities resident
in Jos lived together in peace for so long, in a city that enjoyed the same
reputation Calabar enjoys today; I refuse to believe that there is any
fundamental reason beyond divide-and-rule politics for youth gangs from either
constituent community to be massacring each other. Unfortunately,
1950s-style divide-and-rule politics appears (on the surface anyway) to colour
public reaction to the event in Jos, so rather than come together to force our
leaders do actually do something to fix the situation, we (if public
commentary is to be believed) instead take sides with one or other of the
warring youths.
We also (per the public commentary)
take sides when we hear news of farmers and herders involved in tit-for-tat
murders in the Middle Belt. What nobody seems to be doing is questioning
why it is that the three tiers of government are doing nothing about it.
We all know that the farmers and herders are competing for the same scarce
resource, land, and that this competition, unmoderated by law or law
enforcement, has taken the form of attacks and counter-attacks that happen,
predictably, every year, and yet there is no institutionalized or systemic
response to it. There are no preventive measures, no efforts to create
and enforce mutually beneficial compromises, no efforts to monitor risk
factors, and no rapid reaction to outbreaks.
Why would leaders who rely on, and
exploit our divisions for political purposes be inclined to do anything about
incidents of violence that help keep us divided against each other? But if the
people who benefit from the violence don't want to stop it, what is our
excuse? We the people are the ones who die in these incidents, or who have to
bury our relatives, or who have to dig into our savings to pay for the medical
bills of the injured and to repair and replace homes and other property.
Again, I am not saying that
things in Nigeria are at the point of anarchy. What I am saying is
that we are sleep-walking down a dangerous road, and while we are not near the
end of the road, there is only one thing waiting for us at road's end if we
don't change direction. If we don't address this 13-year trend of
rising violence (1999 to 2012), while we still have the ability to do something
about it, we will eventually get to the point where we no longer have the
ability to do anything about our fate.
Most of us seem to believe that
anarchy can only happen in countries like Chad and Somalia, but even the
richest countries in Africa, countries like the Cote d'Ivoire and Libya, have
collapsed in recent years. And the Republic of Mali was hailed as a bastion of
democracy and stability -- up until it collapsed too.
These things do not happen overnight;
it is the culmination of many things over a period of many years or even
decades -- things that were never inevitable or unavoidable, but things that
the relevant parties nevertheless refused to do anything to prevent or avoid.
It is so frustrating. The cases of
Liberia and Sierra Leone are among the worst because the build-up to the
catastrophe moved in slow-motion across enough decades that it could have been
stopped and avoided long before it happened.
The Federal Republic of Nigeria
still has a chance to avoid that destination, though for the families of the
many, many victims (dead and injured) since 1999, it is already too late. I
doubt the government has been keeping count, and if they have, I am sure they
will never release the number to the public because it would be alarming. The
13 years of the Fourth Republic so far have been the second-most violent period
of modern Nigerian history, behind only the period from 1966 to 1970. There was
a lot of violence between 1960 and 1965, but, while our statistical
record-keeping is weak and politicized, I think the cumulative death toll
between 1999 and 2012 far exceeds the total from 1960 to 1965.
Two things stand out about the
Fourth Republic. These factors were present before the Fourth Republic, but for
whatever reason have become more acute since 1999:
(a) Our politicians, political
parties and political factions have busied themselves recruiting violent young
men to serve as their political enforcers and political defenders. In many
cases, they have subsequently lost control of those young men, or have shifted
from a situation of total control of the gangs to one of symbiotic (and
almost equal) partnership. Our leaders think they are playing clever
games among themselves, but if you weaken the capacity of the government to
enforce its laws because you want to empower a militia group you think is on
your side, the weakened institutions you've created will not be able to stop
the militia groups you perceive to be your political enemies.
(b) If the law enforcement agencies
did their jobs effectively, most of our leaders would be in prison, and they
know it. Our political, economic and social leaders have long preferred to keep
our law enforcement agencies and intelligence services ineffectual. Or rather,
make them very effective a protecting Any Government In Power while
being simultaneously ineffective at what it is they are supposed to do for the
citizenry in terms of the social contract. But in keeping themselves safe from
prosecution, they have long since (for decades now) left the citizens entirely
unprotected and insecure. Heck, insofar as they use law enforcement agencies as
a tool of government oppression, the people start crying out for protection
from the government agencies that are supposed to be protecting them, an
emotion exploited by the political recruiters of
vigilance/ethnic/regional/militant militias, to gain sympathy from sections of
the citizenry that should actually fear them for what they will eventually
do/cause.
Some will respond, "well that
is why we have to back our own "vigilance" militia, since we can't
rely on the government to protect us from the proliferation of armed
groups" ... to which I would respond, "Go and look at every country
in Africa that did exactly that and see what happened." Civilians
get raped and pillaged by all sides in these long-running low-intensity wars,
including by the very militia they once deceived themselves into thinking would
fight to defend them as opposed to exploit them. .
Too many of us citizens are too
quick to shield and protect the politicians and/or ethnic militia from our own
part of the country, rather than work with our fellow citizens across the
divides so we can all be safe. But we citizens do not control or even
minimally influence the decision-making of the armed groups or of the
politicians that create them. And after a while, in our country (as in every
other country in Africa where this has happened), the politicians themselves
lose control of the very militia groups they created. These armed groups are
exactly like the politicians who create them; they are interested only in their
own perpetuation and profitability, even if it comes at the expense of you the
ordinary citizen.
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