Nigerian Ethnic Violence Leaves 39 Dead in Northeastern Town.

[struggle4progress]

7. A number of people, who (unlike me) follow Nigeria closely, see other factors

Conflict and Conflict Transformation of Religious Fanaticism in Northern Nigeria: A Cultural Theoretical Approach
Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences ( 2011) Vol 3, No 1, 72-89
Andrew A. Ovienloba,
Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA

... Growing up as young innocent boy from a Catholic Christian home in the mid 1970s to early 1980s in thenorthern Nigeria, peace and respect for individual culturaland religious autonomy was taken for granted. I recall with a deep sense of nostalgia, how we celebrated each other’s religious and cultural festivities with great pump and pageantry. On Fridays, I could walk into the praying ground of my Muslim friend with great acceptance. My entire family moves to our Muslim family friend’s home to mark their Idkefir or Id fitr, or even cook for them in the evenings of their Ramadan as we join them in breaking their daylong fasting. On their Sala 'at day, our meals were provided for by our Muslim neighbors who take pride in celebrating thefestivities of their faith with us the non-Muslims. It was party all day long in the Military barracks where we lived in Rukuba, Plateau State, Nigeria.

We celebrated Easter or Christmas day with great expectations as we anticipate the flooding of our living rooms and bedrooms with our entire Muslim friends. Culture and religious diversity was a phenomenon to be celebrated in those years of my childhood. We had no reason to fear our neighbor for arson or religious intolerance. Respect andcommunal living was a given. I could not remember any major Muslin feast that I was not given a new set of clothes to visit Muslim families who lavish my Muslim friends and I with gifts and food. I do not remember any instance of discrimination base on my non-Muslim background or non-northern origin. I can not recall any instance at which “Baba,” “Saidi,” and Amina” or “Talatu” my Muslim peers were chased out of my home or fellow Christian homes we visited on Christmas day simply because they were non-Christians. “Baraka de Sal at” or “merry Christmas” was equally given as a salute to each other’s faith with pride and honesty. Yet, years later, in the same community I once felt comfortable being a Christian child, I could no longer sleep without a gun by my side for fear of my Muslim neighbors who once ate and dine with me on the same plate. Being a Muslim or Christian has become a normative phenomenon for killings and intractable community conflict in northern Nigeria ...

Such a remark has much in common with (say) mid-1990s accounts from the Balkans: communities with a long history of tolerance could be split along cultural lines, and the splits would perpetuate in a climate of fear and uncertainty

Ethno-religious conflicts in Northern Nigeria
By: Jibrin Ibrahim and Toure Kazah-Toure. Ibrahim is the Nigeria country director of Global Rights ... Kazah-Toure is researcher at .. Ahmadu Bello University ...

... During the First Republic, Nigeria had three majority ethnic groups, each of which dominated the minority groups in its region. Following thirty years of a fissiparous process of state creation, the political map of majorities and minorities has been complexified by the creation of numerous new majorities and minorities. This has been made possible by an active process of proving that your neighbours are historically, ethnically, linguistically, culturally and religiously different from you, which is the basis for your demand for a separate state of local government. Effective mobilisation, involving the writing and rewriting of history, was carried out. As campaigns developed, hitherto peace-loving neighbours in the state or local government had to be portrayed as the terrible/aggressive/settler ‘other’ who must be separated from ‘our people’ in the interest of peace, stability, good government and development. As this type of dynamics unfolds, traditional conflict resolution mechanisms break down and ethno-regional political actors feel obliged to take maximalist positions and treat both their neighbours and the spirit of compromise with disdain. In the process, each group develops a reading of Nigerian history in which they discover that they have had the worst deal in the political equation.

... The most significant sociological variable in Nigeria over the past twenty years is the astronomical growth of the level of religiosity in society. Growth is expressed both in the intensity of belief and in the expansion of time, resources and efforts devoted to religious practice. Religious practices have not surprisingly, as is popularly assumed, been excessively subjected to political instrumentalisation by the political elite ... The norms and practices of the growing number of religious movements and their activism is characterised by norms that are often antithetical to democratic ones. They include unquestioning faith in religious leaders, sectarianism and exclusiveness, intolerance and a propensity to hate free speech and undemocratic organisational practices. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the trajectories of religious pluralism and democratic culture in Nigeria have tended to work against each other.

... The story of the Nigerian State is one of complex and multiple processes of subjugation and marginalisation. As we have argued above, there has been a process of constant creation of majority groups who seek to dominate their minority neighbours ...

This suggests that the definition and marginalization of "others" has played a significant role in the recent political history of the country, which may help us understand something about exactly how opportunistic political instrumentalization of religion unfolds in Nigeria

Northern Nigeria: Background to Conflict
20 December 2010

... While some in the West panic at what they see as growing Islamic radicalism in the region, the roots of the problem are more complex and lie in Nigeria’s history and contemporary politics ... In the first decades of independence, which were marked by frequent violent conflict between the regions for control of state resources, the north saw the military as a route to power and influence. But .. the return to democracy in 1999 was viewed as a chance for the north to seek political and moral renewal. This lead to the reintroduction of Sharia in twelve states between 1999 and 2002, although only two have applied it seriously. Sharia caused controversy ... Tensions over the issue have declined in recent years ... Debates among Muslims in the region tend to divide those
who respect the established religious and secular authorities and their two-century-old Sufi heritage from those who take a “reformist” view. The latter cover a very wide range of opinion, from Salafist-type anti-Sufism to Iranian-inspired Shiite movements, and combine anger at the establishment’s corruption with a promise of a more individualistic religious experience ...

Violent conflict, whether riots or fighting between insurrectional groups and the police, tends to occur at specific flashpoints. Examples are the cities of Kaduna and Zaria, whose populations are religiously and ethnically very mixed, and the very poor states of the far north east, where anti-establishment groups have emerged. Many factors fuelling these conflicts are common across Nigeria: in particular, the political manipulation of religion and ethnicity and disputes between supposed local groups and “settlers” over distribution of public resources. The failure of the state to assure public order, to contribute to dispute settlement and to implement post-conflict peacebuilding measures is also a factor. Economic decline and absence of employment opportunities, especially as inequality grows, likewise drives conflict. As elsewhere in Nigeria, the north suffers from a potent mix of economic malaise and contentious, community-based distribution of public resources.

But there is also a specifically northern element. A thread of rejectionist thinking runs through northern Nigerian history, according to which collaboration with secular authorities is illegitimate. While calls for an “Islamic state” in Nigeria should not be taken too seriously, despite media hyperbole, they do demonstrate that many in the far north express political and social dissatisfaction through greater adherence to Islam and increasingly look to the religious canon for solutions to multiple problems in their lives ...

This suggests there is actually significant diversity in Nigeria's Muslim community. It further suggests that cynicism and despair, resulting from a long history of struggles for resources and from economic marginalization, lead to distrust of the secular and religious establishment. And it also (again) suggests political manipulation of differences as a contributing factor to the problem