Nigeria: Holding it together

COUNTRYFILE

President Olusegun Obasanjo's greatest tests will be how to keep the disparate parts of the nation together and to prevent a repeat of the bloody Biafran bid for secession in the 1960s. Analysis by Neil Ford.

Despite the return to democracy, the past three years have not been peaceful. It is estimated that over 10,000 people have been killed in rioting and inter-communal violence since President Olusegun Obasanjo came to power. It is difficult to assess how well the president and his government have done under the circumstances because we do not know what would have happened had other policies been adopted. But we do know that Nigeria remains intact and it seems unlikely that the federation will break up in the near future.

Two factors lie at the heart of the sporadic violence: the number of divisive factors within Nigeria and the willingness of political and other leaders to exploit these differences to further their own ends.

There are over 200 languages and distinct ethnic groups in Nigeria. Ethnic differences are also reinforced by regional divisions, with the three largest ethnic groups, the Hausa (21%), Yoruba (21%), and Igbo (18%), concentrated in the north, south west and south east respectively.

At the same time, the country is split between the largely Muslim north and mainly Christian and animist south. Large minorities exist in all major cities, but those of Christian traders in the north and impoverished Muslims in the south provide ample scope for others to provoke disturbances.

Most deaths have been brought about by fighting between Christians and Muslims. Islamic Sharia law began to be introduced in Nigeria's northern states during 2000, a move that was strongly opposed by Christians living in the north. Many Christians feared that Islam would be imposed upon them as the number of states adopting Sharia grew, while Muslims argued that Christians wanted to prevent them from practising their own religion.

Many Muslims welcomed the introduction of traditional Islamic law in order to combat the lawlessness and corruption of many Nigerian towns. But the introduction of Sharia also institutionalised religious differences and intensified the Christian -- Muslim, north - south division of the country, as thousands of Christians have fled southwards.

A series of judgements concerning the punishment of women for adultery has brought the situation under the spotlight of the international media.

In one of the worst outbreaks of violence, over 2,000 were killed in February 2000 in religious clashes between neighbouring Christian and Muslim communities in Kaduna, while 500 were killed in the overwhelmingly Christian city of Jos the following year. In February this year, ethnic and religious conflicts combined as the mainly Christian Yoruba and predominantly Muslim Hausa living in Lagos fought for days.

Undoubtedly, the poverty and unemployment of many of Lagos' inhabitants provide a perfect tinderbox for such violence. According to the Red Cross, over 100 people were killed, 430 injured and thousands fled the city. The governor of Lagos State suggested that retired military personnel provoked the conflict in order to provide an opportunity for a military coup.

Partly out of fear of provoking northern secessionists, Obasanjo has not cracked down upon religious and ethnic violence as strongly as some critics would have wished. In an interview with the BBC World Service in February, when asked if he approved of Sharia punishments such as amputation and stoning, he replied: "Personally, for reasons of humanity, I don't, but in a democracy, my personal opinion counts for no more than anyone else's."

RELIGION: CAUSE OF CONFLICTS

The severity of ethnic clashes has also intensified over the past couple of years, resulting in hundreds of deaths and major population upheavals. Fighting in Nasarawa state in the centre of the country between the Tiv and the Jukun prompted over 40,000 people to flee the region in November 2001.

Around 50 people were killed in January 2002 in fighting on the Mambila Plateau of Taraba state, near the Cameroon border. Mambila farming communities clashed with nomadic Fulani pastoralists in a conflict over grazing and water resources. Some commentators claimed that the dispute was stoked up by politicians using the land issue as political weapon. Most recently, over 100 people were hurt at the end of June in political fighting in the town of Idasen, in Ondo state in the south west.

Many rumours have swept Nigeria over whom, if anyone, has been orchestrating the various incidences of violence. In February this year, the President said he feared that political opportunists were bringing about the inter-communal violence that threatens Nigeria's democracy. He said: "There is no largescale violent activity in our nation today, communal, religious, ethnic... that has no substantial political undertones." He added that the rioters "merely serve as the foot soldiers of cynical political strategists."