Ethno-religious conflicts in Northern Nigeria
By: Jibrin Ibrahim and Toure Kazah-Toure. Ibrahim is the Nigeria country director of Global Rights (formerly International Human Rights Law Group) based in Abuja, Nigeria. Previously, he was an associate professor of political science at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. Kazah-Toure is researcher at the department of history, Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. Both were guest researchers at the Nordic Africa Institute in late 2003.
This presentation aims to deal with an important part of the story of Nigerian nationalism, especially as it relates to Northern Nigeria. It is a story that has always been told against a background of strong ethno-regionalism. Ethno-regional identities in Nigeria have developed along a tri-tangential trajectory. The first is the North/South divide that emerged at the beginning of the colonial period. The second is the tripolar framework related to the three colonial regions and the majority groups that dominated each region. The third and maybe the most important tendency in Nigerian politics is a persistent multi-polarity governed by micro-nationalism of the numerous minority ethnic groups in the country. Ethno-regionalism in Nigeria has always been played out alongside ethno-religious politics and this dimension makes the story more complex.
Precisely because of this political background, the story of Nigerian nationalism has been expressed in the discursive language of federalism. Fears of domination of one region or ethnic group or religion over the others have played a central role in convincing politicians of the necessity of a federal solution for the First Republic. The First Republic which operated essentially as an equilibrium of regional tyrannies was however characterised by the domination of each region by a majority ethnic group and the repression of regional minorities.
One of the most important questions informing political mobilisation in Nigeria has been the conquest of federal power at the centre. The logic of political mobilisation has developed along the lines of a zero-sum game. This means that groups are obliged to block the access of others or displace those who already have access if they are to eat from the national cake. That process of a permanent strategy of blockage has amplified the expression of fissiparous tendencies because all those who are not inside are outside.
The lived story is one of a widespread perception of ethno-religious domination. The story is first and foremost one of the control of political power and its instruments such as the armed forces and the judiciary. The second is the control of economic power and resources. Both are powerful instruments that are used to influence the authoritative allocation of resources to groups and individuals. Nigeria was amalgamated into a single political community only in 1914. The event, which was not a nationalist act, had limited objectives – the amalgamation of some aspects of separate colonial administrative mechanisms rather than a political unification of the peoples. Twenty-five years later, in 1939, regional autonomy was reinforced with the division of the country into three regions and the appointment of chief commissioners. Since then, Nigerian politics has had a very strong ethno-regional character and the political class have always sought to exploit it for their political ends, leading to a disastrous civil war in 1967–70.
The current story has become even more intense. The boundaries within which, and the discourses being expressed, over why and how Nigerians should and could stay together, are expanding. Basic issues in defining the Nigerian State such as secularity versus support for religious laws or federation versus confederation are still being debated. Various modalities for debate and decision-making such as a national conference or a conference of nationalities are being proposed. The power elite is worried that such a debate can have disastrous consequences for national unity. The proponents of these positions are confident that it is the only path to assuring a federal and democratic future for the country. Here we wish to tell the story from the perspective of building a federal and democratic future for Nigeria.
The paradox of the return to democracy
There has been an explosion of political and religious conflicts in Nigeria since the return to democratic rule in May 1999. The expectations that the departure of military rule would reduce arbitrary rule, allay fears of ethnic and religious persecution, and consequently reduce political tension and conflict have not happened yet. On the contrary, the number of conflicts has been increasing and their spread has been widening. As the level of violence grows, their locations are becoming more provincial and the consequence is that political, ethnic and religious tolerance has been declining dramatically.
The usual explanation for the growth of ethno-religious conflicts in Nigeria is that one majority group or the other is monopolising power. A closer appreciation of the political situation in the country will however reveal that it is simplistic to continue to assume that the steady decline of political and religious tolerance in the country is a direct result of the political domination of the country by one, or even three hegemons. The Nigerian political elite has been involved in an intense struggle to have access to what has been called the national cake. In that process, patterns of political domination are constantly being transformed. It is this constantly changing pattern of domination that is producing the fears and anxieties that underlie increasing conflict and intolerance. Our intention is to outline a number of underlying factors that account for this process.
It is generally accepted that Nigeria is a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society with enormous potential for economic, social and democratic development. Authoritarian leadership, the emergence of an over-centralised state, elite manipulation, irresponsible mass media, corruption and prolonged conflict, have so far blocked this potential. In the process, Nigerians have been losing their freedom, their resources and the good relations they have hitherto enjoyed with their neighbours. The development of the Nigerian project would therefore require the deepening of democracy and increased commitment to what we call ‘true’ federalism. The development of democratic culture is dependent on the existence of a modern state that can protect the rights of its citizens and extract duties from them. Modern states are characterised by the practice of equity, the rule of law and the search for legitimacy. The legitimacy of the state is linked to its capacity to present itself as a provider of necessary public goods and more important, a neutral arbiter that guarantees the security of all sections of society. When the state is generally perceived as serving the particularistic interests of one group, it starts losing its legitimacy, and indeed, its authority. As state capacity declines, fear of ‘the other’ rises and inhabitants of the state resort to other levels of solidarity such as the religious, ethnic and regional forms in search of security. It is in this context that the two major issues of ethnic and religious identity and mobilisation have become so central to the resolution of the Nigerian project.
The first is the transformations in the country’s ethnic equation linked to the dynamics of the majority/minority divide. 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 second issue relates to the impact of the rise of religiosity on democratic political culture. 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 instrumen-talisation by the political elite. The Nigerian religious sphere is developing in a specific cultural context. 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.
In spite of the two factors outlined above, our main contention would however be that Nigeria is a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society, which accepts differences among its peoples and has a fairly large consensus of agreeing to live together. Out of this flows what we can call the Nigerian project. The Nigerian project is the discovery that if we are to live peacefully together in spite of our differences, we must develop federalism and democracy in our society. It is not an easy project to execute. The project is constantly threatened by ethnic and religious conflicts. The story of the Nigerian State is one of complex and multiple processes of subjugation and margin-alisation. As we have argued above, there has been a process of constant creation of majority groups who seek to dominate their minority neighbours. This process has undermined the long-held assumptions about a Hausa-Fulani oligarchy that has been ruling and ruining Nigeria.
End of the regional hegemons?
A lot of the literature analysing the failure of the Nigerian project has traced the crisis of democracy and the causes of ethno-religious conflicts to misrule by the three regionally based elites – Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo, (WAZOBIA in Nigerian language parlance). The argument is that this elite has devised effective methods for subjugating the minorities to their hegemonic hold. Some of the most vociferous critics of these oligarchies are the intellectuals from the Middle Belt who complain about the hegemonic stranglehold of the Hausa-Fulani elite over them. The usual arguments are: 1) The political problem of Northern Nigeria is that the majority Hausa-Fulani ruling class has maintained its hegemonic hold over the ethnic minorities of the Middle Belt. 2) In so doing, it has used effective administrative structures to maintain this hegemony. 3) The effect of this history of domination is that the people of the Middle Belt have been deprived of access to political power and they have been constantly threatened with the violation of their religious rights by attempts to impose Islam and the Shariah on them.
Similar arguments have been made concerning the ruling oligarchies of the other two majority groups. Analysts and pundits continue to make these arguments although they describe a reality that has significantly changed over the years. Since the creation of states in 1967, the structural basis for political domination by the majority groups has been eroded and multiple power elites from both majority and minority groups have been jostling for power using numerous and constantly changing ethno-religious combinations. In the process, a new reality has emerged in which former minorities are emerging as new majority groups. Indeed, a more accurate depiction of the current political situation is that we are witnessing the subjugation of minorities by other larger minorities who have become ‘majorities’: 1) The process of state creation has produced new majority groups out of former minority groups who have created new patterns of hegemonies over their smaller neighbours. The category of subjugation then becomes that of ‘marginal minorities’. 2) This process has created a mentality that favours the constant search for hegemonic possibilities among dominated minorities who seek to transform themselves into majorities vis-à-vis their ‘marginal minority’ neighbours.
This new reality can be presented in the form of three theses about Nigeria’s political trajectory: 1) The categories majority/minority are fluid and constantly changing. Nigeria is a country in which constantly changing minorities have been the majority of the population and their numbers as distinct groups are increasing while their population sizes are reducing. 2) The character of the Nigerian State and society is such that there is a constant attempt by emerging majorities to suppress created minorities and throw them further into the margins. 3) This process of a fissiparous tendency in the creation of political and administrative units is multiplying rather than reducing the problem of political domination.
This reading of transformations in the ethnic equation has serious consequences for the Nigerian project. It represents a call for a more analytical approach rather than a focus on discrete ethnic groups in understanding the country’s political trajectory and the process of conflict generation.
Selected topical literature
Basta, R.L. and J. Ibrahim (eds), Federalism and Decentralisation in Africa: The Multicultural Challenge, Fribourg, Institute of Federalism Fribourg, 1999.
Ibrahim, J., ‘Religious and Political Turbulence in Nigeria’. In The Journal of Modern Africa Studies vol. 29, no. 1, 1991.
Ibrahim, J., ‘The Transformation of Ethno-Regional Identities in Nigeria’. In Jega, A., (ed.), Identity Transformation and Identity Politics under Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2000.
Joseph, R. (ed.), State, Conflict and Democracy in Africa, London, Boulder, Lynne Rienner, 1999.
Kazah-Toure, T., Ethno-Religious Conflicts in Kaduna State, Kaduna, Human Rights Monitor, 2003.
Kukah, M.H., Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria, Ibadan, Spectrum, 1993.
Momoh, A., Even Birds Have a Home: Explaining the Pathologies of the Citizenship Question in Nigeria, EMPARC’s Annual Lectures Series no. 7, Lagos, EMPARC, 2001.
Nnoli, O., Ethnic Politics in Nigeria, Enugu, Fourth Dimension, 1980.
Olukoshi, A.O. and O. Agbu, ‘The Deepening Crisis of Nigerian Federalism and the Future of the Nation-State’. In Olukoshi and Laakso, (eds), Challenges to the Nation-State in Africa, Uppsala, Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996.
Taiwo, O., ‘Of Citizens and Citizenship’. In Constitutionalism and National Question in Nigeria, Lagos, Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarisation, 2000.
Williams, P. and T. Falola, Religious Impact on the Nation State: The Nigerian Predicament, Aldershot, Aveburz Ashagate, 1995.
