“If they explain Nigeria to you and you understand it, they didn’t explain it well enough”. So goes the maxim for trying to parse Nigeria’s labyrinthine political dynamics. A security crisis has engulfed the country, catching the attention of the US president in the process. With the help of our West Africa correspondent, Eromo Egbejule, I’ll try to get to the bottom of what is happening.
The marginalisation of Nigeria’s minorities
On Friday, more than 300 schoolchildren were kidnapped from a Catholic school in the country’s north-central Niger State. That was just the latest example of escalating violence, as the country has been plagued by crises including the killings of hundreds in Benue State and a recent live-streamed terrorist attack on worshippers at a church in Kwara State. Earlier this month, Donald Trump threatened to invade, citing an ongoing ‘‘Christian genocide”, while Trinidadian hip-hop star Nicki Minaj spoke at a UN event in New York spotlighting Christian persecution.
After Minaj’s address at the UN, Rolling Stone published an article claiming that “Nicki’s claims of extremism against Nigerian Christians … aren’t backed by any data.” The article has not been received well by many Nigerians online, who have argued that westerners are weighing in with unwarranted authority. “To start, there is religious persecution in Nigeria,” Eromo says.
“The dominant Islamic class, entrenched by the 18th-century Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio, proposed a much stricter version of Islam, which is what influenced the implementation of Sharia Law in 12 states after Nigeria returned to democracy, from 1999 to the early 2000s. And so some of those who haven’t adhered to that have been killed and displaced.”
This not only affects Christians – Muslim groups are also impacted if they are not seen as Muslim proper. In the north there are Sunni groups attacking Shia groups, who are viewed as heretics by extremists such as Boko Haram.
The country’s middle belt, a site of much of this violence, has “a predominance of minorities”. “Many Nigerian crises are essentially about the marginalisation of political, ethnic and religious minorities. Such minorities feel whatever little resources they have left are being taken away by the majority or state-backed minorities,” Eromo says. “It’s just that the most colourful manifestation of this marginalisation is between Christians and Muslims, and most minorities in the middle belt are Christian.” While there are significant Muslim casualties, this does not undermine the reality of religious persecution against Christians in Nigerian states such as Benue and Kaduna; but it should be seen as one aspect in a broader quagmire of domination.
The herder-farmer conflict
Nigeria’s security crisis differs significantly by region. The most notable thus far has been Boko Haram’s insurgency in the north-east, but it is the herder-farmer conflict, which has been especially prominent in the middle belt, that has largely been extrapolated into a narrative of “Christian genocide”. There is little cattle ranching in Nigeria, due to a resistance in uptake of ranches and the prevalence of nomadic cattle herds. The Fulani herdsmen historically had a more symbiotic relationship with non-Fulani farmers, but this has become strained by resource competition and exploitation by criminal groups.
Climate change, desertification and deforestation have all exacerbated the problem, as Fulani herdsmen travel farther south. And there is the rapid development of former herding trails. “Abuja used to be part of the big grazing roads in the 1960s, but now it is the capital, there’s malls and complexes where you used to take your cows through.” What this has left is a series of grievances and conflicts, and with a lack of functioning state policing to calm the problems, the result is large graveyards. These herdsmen and militias also have access to more complicated and sophisticated weaponry, with conflicts in the Sahel region fuelling the proliferation of unsecured weapon stockpiles. This has led to an asymmetric conflict with Christian farmers, who often only have machetes.
A centralised power with little federal oversight
Eromo says that Nigeria has repeatedly failed to get to grips with insurgent violence because of a centralised government. “Abuja has all of the power, and there’s a lot of ungoverned, or under governed, spaces.” He also points to the lack of state police. He says that “Nigeria’s big problem” is “ignoring the minorities and focusing on regime security. It’s Nigeria’s original sin.”
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Eromo continues: “Intelligence sharing is terrible. And so in all of these forests across the middle belt, north-east and into the north-west, there’s space for non-state actors to take over and to plan.” Indeed it was in Sambisa forest that the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls were held by Boko Haram. “So you have ideological criminals who are persecuting the religious, political and ethnic minorities. Then you have commercial criminals looking for money. There’s just so many groups – which is why the catch-all term is ‘bandits’.” The problem is also obfuscated by non-herder Fulani-speaking criminals exploiting resource conflicts and stereotypes.
***‘Data is a luxury in Nigeria’
There are significant blind spots in the country’s data collection, hence calls for a unified national database. “Data is a luxury in Nigeria,” Eromo says. “There’s never enough data, no one even truly knows the true size of the economy, it’s just inshallah and vibes. Nigeria is so big, there’s forests where there’s no network, so sometimes you hear of atrocities 10 days later when a person escapes. Nigeria doesn’t even know how many people it has, we see an estimated 220 million, it could be less, it could be more. It’s been a problem spanning more than 100 years, since the first British census of Nigeria in 1921.”
So the real extent of the persecution is not clear. “What if the people on the ground are seeing things that the rest of us don’t see?” Eromo says. “We have to tread carefully.”
Religious persecution also cannot always be neatly divided from other motives. For example, Eromo tells me that the targeted abduction of Nigerian priests amounts to religious persecution. But priests are “economically important in small communities” and attract a higher ransom from church attendants as well as the Christian diaspora. “Some Imams have also been targeted, but people are more likely to pay for a priest.”
***Where now for Nigeria?
There is no singular resolution for a country whose problems are too intricate and myriad to ever be done justice in this analysis. Is American intervention the answer? Certainly not. But I am loth to criticise the Nigerians who have echoed calls for US intervention. At the very least, perhaps such international embarrassment might wake up the Nigerian government. The narrative might be isolated from nuance, but that is understandably not the concern of victims and survivors. Why would Nigeria’s ignored minorities not embrace a moment of global attention?
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
