Does God cause Nigerian violence?

The press will portray yesterday’s violence in the Nigerian town of Jos, following on Christmas eve bombings,  as inter-religious, between Christians and Muslims. And some of the main battle lines are certainly drawn along that divide.

But the driving factors lie far from religion: political status, property rights and power distribution are the underlying causes.  As my former US Institute of Peace colleague David Smock puts it:

The principal sources of this conflict are competition for resources and political power rather than theological differences.

The most important of the underlying issues seems to arise from the distinction between “indigenous” people and “settlers.”  As Chris Kwaja and Darren Kew explain:

This distinction becomes a major legal problem because Nigerian law allows local governments to determine their own qualifications for residency, and local administrators across the country typically make this determination based on ethnic heritage and historic control of the land.

Consequently, many Nigerians are considered “residents” of local governments in ethnic homelands from where their grandparents or great-grandparents may have migrated and where they themselves may never have even visited. These same Nigerians may be denied residency in the very neighborhoods where they were born. Without certificates of residency, individuals face a host of problems in voting, gaining political office, accessing certain types of employment or public services, and even buying land.

The largely Muslim Hausa have generally been regarded as non-indigenous “settlers” in Plateau State, of which Jos is the capital, no matter how long they have lived there.  But in Jos North, where the Hausa control the local government, they treat non-Hausa as settlers.

These are problems considerably more mundane, and in a sense soluble, than at least some theocratic issues. While there are Nigerians committed to resolving them, resources have been lacking, and the justifiably admired Imam and Pastor need support (the video clip about them

here is only 10 minutes, despite what the label says).  Unless the underlying issues are dealt with, Nigeria’s fault lines, which are not limited to Plateau State or Christian/Muslim tensions, will widen, with catastrophic consequences in a country that supplies about 2.3 million barrels of oil per day to the world market (including 8% of U.S. imports) and has the largest population in Africa (over 152 million).