A British colonial decision brought the
northern and southern halves of modern Nigeria together. One hundred
years later, they still don't get along .
Modern
Nigeria emerged through the merging of two
British
colonial territories in 1914. The amalgamation was an act of colonial
convenience. It occurred mainly because British colonizers desired a
contiguous colonial territory stretching from the arid Sahel to the
Atlantic Coast, and because Northern Nigeria, one of the merging units,
was not paying its way while Southern Nigeria, the other British colony,
generated revenue in excess of its administrative expenses.
It made practical administrative sense to have one coherent British
colony rather than two. It also made sense to merge a revenue-challenged
colonial territory with a prosperous colonial neighbor, so the latter
can subsidize the former.
The amalgamation made little sense otherwise and has often been
invoked by Nigerians as the foundation of the rancorous relationship
between the two regions of Nigeria. Northern Nigeria, now broken into
several states and three geopolitical blocs, is largely Muslim. It was
the center of a precolonial Islamic empire called the Sokoto Caliphate,
and its Muslim populations, especially those whose ancestors had been
part of the caliphate, generally look to the
Middle East
and the wider Muslim world for solidarity and sociopolitical example.
The South, an ethnically diverse region containing many states and three
geopolitical units, is largely Christian. The major sociopolitical
influences there are Western and traditional
African.
These differences have been a source of political disagreements and suspicions between the two regions since colonial times.
To add to this cauldron, each of the two regions contains ethnic and
religious minorities who harbor grievances against ethnic and religious
majorities they see as hegemonic oppressors. These grievances are
sometimes expressed through bitter political complaints, through
sectarian crises stoked by political elites and incendiary media
rhetoric, and through violent insurgencies.
Between 1947 and 1959 Nigerian nationalist leaders from different
regional, ethnic, and religious communities came together in a series of
conferences and parliaments to negotiate the transition to self-rule
and to map out a common future. During these interactions and in the
first few years after independence in 1960, the jarring effects of
arbitrary colonial unification manifested as seemingly irreconcilable
differences of aspirations, priorities, and visions. So deep were these
religious and ethnic antagonisms that one Northern Nigerian Muslim
nationalist leader declared Nigeria “the mistake of 1914” while a
prominent Southern Nigerian Christian nationalist figure called Nigeria
“a mere geographic expression.”
In Nigeria’s national politics, Christian anxieties about Muslim
domination of the national political space and the accompanying fear
that politically dominant Muslims would use their privileged perch to
Islamize national institutions and impose Islamic Sharia law on
non-Muslims date back to colonial times. Muslims, especially those from
Northern Nigeria, for their part, have sought to fend off what they
regard as unbridled Westernization and have sporadically sought refuge
in parochial religious reforms.
Mismanagement of national resources and misrule by multi-ethnic and
multi-religious coalitions of successive rulers since independence have
impoverished and denied opportunities to the majority of Nigerians. As a
result, religious rhetoric blaming members of other religious
communities and proposals for religious reform as a solution to
society’s ills have found purchase among the masses. This genuine, if
misplaced, quest for a religious utopia has given some opportunistic
political gladiators an excuse to curry legitimacy through politicized
appeals to piety and religious fervor.
The desperate advancement of religious solutions to socioeconomic and
political problems has deepened social fissures and spawned extremist
and violent insurgencies such as the ongoing Boko Haram Islamist
terrorist campaign, which has killed and maimed Christians and Muslims
alike.
The adoption of the Sharia criminal legal system by a slew of
Northern Nigerian Muslim-majority states between 2000 and 2002 was the
highpoint of this new politicization of religion. Once Sharia was
introduced, it only added to the fear of Christians that they would be
persecuted and their freedoms, guaranteed in the Nigerian constitution,
curtailed. Christian communities in the affected states protested, their
protests stoked by the rhetoric of Christian politicians and leaders.
Clashes between Christian and Muslim communities with a history of
peaceful cohabitation followed, in which thousands of people were
killed, property destroyed, and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Sharia had been a sticking point in Nigerian politics for decades. In
1978 when many Northern Nigerian Muslim delegates to a constitutional
conference sought to extend Sharia beyond the realm of family law,
Christian delegates protested, and the Sharia debate almost tore the
conference apart. A compromise allowed states with majority or
significant Muslim populations to set up Islamic courts but Sharia’s
application was restricted to inheritance and family law.
Subsequently, religion became a major topic of national political
debates, with each religious community pushing increasingly adversarial
agendas. In Northern Nigeria, clashes between Muslim groups—mainly
ethnic Hausa and Fulani—and Christian and traditionalist communities
have become a monthly affair, with devastating consequences. In this
charged environment where religion functions as the primary idiom of
political identity, conflicts over resources, cattle, land, and
political offices have often taken on a religious coloration, with
Muslims pitted against Christians.
Christian ethnic groups in Southern Nigeria have been drawn into
these religious conflicts, with their members in Northern Nigerian
cities frequently targeted by Muslim mobs. Muslim Northern Nigerians
have sometimes been targeted in revenge killings in Southern Nigeria.
Colonialism did not cause the primordial conditions and identities
that have generated tensions and conflicts between Christians and
Muslims, but it made them worse. The British colonial policy of Indirect
Rule, a divide-and-rule system that required sharp ethno-religious
differentiation among Nigerians, made religion and ethnicity the
preeminent markers of identity and pushed exclusionary identity politics
into the political arena. As a result, in Northern Nigeria, minority
ethnic groups, mostly Christians, defined and still define themselves
against the Muslim Hausa-Fulani majority, under the political rubric of
Middle Belt, which is usually a stand-in for “non-Muslim.”
Since colonization established the basis for using identity politics
as a means of accessing political and economic resources, religious
differences have exacerbated political crises and have been implicated
in major national conflicts such as the Nigerian civil war (1967-70), in
which the Biafran separatist movement initiated by the predominantly
Christian Igbo people was crushed by a Federal Nigeria which used
pogroms, blockades, and starvation to exact victory. Religious
animosities only grew from that tragic episode of Nigerian history.
Since independence, religious and ethnic rhetoric has leveraged
claims to political representation and opportunities. This is bad enough
and often degenerates into fierce zero-sum conflicts. Corruption and
incompetent leadership have added another wrinkle, preventing the
equitable distribution of resources and opportunities and making the
politics of religious and ethnic exclusivity more appealing.
Official graft needs to be tackled headlong. A new constitution that
defines rights and privileges of citizenship in terms of residency
rather than nativism, ancestry, and religion needs to be crafted. This
new constitution needs to devolve power over resource distribution and
development from an all-powerful central government to local
constituencies.
This will ensure economic justice and equity. It will make central
political power less attractive and less corrupt and contests over
national political offices less contentious. The use of religious and
ethnic appeals as tools of political mobilization will become less
attractive and find a diminished reception in a climate of justice,
equitable resource distribution, and equal opportunities for all.
Dr. Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University and is the author of "Colonialism By Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria"
(2014).
