JOS (Nigeria): An outburst of bloodletting at the cusp of Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south shows how easily ethnic and religious rivalries can be exploited to political ends in Africa’s most populous nation.

The worst sectarian violence in years comes as a sobering lesson, particularly at a time when the legality of President Umaru Yar’Adua’s election is still under review, compounding political uncertainty.

The killing began on Friday as a dispute over a local government poll in the central Nigerian city of Jos.

By the end of the weekend, hundreds of bodies had been brought to the main mosque after gangs of youths split along political, ethnic and religious lines fought with machetes and home-made guns and the security forces opened fire to stop them.

“It is clear that people were armed, that politicians encouraged people to be violent and invariably that people became victims,” Abubakar Momoh, professor of politics at Lagos State University, said of the fighting in Jos.

“It has always been so. Once you unleash violence it cannot be controlled ... They do not learn from these lessons. Look at the history of political violence in Nigeria, every time it is fomented by the politicians themselves,” he said.

The resurgence of sectarian violence is a particular worry at a time of uncertainty over the fate of Yar’Adua because of a legal challenge to his election and concerns over his health.

There is an unwritten agreement among the political elite that the presidency rotates between the north and south.

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on a challenge by his main rivals to his April 2007 election victory and were he to be forced from office early, that delicate balance between the two religious and ethnic blocks could come under pressure.

Competition for resources

Nigeria is home to 140 million people split among at least 200 distinct ethnic groups and almost equally between Christians and Muslims who generally live peacefully – although civil war left one million people dead between 1967 and 1970.

The trigger for the violence in Jos may have been political and the most obvious targets religious, with mosques and churches set ablaze, but the fighting was rooted in decades-old economic rivalry between mostly Christian or animist indigenes and Hausa-speaking settlers from the Muslim north.

The hostility has more to do with competition for control of fertile farmlands and access to economic opportunities, such as the right to own a market stall or go to university, than it does with arguments about religious belief.

“Religion is just used as a cover-up, a camouflage. Religion is very volatile, very vulnerable and it is very easy to manipulate,” said Ignatius Kaigama, the archbishop of Jos.

Sheikh Khalid Aliyu, spokesman for the council of imams in Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, also doubted the violence had been spontaneous.

“When the politicians want to perpetuate their own political agenda or evils, they can cause chaos in this kind of place ...As far as I’m concerned, this was well-planned,” he said.

Spoils of office

It is a trend familiar from other parts of Africa.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election almost a year ago triggered weeks of bloodshed which killed more than 1,300 people as politicians stoked ethnic rivalries. Many are looking to elections in Ghana on Sunday to set a better example.

Nigeria has weathered similar bouts of unrest before – thousands have died in religious and ethnic violence since the start of the decade. But as often as not, politicians seeking to protect the riches of office have fuelled the fighting. Rioting which grew out of a Muslim protest against Danish cartoons in the northeastern city of Maiduguri in February 2006 quickly developed its own political logic and spread to several other towns.

It came at a time when many believed then-President Olusegun Obasanjo would try to stay in office for a third term after eight years in power, driving the tensions between those who wanted their own ethnic or regional bloc to have their turn.

The vote which triggered the Jos clashes was for a constituency at the heart of the local economy, handing the winner a say in the spending of state revenues. Many of those who died were from the city’s poorest neighbourhoods, unlikely to have seen the benefits even if their candidate had won.

“Is it surprising that politics is a matter of life and death in a country where ... public office has become the easiest path to wealth,” wrote Adebolu Arowolo, a columnist in the daily Punch newspaper.—Reuters