The mild, montane
climate on the plateau and the picturesque hills of Jos offer a sharp
contrast to the gory massacres and bloodletting Nigeria has witnessed
in the past years. Jos presents the typical vignettes of sectarian
killings, like in Northern Ireland. The city is reminiscent of Belfast
– each stroke of violence is followed by revenge.

Inappropriately,
such barbarism gets classified under the microscope of religion –
Catholics against Protestants; in the Nigerian case, Muslims versus
Christians. Many of us have even forgotten the origins of the perennial
fighting between Israelis and Arabs. Conflicts always have causes and
consequences beyond the boundaries of religion.

The Jos carnage
could have been prevented if governance in this country was of the type
permitting introspection, analysis, conflict resolution, and
restitution.

When violence is naively forgotten and forgiven, everything is postponed.

South Africans
instituted a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ not so much
designed as a punitive campaign to dredge up and hang tormentors of the
apartheid period, but to get to the roots of what had happened, and
learn lessons for the future.

Most conflicts are
over land and the inequity in holding it, the stronger forcibly
hijacking the communal cake, which they hardly helped to bake. Such
injustices are straight from the Jungle Book – lionesses make a kill
and a hefty, passive male ambles in for the first bite.

Land appreciates
with time and lays the foundations for economic growth and military
might. But Nigeria’s land tenure systems encourage a perverse model of
capitalism where wealth continues to circulate within small, corrupt,
indolent and well-connected elite. Weaker people and communities are
routinely pushed aside and into inhospitable and unproductive
ecosystems and occupations by stronger cabals, under the common pretext
that they are lazy.

The corporate
existence of Nigeria is a function of two sharply contrasting and harsh
ecological systems – the sea and the desert.

Christian
missionaries arrived by boat. Islamic scholars and Jihadists galloped
from the Sahara into the north of the country. While the former
suffered immensely under the attack of anopheles mosquitoes, the
latter’s horses succumbed to the tse-tse fly and failed to penetrate
the forest zone.

The blurred fault
line separating both religions lies in Nigeria’s middle belt on which
the city of Jos is planted. A collision of religions is often a clash
of cultures, land use systems, legal interpretations, economic
activities, and political aspirations.

The problems of Jos had been lying latent for a long time.