| UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER |
LAGOS, 23 June (IRIN) - A trend of violent communal conflicts spreading through Nigeria in recent years has intensified in the past months, leaving hundreds of people dead and thousands displaced.
>From Warri in the south to Kafanchan in the north and from Aguleri-Umuleri in the east to Ife-Modakeke in the west, neighbouring communities have pounced on each other with destructive fury hardly justified by longstanding rivalries.
Since April, more than 600 persons have been killed, scores of houses burnt and many people displaced from their homes.
Automatic weapons and dynamite were employed to kill and destroy houses when fighting broke out between the Aguleri and Umuleri communities over a boundary dispute early in April. More than 300 people were reported killed and thousands displaced.
In May, more than 100 died in the northern town of Kafanchan in clashes over the installation of a new traditional ruler as the indigenes' age-old resentment of what they see as domination by the neighbouring Hausa-Fulani erupted into violence.
More than 200 people died in the latest incident of communal violence, when ethnic Ijaws and Urhobos fought their Itsekiri neighbours in and around the oil town of Warri.
"Thirty-one prominent communal conflict areas have developed in Nigeria in the last 10 years," said Samie Ihejirika of Strategic Empowerment and Mediation Agency, a Nigerian non-governmental organisation.
He identified the major cause as rivalry over distribution of resources, which may manifest itself as disputes over land, money, titles or chieftaincy.
Other prominent communal conflicts in terms of high casualties include that between the Ife and Modakeke communities in southwest, the Jukun and the Kutebs in the northeast, and the Kataf and the Hausa-Fulani in the north.
Despite the ethnic lines often dividing belligerents, some of the most intense fighting has been between people of the same ethnic group, such as the ethnic Igbo communties of Aguleri and Umuleri in eastern Nigeria and the Yoruba of Ife and Modakeke.
"In most cases the conflicts are rooted in age-old disputes," Chukwudi Ekwunife, who is conducting research on communal conflicts for a doctorate in local government administration, told IRIN. "But they are the result of what I call the retreat of government, which has been compounded by poverty."
He said over a decade and a half of corrupt military rule, people in remote districts - most of the country - felt the impact of the state on their lives decreasing with passing years, as government failed in its traditional role as provider of welfare and development.
"With most communities left on their own and poor, they resorted to their own, old ways. This includes the old ways of settling their disputes," Ekwunife said.
In the growing trend of communal conflicts some analysts saw signs of a creeping anarchy sown by the failure of government as successive, corrupt, urban-centred military regimes lost control over neglected rural areas.
They underline the severity of daunting social and political problems facing new President Olusegun Obasanjo, who has taken over the helm of Nigeria's third elected government at a time it is battling its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1960.
Obasanjo has embarked on a process of restitution, which includes probing corruption and human rights abuses by past governments and purging the military of officers who had benefitted from state positions.
"Obasanjo may have started well towards restoring the lost confidence of the people in government," Ekwunife said. "But he will have to touch the lives of the rural poor positively to end the conflicts.
"They must be returned to the path of modern development from which people have deviated because of poverty."
[ENDS]
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Item: irin-english-1082
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Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 1999
Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar
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