New Strife Tests Nigeria's Fragile Democracy

March 15, 2000

New Strife Tests Nigeria's Fragile Democracy

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By NORIMITSU ONISHI

KADUNA, Nigeria -- With soldiers and armored trucks blocking the street, thousands of Muslims gathered for Friday prayers recently under the burned-out roof of the central mosque, a result of religious violence that has gripped the city for weeks. After prayers, the faithful spilled out of the mosque and the soldiers reopened the street.

The New York Times

Kaduna has been torn by religious violence in recent weeks.

On the following Sunday the scene was repeated next door at St. Joseph's Catholic Cathedral, which is separated only by a narrow alley from the mosque. Christians walked past the charred remains of cars in front of the church's blackened main entrance, under the soldiers' watch.
The proximity of the mosque and church was once a bright symbol of Kaduna, the country's military capital and the north's political center, a cosmopolitan meeting place for all Nigerians and one of the best hopes for a unified Nigeria.
Today Kaduna has become the epicenter of a national battle that on the surface is over states' right to adopt Islamic law, but which is really about raw political power in Africa's most populous country.
The future of Nigeria, the most fragile of democracies, might be decided in this battle. President Olusegun Obasanjo, who has surprised many by the breadth and aggressiveness of his democratic reforms, is facing the most serious threat to his 10-month presidency.
Some members of the northern Muslim elite -- which ruled Nigeria for most of its history but has found its power greatly diminished under Mr. Obasanjo, a Christian -- seem to have seized on religion to galvanize their forces and challenge the federal government.
After Muslims marched here last month calling for the adoption of the Shariah, the Islamic social and penal code, a counterdemonstration by Christians led to riots. At least 400 people were killed. A history of religious coexistence quickly gave way to extremism. "Shariah must be done; Shariah is law," rioters scrawled on the houses of destroyed neighborhoods. Christians invaded the statehouse and wrote at the main gate: "Shariah is dead. Shariah is not Y2K compliant."
"Our Kaduna, the tolerant, pluralistic Kaduna we were so proud of, is gone," said Festus Okoye, a Christian lawyer who has practiced here for 15 years and is the founder of a human rights organization. "The fabric of intercommunal relations is completely broken. What took place here had nothing to do with religion. Religion was the mask, as always. What took place here was the struggle for power in Nigeria.
"Kaduna will never be the same again," he added. "Never."
Whether Nigeria will ever be the same again is a question many people are asking. As the killings in Kaduna have led to hundreds of more deaths in the Christian east and then in Sokoto in the north, the home of Islam, many are asking how many further blows Nigerian unity can withstand.
President Obasanjo described the violence as "one of the worst incidents of bloodletting that this country has witnessed since the civil war" in which the secession of Biafra nearly broke up Nigeria three decades ago.
Nigeria, like another newly democratic giant, Indonesia, has seen a surge in ethnic, religious and social violence since its longtime military rulers gave up power last year.
Thousands have been killed in a bewildering number of conflicts across the country: ethnic groups fighting one another in the oil-producing Niger Delta; ethnic minorities fighting against the emirate system in the town of Kafanchan; members belonging to subgroups of the same ethnic group fighting each other for land.
Lagos, the steamy commercial capital that teeters toward chaos on its best days, has recently suffered deadly riots almost weekly. Incidents like a truck driver accidentally hitting a crowd of pedestrians are enough to set off killings with religious and ethnic overtones.
The conflicts have all had in common a particular group's quest for power in a country where such quests were brutally and swiftly quelled for years by the military rulers.
President Obasanjo, whose handling of the Shariah issue has been criticized as weak from all corners, has even said that the crisis is an orchestrated campaign by those trying to destroy his government.
Doyin Okupe, Mr. Obasanjo's spokesman, said in a statement: "The enemies of this administration who hide under the cloak of religious piety to try to destabilize it will fail collectively, as it is not in the manifest destiny of this country that it should disintegrate."
The events that culminated in Kaduna began in October when the governor of the neighboring state of Zamfara announced his intention to enact the Shariah as state law.
Soon schools were segregated into single-sex institutions, hotels and bars stopped serving alcohol and taxis only for women began appearing on the streets of the state capital, Gusau. Last month a man who was caught drinking alcohol in public received 80 lashes with a cane.
Nigeria's northern states, which are predominantly Muslim, have always incorporated the Shariah into their legal system, applying it to issues like marriage, inheritance and divorce. The predominantly Christian south has simply relied on English common law.
Critics of Zamfara's governor, Ahmed Sani, said he was merely trying to increase his flagging popularity by taking the Shariah to a new level, one that might eventually cover criminal matters and, in theory, include such punishments as amputation of hands. His administration said that it was motivated by religious piety and that the adoption of the Shariah was a reaction to widespread corruption in Nigeria.
Whatever the governor's true motives, he found himself transformed overnight into one of the most famous politicians in Nigeria. Leaders in other northern states announced that they also planned to introduce the Shariah. Besides Zamfara, the states of Sokoto and Kebbi have adopted Islamic law, ignoring the Obasanjo government's appeal that they put their decisions on hold.
"If you didn't implement Shariah your faith became questionable," said Umaru Dikko, a Muslim northerner who served as transportation minister in the early 1980's. "There are some politicians who used Shariah to make themselves popular. But religion is a very serious business in Nigeria. So after Shariah came, the extremists jumped at it."
In Kaduna the march and counterdemonstration resulted in 400 deaths, according to the official tally, though many people believe that the real figure reached the thousands. Countless churches and mosques were set afire in the city's center and poorest neighborhoods.
In the slum of Narahi, a predominantly Christian neighborhood, row after row of Muslim-owned houses were devastated. The strong smell of smoke lingered in the air. A chicken and her chicks, their feathers blackened, wandered around a street where a gutted mosque stood. Nearby, some pigs searched for food among the ruins, their pink snouts black from the ashes.
During the weekend in Sokoto, Christians continued to leave the state. At the main bus station, Peter Ekeson, 37, an Ibo from the southeast, was looking to buy tickets for his wife and child.
"I've lived here for 20 years," Mr. Ekeson said. "Most of us are sending our wives and children back home. And many of the men have left. They have sold their goods at moderate prices or are shipping them."
Behind Mr. Ekeson two large trucks waited to leave for the southeast, piled high with refrigerators, televisions, mattresses, drums and other belongings. A passenger bus also waited; the lettering above its windshield announced, "All over."
Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi, 43, the governor of Kaduna State, said the conflict could have been over in a different way.
"This could have been avoided if the right thing had been done at the right time," said Mr. Makarfi, who belongs to the same party as Mr. Obasanjo, the People's Democratic Party. "The federal government should have been decisive and sent the issue to the Supreme Court. The court would issue a decision on Shariah and the executive would enforce it. And it's over."
It is a suggestion that many in Nigeria, including members of the national legislature, have made. But so far President Obasanjo has steadfastly resisted it, arguing "that a legal solution may carry in its wake chaos, pandemonium and further communal hostilities, which is undesirable," said his spokesman, Mr. Okupe.
But many people say Mr. Obasanjo has acted cautiously because of his own place in Nigerian history and his increasingly delicate relationship with the northern Muslim elite.
Shortly after the death of the military dictator Sani Abacha in June 1998, Moshood K. O. Abiola, a Yoruba businessman who was denied victory in the 1993 presidential election by the military, also died suddenly.
Many Yoruba -- who make up one of Nigeria's three main ethnic groups, the others being the Hausa-Fulani and the Ibo -- talked of breaking away from Nigeria. To pacify the Yoruba, the northern Muslim elite agreed on a "power shift": they would yield the presidency to a southerner, though not just any southerner.
Their candidate was Mr. Obasanjo, who served as president for the first time from 1976 to 1979. During that tenure Mr. Obasanjo was seen to have preserved the status quo, earning the north's enduring trust and his own people's mistrust.
One result was that in the election last year Mr. Obasanjo won with votes from the north and the southeast. His own people, the Yoruba, rejected him almost unanimously.
But immediately after taking office he embarked on aggressive campaigns to clean up the military, re-examine past abuses and flush out corruption. Describing himself as a "detribalized" politician, he made appointments by choosing people from all over the country. The moves angered many northerners.
"Obasanjo has tried to reach out to everyone," said Aliko Mohammed, 65, a prominent northern businessman who once served as president of Nigeria's stock exchange. "The north is surprised that Obasanjo is not acting like a typical Nigerian politician -- winner take all. Having got the support of the north, he is now rewarding his own people, who did not even vote for him."
Despite his own independence, Mr. Obasanjo is now faced with trying to hold together a nation that since gaining independence from Britain in 1960 has been a country of competing forces. The military rulers concentrated power in a small number of hands, even as centrifugal forces created more and more divisions.
From three regions in 1960, the number of states has climbed gradually to its current number of 36. Three decades ago a million people were killed in the Biafran civil war, when the Ibo tried to secede.
"Between 1967 when Biafra started and now, we have not solved the fundamental problem that threatens the existence of Nigeria," said Dr. Abayomi Ferreira, a physician who served in the war and who is involved in politics. "The history of Nigeria has been the recurrent struggle of one group after another fighting for self-determination."
That is why Dr. Ferreira and many others are calling for a restructuring of the country. Many, including the governors of all five Ibo states, are proposing that Nigeria become a country of a few large autonomous regions with a relatively weak federal government.
President Obasanjo has rejected the proposal, saying its proponents were exploiting the current situation with "unfounded claims of marginalization."
But those claims have gotten louder. Separatist groups have mushroomed. Ralph Uwazuruike, 41, an Ibo lawyer, founded his organization, the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra, a few months ago. The Ibo supported Mr. Obasanjo in the election but did not benefit enough in his administration, Mr. Uwazuruike said, voicing a common complaint of his ethnic group.
So he wants out of Nigeria.
"Everybody to his tent," he said. "Things fall apart if the center cannot hold."
Whatever structural changes the politicians might adopt for Nigeria, the people have already started going into their tents.
In Kaduna the two biggest slums, Rigasa and Narahi, suffered the greatest devastation during the upheaval last month.
Since the riots, Christians living in the northern slum of Rigasa have moved to Narahi in the predominantly Christian southern part of the city; Muslims have migrated in the opposite direction.
One Friday, a truck laden with furniture rumbled along the main road here, heading toward southern Kaduna. Half a dozen Christians sat atop the heap, above a sign in the back that proclaimed in bold, green letters: "One Nigeria."

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