Nigerian Blood Feud in Plateau State
The text message came from my friend M. in Kafanchan, a small city north of Jos, the capital of Plateau State. Email is too hit and miss with power rationed by the day, only cell phone communication operates with any kind of regularity. The text said: “Pray for us, over 500 people have been killed, mostly women and children. Thanks, M.”
I met M. at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, from which we both graduated in 2003.
He took the heroic course after three years study in the US, of returning to the dirt poor existence his family knows in Kafanchan, to minister in the church which sent him for further training. For the past 6 years I have known something of his people’s struggle to have any kind of work, and any kind of sustenance. He buries many people in a month, too many times I discover it’s a relative or close friend, and he is always needing to find medicines and food for his parishioners, and his own family. His denomination pays him no salary. He grows his own food in the growing season, depending heavily on the rains to come at the right time, or to come at all. Car accidents, house fires, robberies, medical emergencies, and serious diseases have come to seem all too frequent in his occasional phone calls and more frequent text messages. Now the threat of ethnic reprisals in an ongoing jostling for the scarce land resources brings uncertainty and fear to many lives already straitened.
So this post encourages you to pray for the peace of the Plateau State in Nigeria, for M. and his city of Kafanchan, for the city of Jos, the hometown of another good friend now living in New York City. And if you would like to know how to assist M. and his people – email me at cgilbertlpm@comcast.net
The violence in Jos is serious. According to Al Jazeera English five hundred people, many of them women and children, were targeted for slaughter in the middle of the night. And, although it happens the attackers are largely Muslim, Hausa-Fulani herdsmen, and their victims Christians of the Borom community, the real division from which the conflict arises, is between “settlers” and “indigenes.” That’s a hang over from British Colonial bureaucracy, where people are still dealt with differently according to origin, no matter that many settlers have been in the region for generations. It seems the real issue is a desire for fertile land, and the settlers are by this administrative structure, politically and socially marginalized in the struggle for land and resources. Meanwhile the Nigerian government is distracted from dealing with the issue by a many months long issue – the unknown state of health of a Prime Minister who seems too ill to fulfill the role, and the uncertainty over the right of his deputy to assume power.
This BBC link is also useful for understanding the history of this ongoing conflict.
