Northern Nigerians Cry for Help

In the world of Google News the bloodshed ongoing in Nigeria following the fairest elections in decades is buried.  We’re more tuned in to Apple’s latest earnings report, and the life issues of film stars than to another tragedy in another part of the world.

But I can’t avoid it.  My friend in Kafanchan, just north of Jos in Plateau State called my cell a half hour ago  and although he was clearly in deep distress, I could understand very little of what he tried to say through an echoing phone connection. So I asked for him to text me, and he did.

He texted,” A lot of people have been killed, stores and houses burned down in post election Nigeria.  We are badly touched. We are suffering.  We cannot get to buy food, you cannot even get the food because the stores are destroyed by fire.  Banks are closed, in fact life becomes unbearable for us here in Kafanchan.  We need you prayers please.  Thanks M.”

His was not the only cry for help.  I have Australian friends who have established community development work in the northern Kaduna City working among Christians. Here is where the killing is most vicious. People are being hacked to death by machete or set ablaze. And it’s all a backlash to the successful election of Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, as Prime Minister.  On the face of it Christians are being killed by Muslims, and some reports say Christians are retaliating in kind.  The Aussies are in Johannesburg at the moment and worry for their community of friends in Kaduna City, who are young and likely targets in the vicious pogrom.

What’s to do from the East Coast of the US?  In the short term, well, we can pray. In the longer term we can strategize to assist political and social solutions to the real economic issues there.

As I’ve written previously in this column the main issue is the exploitation of the religious divide to mask a deeper divide that survives from British colonial days that has for more than a century impoverished people who were then newcomers into the northern states like Plateau State – the divide between indigenes and newcomers. It entrenches a class division that keeps land and wealth locked up for the original inhabitants, the wealthy elite, many of them Christians.  The newcomers ‘tho settled for over 100 years happen to be mainly Muslim. And according to Christian Science Monitor reporting today – politicians like the aspiring governor for Plateau State, or the newly elected Federal opposition leader are exploiting the divisions and pouring petrol onto the fanatical fires for their own electoral gain.

In the meantime – civil order is destroyed and the people of this remarkable African state suffer yet again steps backward when they desperately need to go forward.

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~ by cgilbertlpmedia on April 20, 2011.