Youth Paper Sanni

For Conference only, not to be cited without the author’s permission International Conference on Youth Politics & the Global South : Religion, Politics, and the Making of the Youth in Asia and Africa- Dakar 13-15 October,2006. Terror in the Name of God and the Society: The Nigerian Youth and the Economy of Violence Professor Dr Amidu Sanni Lagos State University Nigeria <[email protected]> Introduction Bloody conflicts across and within religious and ethnic groups have put Nigeria in the spotlight since the beginning of the new millennium. Until the British colonialism of the nineteenth-century, the Islamic law, the Sharî‘a, was the operative code in what was then known as Northern Nigeria. The recession, if not the reversal, in the operational fortunes of the legal system has been at the bottom of difficult and often raucous relationships between the Muslims and the Christians in Nigeria (Umar 2006). Since 1979 no other issue as sharî‘a, has generated greater controversies and blood letting in Nigeria. Ethnic violence has never been an unfamiliar phenomenon since independence, but it has reached a high water mark since the country’s renewed experience with democracy in 1999. In this presentation, I intend to chart the course of religious and ethnic conflicts within the context of the agitation and counter agitation for the istitutionalization of the Islamic legal code and the culture of ethnic and state protestation with regard to natural resources and access to power in all its ramifications. Sharî‘a: Much ado about nothing? The Islamic legal system is almost as old as Islam in Nigeria. Until the advent of the British colonialism in the nineteenth-century, it was the only legal system in Northern Nigeria, the Caliphate, through which civil, criminal, property, and family cases were adjudicated. The British explorer, Clapperton noted that the Islamic law was so strictly applied during the reign of Muhammad Bello (r. 1817 – 37) “that the whole county when not in a state of war, was so well regulated that a woman might travel with a casket of gold upon her head from one end of the Fellata dominions to the other”. (Bello 1986: 38). The nostalgia for what is considered the ‘golden age’ of religious traditions, when scriptural canons held sway, has thrown up new debates about Islamic Salafism and Christian Lefebvrism (Netton 2006). Muslim thinkers, and indeed activists have often argued for the need to have a moral society based on the sharî‘a, as one of the prerequisites for the establishment of an Islamic state (Moussalli 1999). The 1979 Iranian Revolution continues to be a significant reference point for the resurgence of radical Islamism throughout the world, including Nigeria, where it it believed that Islamization will offer the ultimate solutions to societal problems (Kane 2006). The desire to bring God’s way into all lands is a binding identifier of the Islamic commonwealth (Hodgson 1974). The Islamic revivalist discourse in Nigeria aims at having the Islamic legal system as a national, if not the national, code of jurisdiction. In the pursuit of this agendum since the 70s, intellectual and physical clashes between the proponents and the opponents at all levels have assumed various characters, from the robust to the bloody. Human and material losses have been exceedingly enormous. Politicization of religion and religionzation of politics have been around in Nigeria for a long time, hence they are not new. What is new in the last three decades or so is the violent radicalization of religion (Kastfelt 1994). According to Hafez, “Muslims become violently militant when they encounter exclusionary states that deny them meaningful access to political institution and employ indiscriminate, repressive policies against their citizens during periods of mass mobilization” (Hafez 2003). In other words, the constitutional responsibility of the government to maintain law and order is often used as a pretext for the visitation of state physical and psychological violence on the proponents of the enthronement of the Islamic legal code, even under a democratic dispensation. The genesis of ethnic Violence The strong sense of nationalism and the freedom to control the natural resources of the land had been strong among the ethnic nationalities in the various regions that existed before the British colonialism. In 1895, for example, the Jaja of Opobo in the Niger Delta protested to the Crown in London, calling for greater access to the resources that had lubricated his traditional authorities before colonialism. For this he paid dearly. In the same year, the people of Nenbe, also in the Niger Delta, having failed to achieve their desire for greater economic welfarism and access to resources through peaceful agitations, resulted to violence. So the campaign by indigenous peoples for greater access to the resources of their native lands had been part of the Nigerian history before independence in 1960. But the liberalism of the post independence era, which of course had its roots in the few decades before that, allowed the political regions a far more greater control of their affairs and resources. The North controlled the agricultural products and its natural resources, for example, the groundnut, tin, cotton, etc. The West was in charge of cocoa, marble, and other items, the East utilized palm oil and other minerals for its social and developmental needs. The 1966 military incursion into the polity and the resultant centralization of political and economic control saw the introduction of the culture of marginalization, denial, and oppression of the area which has been producing some 90% of the nation’s revenue through crude oil. All through the military era, the people of the area consistently agitated through peaceful means for a more equitable treatment. A notable effort in point is the 1998 Keyamo Declaration by the Ijaw Youth which called upon the then military government to tackle the issue of environmental degradation of the area and better attention to infrastructural and human development, especially of the teeming unemployed and underemployed youth. The government had always responded with brute force on individuals that were perceived as arrow heads, as was the case with Ken Saro Wiwa, or on the whole community, as happened under democracy with the Odi people some six years ago. The youth have since then engineered a new economy of violence through economic sabotage of oil installations and the kidnapping of foreign oil and construction workers. Unofficially the government negotiates, and possibly pay ransoms in order to avoid international embarrassment. On the other hand, the government plays and talks tough by perpetrating state induced or condoned terrorism (Cf. Combs & Slann 2002). And just on Tuesday 15 August, 2006, President Obasanjo gave a new order for a military crackdown in an operation christened “fire for fire”. The following day four members of the so called militant movement had been arraigned before a court in Abuja, and by Friday over a hundred youth had been detained after what was said to be a raid on a militant slum in Port Harcourt. These extreme measures notwithstanding, the kidnapping of foreign oil and construction workers continued unabated, and the sphere of kidnapping had even been extended to night club houses known to be call points for Western oil and construction workers. So the triangle of violence, in which the state, the agitators, and the society are players and victims continues. Concept of violence and its impulses There is hardly any single, all-embracing definition of violence, for which reason it may be defined, like terrorism, as “the language of being noticed”. (Thackrah 2004). But one definition of it which may be considered here says that it is “any uninvited but intentional or half-intentional act of physically violating the body of a person who previously had lived in peace” (Keane 2004: 6). Anger, alienation, denial of national or religious rights may lead to the radicalization of the victims of such deprivations, and this radicalization may find expression in the form of violenct actions or reactions. According to the first ever global report on violence by the World Health Organisation, 1.6 million people die violently every year, each day an average of some 1400 are killed, while 35 people die hourly through armed conflict.1 The wave of religious revivalism in the major world confessions, and of ethnic nationalism and their capacity to provoke conflict and violence in a globalizing world has been a subject of interest in modern religious and social science scholarship. This is not surprising, there are “family resemblances” between militant and fundamentalist movements in the various religious traditions (Ruthven 2004). This notwithstanding, the more militant religious and indeed ethnic fundamentalism becomes, the more likely the institutionalization of clashes between rival systems in cognate specific spheres (Sim 2005). Shared perception of oppression, exclusion, denial, and marginalization often breeds radicalism which ultimately promotes the culture of organized and sustained violence, be it in religious or socio-political configurations (Cf. Juergensmeyer 2003; Moussalli, 1999; Chabal and Daloz 1999; Duffield 2000). The imperatives of modernity, the triumph of western democracy as exposited by America, and the end of the messy history of clashing civilizations, to borrow from Fukuyama (1992), has inspired new perspectives in religious and ethnic revivalisms under democratic dispensations. But then the geo- political dominance exerted by America in the name of propagating democratic and human values is considered and rightly too, as an “imperialist fundamentalism”’ the mother of all fundamentalisms” (Ali 2002). According to Jacquard, “violence in the name of religion-of all religions- is as old as history” (Jacquard 2002). Religion and politics are soulmates, bedfellows. Performance Violence The ultimate goal of Muslim fundamentalism is to have a proper Islamic state based on the Sharî‘a which is considered barbaric by its Western opponents, especially its penal provisions.

Load more