Arguments for a Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Violence in Nigeria
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Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos (dir.) Violence in Nigeria A qualitative and quantitative analysis IFRA-Nigeria Introduction: Arguments for a qualitative and quantitative analysis of violence in Nigeria Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos DOI: 10.4000/books.ifra.1905 Publisher: IFRA-Nigeria, African Studies Centre Place of publication: Leiden, Ibadan Year of publication: 2016 Published on OpenEdition Books: 22 July 2021 Series: WAPOSO Series Electronic EAN: 9791092312553 http://books.openedition.org Printed version Date of publication: 1 January 2014 Electronic reference PÉROUSE DE MONTCLOS, Marc-Antoine. Introduction: Arguments for a qualitative and quantitative analysis of violence in Nigeria In: Violence in Nigeria: A qualitative and quantitative analysis [online]. Leiden, Ibadan: IFRA-Nigeria, 2016 (generated 21 septembre 2021). Available on the Internet: <http:// books.openedition.org/ifra/1905>. ISBN: 9791092312553. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.ifra. 1905. Introduction: Arguments for a qualitative and quantitative analysis of violence in Nigeria Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos At first, some of the reports appeared frightening but, in the course of time, I got used to alarms that no longer made any serious impact on me. It is debatable whether or not familiarity with serious security reports, helps the President or any Chief Executive in his administration. Former Nigerian President Alhaji Shehu Shagari, 1 commenting on the daily bulletins of the National Security Organisation. Nigeria has a reputation for being a very violent country. In 2014, it was consid- ered to be the seventeenth most fragile state in the world, and it was ranked 151 out of 162 countries in the Global Peace Index, a multidimensional report on vio- lence, security, and criminality.2 This is a cause for alarm, and researchers obvi- ously have a role to play in the private and public debates on insecurity. Howev- er, many academics claim that crime is on the rise without relying on any data other than some scattered evidence. Most of the literature on violence in Nigeria is qualitative. It rarely relies on quantitative data for a simple reason: police crime statistics are not reliable, or not available, or not even published. Moreo- ver, the training of Nigerian social scientists often focuses on qualitative, cultur- al, and political issues. The French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) has been a pioneer in promoting research on urban violence in Nigeria, yet there is still a need to bridge the qualitative and quantitative approaches of conflict stud- ies. This book fills a gap in this regard. First, it underlines the necessity of a trend analysis to decipher the patterns and the complexity of violence in very different fields: from oil production to cattle breeding, radical Islam to motor accidents, land conflicts to witchcraft, and so on. Secondly, it argues for a complementary approach using both qualitative and quantitative data. Statistics, as such, are in- ert, of little use, and prone to manipulation; they require an empirical investiga- tion to make sense. 3 Thus, statistics cannot be accurate if they are not cross- 1 Shagari, Alhaji Shehu (2001), Shehu Shagari: Beckoned to Serve - An Autobiography, Ibadan, Heinemann Educational Books, p. 327. 2 See: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#/page/indexes/global-peace-index See also: http://library.fundforpeace.org/library/cfsir1423-fragilestatesindex2014-06d.pdf. 3 Pérouse de Montclos, Marc-Antoine, Elizabeth Minor & Samrat Sinha, ed., Violence, statistics, and the politics of accounting for the dead, Dordrecht, Springer, 2016. 2 checked and enriched by fieldwork studies. Moreover, it is the qualitative and intuitive understanding of violence that helps to build a coherent database of in- cidents and develop reliable analysis. This book is therefore organized into two parts, with a focus first on statistical studies, then on fieldwork. With the support of the Nigerian Stability and Recon- ciliation Programme (NSRP), the contributors each received a grant from IFRA to write their chapters. Their work uses a database that has archived reports of fatal incidents and monitored human security in Nigeria since 1 June 2006. Es- tablished on the campus of the University of Ibadan, the project is called Nigeria Watch and celebrates its tenth anniversary with the release of this book. It relies on a thorough reading of the Nigerian press and reports from human rights organ- izations to compile and record fatalities on a daily basis, including deaths result- ing from accidents. The purpose of the project is to address the general lack of data with regard to violence in Nigeria and its victims. Indeed, crime statistics in Nigeria are inadequate. While posing an important problem in Nigeria and being often used rhetorically for political gains by offi- cials, the evolution of violence in the country has never been properly quantified. Since the military era, the Nigerian security forces have remained secretive and reluctant to release data on their operations. Regarding the Boko Haram insur- gency since July 2009, for instance, the military have arrested and killed many people but refused to return the bodies to the families so as to avoid the possible initiation of legal proceedings against the security forces.4 In August 2012, they also instructed the mortuaries in Maiduguri, the birthplace of the sect, not to maintain records, possibly in an effort to conceal the high rate of deaths in deten- tion.5 As for Boko Haram, the insurgents usually conceal the bodies of their dead combatants so as to maintain the myth of their invincibility. In such a difficult context, the Nigeria Watch project aims to compile data consistently and over the long term in order to identify dangerous areas in Nige- ria and to interpret the trends, patterns, and changes in violence, based on an analysis of the data collected. However, it does not claim to be exhaustive. Moreover, its sources often differ when it comes to the number of casualties.6 Because it relies on the media, Nigeria Watch does not cover equally the Nigeri- an territory either, as shown in the second part of this book. It is thus important to be aware of the limits of quantitative studies. Generally speaking, Africa is ac- 4 Amnesty International (2015), Stars on Their Shoulders. Blood on Their Hands. War Crimes Commit- ted by the Nigerian Military, London, Amnesty International, p. 74. 5 In the same vein, the Burundi Red Cross was pressed in May 2015 to stop publishing communiqués on the number of casualties resulting from the military repression of demonstrations against the in- cumbent president. 6 In the online system, figures are updated whenever a new source provides a different report, which explains why trends may change slightly according to the current state of data when they are accessed. Any errors in the following chapters remain the sole responsibility of the authors. 3 customed to poor numbers shaping how decisions are made.7 Except for a few countries, population and economic data are often unreliable. Moreover, statistics are frequently subject to political manipulation and bias. Finally, they can be ig- nored even by institutions that live off statistics. In a recent report, for instance, the World Bank and the French Development Agency speculate on a “rise in vio- lence and conflict in West Africa since 2010”, when the figures they published actually show a dramatic decline of fatalities from organized violence since 1998-1999.8 The most populated country in Africa is of course affected by these issues. In Nigeria, the numbers of inhabitants, internally displaced people, Muslims, Chris- tians, victims of terrorism and of the security forces are all disputed to produce electoral rolls, negotiate a share of the so-called national cake, complain about ethnic marginalization, ‘alert the international community’ … or claim that Allah or Jesus is the winner! As early as 1966, for instance, Odumegwu Ojukwu inflat- ed the number of Igbo people killed or displaced by pogroms in the North, so as to justify the secession of the Eastern Region in 1967.9 The Catholic fathers, who supported the rebels, also claimed that the monthly death toll of the Nigerian blockade against Biafra was exceeding 750,000 people in 1968, a statement that would have resulted in 9 million fatalities in just a year, almost the total number of inhabitants living in the area.10 Even today, the body count of war victims is still a hotly debated issue in determining whether or not the atrocities and delib- erate starving of civilians were a genocide.11 Likewise, the Boko Haram uprising 7 Jerven, M. (2013), Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about it, Cape Town, UCT Press, 208 pp. See also Pérouse de Montclos, M.-A., E. Minor & S. Sinha, eds, (2015), Violence, Statistics, and the Politics of Accounting for the Dead, Dordrecht, Springer, p. 160. 8 Marc, A., N. Verjee & S. Mogaka (2015), The Challenge of Stability and Security in West Africa, Washington DC, World Bank, pp.1 & 10. 9 Gould, M. (2011), The Struggle for Modern Nigeria: The Biafran War, 1966-1970, London, IB Tau- ris, p. 47, 142 & 203; Niven, R. (1970), The War of Nigerian Unity, 1967-1970, Totowa (N.J.), Row- man and Littlefield, p. 93. 10 Mok, M. (1969), Biafra Journal: A Personal Report on a People in Agony, New York, Time-Life Books, p. 95. 11 Going beyond militant points of views, Lasse Heerten and Dirk Moses argue that, in fact, an accusa- tion of genocide would be difficult to sustain on behalf of an invented group like Biafra, which in- cluded non-Igbo minorities such as the Ogoni, who themselves claimed to be victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Igbo. Moreover, Igbo people living in Nigeria outside Biafra were not exterminated during the war; in the same vein, survivors within the Biafran enclave were not killed after the end of the war.