The postcolonial era in Nigeria has witnessed two contradictory tendencies. The first trend is the continuation and even aggravation as well as proliferation of colonial conflict legacies, leading to at least two waves of violent identity conflicts in Nigeria during 1960-70 and since the early eighties, respectively. The second tendency in postcolonial Nigeria involves a more or less concerted attempt to manage identity conflicts through innovative federalist practices.
The colonial state, to reiterate, pursued divide-and-rule policies that entrenched systems of ethnic segmentation and polarization. These included the ‘Warrior tribe’ policy of recruitment into the army and
the police, the exclusion of Christians and southerners from the core north and their restriction to strangers’ quarters, and the privileges accorded leaders of the major groups in the regions, all of which bequeathed a fatal legacy – part of which is referred to as damnosa hereditas (burdensome inheritance) – for post-independence Nigeria.
The lopsided colonial ethno-regional federal structure in particular, was heavily implicated in the first wave of violent ethno-political discontent and conflict in the postcolonial era, as evidenced in the Tiv riots of 1962 and 1964, and the secessionist campaign of Isaac Boro and his Ijaw collaborators in 1966, all of which underscored the continuing disenchantment of the ethnic minorities with their inequitable incorporation into the majority-dominated regions. The polarizing effects of ethno-regional federalism were more or less directly expressed in several other political tribulations that assailed Nigeria in the sixties, including: the 1962 declaration of a state of emergency in the Western region; the bitter ethno-regional dispute over the 1962-63 census; the 1964 federal election crisis; the 1965 western election debacle; the eventual overthrow of the First Nigerian Democratic Republic in 1966 following a bloody ethno-military coup; the complete fragmentation and politicization of the military establishment along ethno-regional lines; the attempted secession of the Eastern region, under the leadership of its Igbo military governor, Odumegwu Ojukwu, as the independent Republic of Biafra; and, the eventual outbreak of the 30-month civil war, which claimed an estimated one million lives, mainly in the ill-fated Biafra.
Arguably, the civil war could have been averted if the country’s Igbo first military head of state, General Aguiyi-Ironsi, had restructured the federation by, for example, establishing new sub-federal regional units for Nigeria’s restive minorities in the north and south. Instead, Ironsi’s purported abrogation of federalism through the unification decree of May 1966 was broadly interpreted as an attempt to replace northern domination under the lopsided regional federalism with Igbo hegemony under an even more obnoxious unitary system. The Decree immediately provoked anti-Igbo killings in the north, which were followed by the murder of several Igbo soldiers (including Ironsi himself) in the counter-coup of July 1966, and an even more massive round of anti-Igbo killings in the north in September 1966. The May-September 1966 massacres of thousands of Igbos in the north, and the attendant influx of Igbo migrants back into the East, more than any other single factor, generated popular Igbo support for secession.
The end of the civil war in January 1970 ushered Nigeria into an era of relative inter-group stability that lasted until the early eighties. This stability was promoted by the following factors: the decisive federal victory in the civil war, which promoted a revitalized sense of Nigerian nationhood; the dissolution of the four regions into twelve and nineteen states, in 1967 and 1976 respectively, which transformed the federation into a more horizontally balanced union; the use of expanding oil revenues to soften inter-group resource conflicts through various ethno-distributive measures, including the provision of infrastructures in new state administrative capitals and the expansion of the general distributable pool account (DPA) under the revenue allocation system; and the crafting of innovative statutory mechanisms of ethnic conflict accommodation, including the federal character principle and the inter-regional distribution requirement for the election of the federal president, which were embodied in the 1979 Constitution for the Second Republic, which ended the first phase of military rule in Nigeria. To be sure, the seventies were not entirely free from sectional tensions, as evident in the north-south dispute over the 1973 census, the assassination of the military head of state in a barely disguised ethno-military coup in 1975, and various inter-group disputes over the boundaries of new sub-national administrations. Yet, compared to the sixties and the period since the eighties, the seventies stand out as an era of relative tranquility in Nigeria.
Indeed, the factors that underpinned the post-civil war peace had begun to evaporate markedly by the eighties. For instance, the oil boom more or less ended with the collapse of international oil prices in 1980/81, while the creative federalism of the 1979 Constitution virtually disappeared with the collapse of the Second Republic in 1983 and the subsequent rule of a succession of hyper-centralizing ethno-military administrations during 1984-1999.
Two events in Kano in the early eighties signalled the beginning of the end of the post-civil war peace in Nigeria. The first involved the Maitatsine (or “Yan Tatsine”) riots of December 1980, which claimed thousands of lives and set the tone for subsequent riots involving the Maitatsine heretical, anti-materialist, Islamic sect in other northern cities like Bulunkutu, Yola, Jimeta and Gombe (Chistelow 1985 ;Lubeck 1985, 1986). The second event was the destruction of churches and other properties belonging to Christians by Muslim mobs protesting the construction of a church in Kano’s Muslim heartland in October 1982. But the turning point in Nigeria’s relapse into inter-group strife was the 1987 Kafanchan-Kaduna ethno-religious riots, which revived age-old tensions between the Muslim Hausa-Fulani and non-Muslim communities throughout the north and beyond. The deluge of inter-group conflicts that has afflicted Nigeria since the Kafanchan-Kaduna crisis may be classified into the following four main, often overlapping, types: ethno-religious clashes, inter-ethnic violence, intra-ethnic and/or intra-religious conflicts, and inter-group economic clashes.
