Jos… Nigeria’s Violence-ravage Paradise Cont
JOS – No other African city has the many blessings Jos has, from a European weather to scenery sights that leave visitors glued to its alluring nature.
But to residents, Jos is no longer that peaceful enclave, but rather a home to bloody ethno-religious violence that brutalized its peaceful atmosphere.
"I have lost all my sense of nostalgia and the idea of retiring to the serenity of the hills… because of the blood of innocent citizens that has been needlessly shed," Olayinka Oyegbile, a man in his late 50s and a senior journalist, told IslamOnline.net.
Many like him believe that the central city has lost its tranquility because of the deadly violence that has rocked it in the past few years.
Some 553 people, mostly Muslims, are believed to have been killed in four days of fighting in the central city of Jos and nearby villages.
Residents lament that Jos was never a violent place but now it is a place divided along ethnic and religious lines.
"Discrimination never existed here. As kids we attended mosques or churches alongside our childhood friends and nobody raised any eyebrow," recalls Oyegbile, who grew up in the city.
"We were brothers and sisters. We ate and celebrated with one another, and there was no discrimination based on ethnic or religious groupings."
Now instead of the welcoming notes, visitors are warned about imminent dangers or looming fighting.
Instead of blissful breeze, the nightfall brings with it the fear of what will happen before the daybreak and everyone sleeps with one eye open.
Police posts and checkpoints dot everywhere, including more than 20 within Jos alone.
The checkpoints reach all the way to Kuru Kurama, a village some 35 kilometers away where 150 Muslim bodies were found stuffed into wells last week.
"There are boundaries everywhere," says Titus Mann, Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) President.
"Every one now minds his business."
Indigene-Settler Syndrome
Jos is one of Nigeria’s most cosmopolitan cities, because of its diverse ethnic and religious populations.
It has many ethnicities including the Beroms, the Noks - both considered the aborigines - the Yorubas from Southwestern Nigeria and the Igbos from the country’s South eastern region.
Until 1994, when the so-called ethno-religious crisis emerged, Jos had been spared the violence that ripped much of Northern Nigeria since 1970s.
But residents blame the loss of their peaceful life on what some call the indigene-settler syndrome that ripped the city apart.
"The source of the crisis is the issue of indigenes and settlers," Segun Ojemuyiwa, who was born in Jos some three decades ago, told IOL.
Some believe the seed of the crisis was sown with the creation for the Muslim Hausa-Fulani community by the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida a little over two decades ago.
"The indigenes hate the Hausa settlers whom they accuse of planning to Islamize their fatherland," says Ojemuyiwa.
Dung Joshua, a Berom man, says the anger in Jos flows from feelings by indigenes that the "Northern Oligarchy" wants to spread their tentacles everywhere.
The Northern Oligarchy refers to the political influence of the Muslim Hausa-Fulani ruling class, as established by late renowned scholar Sheikh Uthman Dan Fodio in the early 19th century.
"There is this jitters that they want to impose themselves on everybody."
But Hausas like Uthman Audu, a 34-year-old cattle farmer, says the natives fear that they want to usurp their land, which is not true.
"They insist you cannot build a house or operates your business somewhere because you are not an indigene," he said.
"This discrimination is so prevalent. We are treated like second-class citizens here."
Oyegbile, the senior journalist who is also a non-indigene, agrees.
"Why should Nigerians go to Britain or the US and after spending five years become citizens and live freely when my over thirty years of sojourn in a part of my country cannot qualify me for any benefit because I am not an indigene?"
He fears that until Nigeria, a multi-religious society with 50 percent of the population Muslims and 40 percent Christians, confronts its monster of religious and ethnic fanaticism, the episodes of killing innocent people will not stop.
"No country can progress under such an atmosphere."