If these reasons are correct, it points to the disturbing fact that people are targeted for elimination in Nigeria based on their religion or ethnicity. The underlying issue that sometimes lead to violence may be the struggle to appropriate scarce resources but when particular groups of people are killed for this purpose, it becomes an act of genocide. Although genocide is sometimes seen as a situation where people are killed mainly because of their race or ethnicity, the underlying reason for such acts usually have to do with the quest for resources or political power. This is what happened in Burundi, Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, Nazi Germany, etc. People are not simply killed because of their ethnicity or race unless ethnicity or race is connected to the quest for power. And that is what is happening in Nigeria. People are being killed based on ethnicity (insider/outsider) or religion (the new racial marker).
What is going on in Nigeria must therefore be called genocide although it is happening on a lower scale. We are told that in some regions, "settlers" find it difficult to obtain jobs in local government or apply for educational scholarships. These are mostly given to the so-called "indigenes" even though both the "settlers" and "indigenes" are Nigerians. Violence, in some cases, is intended to wipe out one group or another. As a person from Cameroon, I am quite familiar with the language of "indigenes' and "settler" because it is also used to describe Cameroonians who are believed to be autochthonous to a particular region and Cameroonians who are believed to have recently settled in that region respectively. In Cameroon, like in Nigeria, this division is instigated by politicians for political gain. However, the situation in Cameroon has not resulted in the kind of mass killing that we see in Nigeria. I bring Cameroon into the discussion to show the similarity between these two African countries. Perhaps this "indigenous" and "settler" distinction is also used in many other African countries to refer to people who are citizens of the same country but have different ethnicity. It is the kind of distinction that leads to genocide. And Nigeria's government, by virtue of its inability to address the situation, is complicit in promoting this dangerous slippery slope.
For this situation to be addressed, at least two important things need to be done:
1. The weakness of the Nigerian state must be addressed
2. Current understandings of identity will have to be challenged.
These are both very tall orders for the fragile Nigerian state but if they are not addressed, what police commissioner Ikechukwu Aduba remarked may very well turn out to be a prophecy: "it is not over."
For more on the killings in Nigeria as genocide, see: http://allafrica.com/stories/201003100475.html
For videos of the recent violence in Plateau State see the following links:
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