Feature blog on Nigeria

WARNING: THIS HYPERLINK LEADS TO A GRAPHIC PICTURE:

http://i.imagehost.org/0088/for-jos-main.jpg

She looks like a burnt rubber doll, right? Her cornrows roasted to a crisp, torso rent from limbs, face melded into the smouldering ashes. They say she was not yet six.

I refused to believe she wasn’t a doll. I refused to believe those were her intestines sticking out from her side.

But the news tells me she was a Nigerian, just like me. Only she happened to live in one of several villages where a sectarian crisis occurred.

This is the most gripping of several pictures that have shocked the world in the past week and made me question my existence as a Nigerian.


On Sunday March 7 a crowd of men stormed Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Rassat villages in Jos, Plateau State, about three kilometers from Abuja, the capital. Reports state that they burnt about 75 houses and killed some 500 Christians; mainly women, children and the elderly. The victims’ chances were marred by the surprise of sleep, the weakness of age and the viciousness of their attackers.



The corpses of children and adults testify that people broke into their homes and dragged sickles through their jaws, from side to side.

There were mothers who were shredded with machetes as they tried to protect the same children the murderers flung into purpose-built fires. Some 3, 000 people have fled the State, and are now destitute.


The latest horror finds grim company; ethnic and religious clashes have occurred in Jos in 1994, 2001, 2004, 2008 and as recently as January. It also comes at a time when Nigeria’s president Umaru Yar’adua has not been seen or heard from for 113 days and the country grapples with a leadership crisis, food prices and fuel scarcity.


The sordid joke in some quarters is that the sign-off phrase used by international media that “one-third of all Nigerians live on less than a dollar a day” may have to be reviewed downwards. Indeed, last Sunday’s riots proved to be the tipping scale worldwide.

Images of weeping children, bodies laid in rows for a mass burial and the words of spluttering officials were relayed by news websites and social networking sites. Nigerians living abroad once again became scavengers, fingers hovering over laptops and mobile phone keypads, all waiting to feed off the latest report. We were not alone. The fixation of news wires and daytime satellite TV shifted.



A statement by United States Ambassador to Nigeria read in part: “The death and destruction is horrific… the underlying issues – economic challenges, ethnic tensions, and the need for improved state leadership on the issue – that continue to spark these continuous incidents of violence need to be addressed in a comprehensive manner with the goal of ending the cycle of sectarian conflicts.



Lawmakers from the region on Wednesday March 10 cited the N65 billion (about R3.4 billion) amnesty /rehabilitation program for militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta and sought a similar ‘economic package’ for Plateau State.

“We are not saying there is no religious undertone, but if someone has a job that closes in the evening, he will have no time to take part in a riot at night,” the lawmakers’ spokesperson said.

News also emerged that there had been attempts by men from Jos to mop-up leftover arms from the Niger Delta just weeks before the killings.



As the governor of Plateau State and religious leaders blamed army chiefs for ignoring warnings of possible attacks, the military commander in the State admitted he had received messages but implied he could not act on them because they were not official.



"I want to make it categorically clear that no official from Plateau State Government called me or forwarded a text message to me. But they all have my numbers," he was quoted as saying.



Meanwhile, the police also paraded 49 suspects, most from a single ethnic group. Lawmakers sped up legislation to ensure youths were not posted to Plateau for the nations compulsory service year for graduates.


Apart from imposing a curfew, the governor also announced a three-day fasting programme to “pray and cry out to God for the forgiveness of our sins, and to plead with him to bring peace on the Plateau and our dear nation, Nigeria.”

Fortunately, the majority of Nigerians who do not recognize their country anymore have decided to do something more practical about it.



On Thursday March 11, hundreds of women from Plateau state were in Abuja, protesting and seeking justice over the death of the 500 lives lost.



The next day, the Save Nigeria Group protests took place, with CNN’s Christian Purefoy reporting from the ranks of sweating but resolute ordinary Nigerians chanting in the mid-day sun.



Tomorrow, it will be the turn of Nigeria’s youths to hit the tarred roads of the national assembly in Abuja, the nation’s capital, to protest the lack of roads nationwide.

We will be asking only three things. That our President resumes office, resigns or is removed before month’s end.

That the government fulfills its earlier promise of providing 6000 megawatts of electricity by December 2009.

That the paradox of being Africa’s largest oil producer, while suffering perennial petrol price hikes and scarcity ends. All three will do.

We have the benefit of numbers on our side; over 60 percent of Nigerians are aged 35 and below.

We have the tools of justified anger, frustration and the internet in our hands.

Most importantly, we have the awareness that we must begin to move collectively from Facebook rage to sending clear signals of dissent to all who have gained political and economic clout from our apathy.



The Nigerian anthem says “the labour of our heroes past/shall never be in vain”. If that didn’t move us all this time, then the present killing of our children by the sword and the continued slaying of our future by a few politicians has obviously proven sufficient.



--Get an overview of plans by young Nigerians on tomorrow’s protest to the National Assembly, Abuja at http://whereisyaradua.com/




--Get updates on social and government efforts on the Jos crisis here:

http://joskillings.blogspot.com/



--See pictures of the Jos killings here: BE WARNED…THEY ARE GRAPHIC. http://www.anglicandioceseofjos.org/dogo.html


*Agbroko is the 2010 Niall Fitzgerald scholar doing her Honours degree in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand (Wits), Johanneburg, South Africa. She writes this column for www.vuvuzela.org.za, the website for Wits' journalism department.