Ethnicity, Conflict Resolution and the Nigerian State

Ethnicity, Conflict Resolution and the Nigerian State

Introduction ------------

Writing just five days after the September 11 WTC terrorist attack, the former professor, ambassador and US Senator, the erudite Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (whose vacated senate position is now occupied by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) had this to say in a Sunday, September 16 article in the Washington Post:

QUOTE

All that [that is CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT COMMUNISM BEING THE CULPRIT FOR EVERY DISASTER THAT HAPPENS TO AMERICA] now changes. The world out there is now in here, and nothing will ever be the same. The test now will be for us to get straight just what it is "out there." The answer is ethnicity, but this has proved hard to learn. Ethnicity was a dominant political fact of the 20th century. The collapse of the great empires in 1918 and 1945 brought about, in the words of the late Harold Isaacs, "a convulsive ingathering of people in their numberless groupings of kinds -- tribal, racial, linguistic, religious, national." The old "larger coherences" were not replaced; instead the world was "breaking into bits and pieces, bursting like big and little stars from exploding galaxies." Neither of the subsequent superpowers seemed able to grasp this. This destroyed the Soviet Union. And keep in mind: We [THAT IS, THE UNITED STATES] are a singularly successful multi-ethnic society. We have a vibrant Islamic community of emigrants from across the world. They will be heard in those parts of the world they come from, and they can speak out.

UNQUOTE

It is that inability to "grasp" the "convulsive ingathering" of these ethnicities in a multi-ethnic Nigeria, and what it should mean to pro- actively re-arrange our governance in order to make our own society "successful" that may yet destroy us as it did the Soviet Union, if we are not careful in Nigeria.

Why do I write so?

Ever since May 29, 1999 when we began a civilian administration, the ethnic stew-pot in Nigeria has been...