BABAJIDE FATAI, Akure, Nigeria | Monday
THIRTY-six people died when militants clashed with palace guards in a south-western town in Nigeria at the weekend, raising to almost 200 the numbers killed in communal violence in the country this month.
Twenty-five people died Saturday and 11 more died of their wounds overnight after members of a banned ethnic militant organisation, the Odua People Congress (OPC), fought guards of the traditional ruler of the town of Owo, in the latest turn in a dispute over control of the royal house, said police and hospital workers.
”Eleven people injured in the clashes died this morning,” a worker at the Federal Medical Centre in the town said on Sunday.
This added to the 25 who had died on Saturday, Ondo State Police Commissioner Paul Ochonu said.
”Twenty-five people had been killed as at last night when I was last in Owo,” said Ochonu.
Nigeria, a country of more than 120-million people, is split between two major religions Islam and Christianity – and divided into more than 250 ethnic and linguistic groups.
Over the years, the country has been repeatedly shaken by ethnic and communal violence.
The latest clash was between different factions of the Yoruba, the dominant ethnic group in southwest Nigeria and one of the three largest ethnic groups in the country.
In the traditional Yoruba system, a series of royal families govern different towns, the ruler of Owo being known as the ‘Olowo’ (or king) of Owo.
But the position of ‘Olowo’ has been disputed since the 1960s when the then king was deposed after falling out with the political ruler of the region, Obafemi Awolowo.
Since then, the descendants of the deposed ‘Olowo’ and the political heirs of Awolowo, today represented in part by the OPC, have been continuing their battles.
Saturday’s bloody clash in Owo came just three weeks after the federal justice minister, Bola Ige, a prominent Yoruba leader, was murdered, on December 23, in what the federal government has linked to another local political feud.
Meanwhile, Nigeria is struggling with a seemingly unending series of outbursts of communal and ethnic violence.
In the past two weeks, alone, more than 50 people have died in fighting over the control of land in northeast Nigeria, and at least 100 people died in fighting over fishing rights in the centre of the country.
Estimates are that since the country returned to civilian rule in May 1999, more than 10 000 people have died in some form of communal, ethnic or religious violence.
In an editorial on Sunday, the newspaper This Day called for President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 31-month-old government to act against what it termed a ”new wave of communal violence”.
The newspaper decried what it called ”a spate of communal conflicts with religious and ethnic undertones” and ”political thuggery”.
”There is a need to get to the roots of the crises. This has to be the plank of whatever security policy the government may be packaging,” it said.
Speaking to AFP, a representative of the OPC, which has been involved in a series of violent clashes with different groups around the southwest, denied provoking the latest violence.
”We were not in Owo to foment trouble. We were just passing though the town when the palace guards opened fire on some of our members,” said the OPC official.
The government in 1999 announced a ban on the OPC, after it was blamed over bloody riots in the southern city of Lagos. However the government failed to implement the ban. – Sapa