Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo is at pains this week to create the image of a “take-charge guy”.
He has sacked Joshua Dariye, the elected governor of Plateau state in the centre of Africa’s most populous country, and replaced him with retired general Chris Ali.
And he has visited the state to go toe-to-toe with his detractors, who have called him weak on the issue of the Christian versus Muslim violence that threatens to unravel the country’s five-year experiment with civilian rule.
The Nigerian Parliament has approved this tough measure, despite a number of expressions of concern about its effect on the fledgling democracy.
The response from the belligerents in a situation that Obasanjo himself described as “near mutual genocide” has produced little for his comfort.
There is a growing feeling that the violence continuously picking at Nigeria’s national fibre is about something more radical even than the communal divide. Obasanjo is resisting calls for the 1999 civilian constitution to be revisited for another attempt to deal with a country of 125-million people and more than 250 languages. Proponents of this change admit it goes to the very soul of the country.
Nigeria’s first independence constitution was handed to the country by the colonial power, Britain, in 1960. Subsequent constitutions have been conceded, as it were, by the succession of military governments that have ruled the country most of the past 44 years. It is time, say the reformers, to have a basic law free of these influences.
Analysts say the root of the violence that has killed hundreds of Muslims in Plateau state and Christians in the northern city of Kano is rivalry between the oil-rich, mainly Christian, south and the poorer, mainly Muslim, north. The country is divided roughly 50-50 along religious lines.
Recent outbursts have been between the Christian Tarok farmers and the Muslim Hausa and Fulani herders moving southwards to escape the desertification from the Sahara. In this case, therefore, the fight is ostensibly over arable land.
But in an area that has seen more than 10 000 people die violently since the civilian government took over, the religious banners are swiftly raised.
A devout Christian, Obasanjo does not find a bastion even in that community. Christians deeply resent the political domination of the Muslim community and fear the growth of Shari’ah law throughout the country. They charge Obasanjo with being too concerned about running a sectarian government to take effective action to curb this spread. Their language is as bellicose as that of their Muslim compatriots. The air is thick with talk of separatism.
In the south-eastern state of Biafra, which lost an exhausting and bloody three-year civil war when it tried to carve out a separate Christian state in 1967, former military commander Joe Achuzia surfaced this week to express his readiness to fight further “Muslim aggression”.
Perhaps more ominous for Obasanjo are increased assertions that the problem is one of poor governance and corruption compounding the dire poverty that grips the majority of Nigerians.
There is still smoldering resentment about the fact that Obasanjo won the elections last year despite widespread claims of corruption.
The country’s oil wealth barely tickles through the mega-rich top strata of that country’s society. They manipulate the poor to keep them in power and their snouts in the oil trough.
“Until and unless an enabling economic environment is available in Nigeria, these clashes will continue,” Ibrahim Gereng of Abuja commented on the BBC website this week.
“Too many people are unemployed and they provide ready cannon fodder for such clashes just to loot and vent their pent-up frustrations. Our leaders live in opulence, while the poor are really poor.”
Obasanjo might find the pressure to review the Constitution irresistible. Already civil groups like the Citizens Forum are banding together to take this further and demand his resignation. Nigeria’s Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka heads one of these and last weekend tasted the determination of Obasanjo.
Soyinka was briefly arrested at a rally in Lagos broken up with teargas by heavily armed riot police. The writer remarked at a press conference on Monday that he had never been treated as badly while protesting again Obajanjo’s predecessor, the military dictator Sani Abacha.