“The government and people need … demonstration that what is happening in Nigeria is no longer a local problem. It is a cause of deep concern
internationally, and the great faith traditions can be part of the solution,” said Archbishop Michael Kehinde Stephen of the Methodist Church of Nigeria in an interview posted by the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) on Jan. 26.
In recent months, the group has increased attacks in the north of the country, raising fears of a broader religious war in Africa’s most populous
nation. The sect’s name – which translates to “Western education is forbidden” in the Hausa language of northern Nigeria – has been responsible for the deaths of nearly 1,000 people since 2009, according to Washington-based Human Rights Watch.
The group was founded around 2002 in the city of Maiduguri by Muslim cleric Muhammad Yusuf. One of its stated objectives is to implement Sharia (Islamic law) in the predominantly Muslim north. Southern Nigeria is largely Christian.
However, commentators have said that there is also a political dimension to the conflict, reflecting “concerns by the Northern elite that [President
Goodluck] Jonathan’s decision to end an informal agreement to alternate presidential power between the Muslim North and Christian South before the 2011 presidential elections will exclude the North from any possibility of future control of the state,” according to former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell, writing in the New York Times.
In addition, “the root cause of violence and anger in both the north and south of Nigeria is endemic poverty and hopelessness,” which Jonathan’s government has done little to ease, wrote history professor Jean Herskovits, of the State University of New York at Purchase, also in the New York Times. Such serious grievances mean that religion may be exploited as a tool by the complainants to attract attention, said Professor Jesse Mugambi, a scholar in theology, philosophy of religion and applied ethics at the University of
Nairobi in an interview with ENInews.
“Other opportunistic groups take advantage of such chaos, making it difficult to tell who is aggrieved and who is not. Religion is blamed in general, although the majority of the citizens remain law abiding,” Mugambi said.
Recently Boko Haram said attacks on churches were in revenge for “wrongs” committed on Muslims by Christians in the North. “This is not the first time such reactions (attacks) have happened. When religion is abused anywhere, it becomes a ‘cancer’ that is very difficult to cure,” said Mugambi.
With the other targets being churches and mosques, Christian and Muslim leaders have been uniting to calm the “passions” sparked off by attacks and retaliations, according to Stephen.
Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian scholar who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, has warned that the country is slowly disintegrating and has called for national dialogue. “If you don’t have a dialogue, you will have a monologue, a series of monologues that is deadly. Right now, we are undergoing a particularly destabilizing and disorientating form of monologue,” he was quoted by The Guardian newspaper of Nigeria as saying on Jan. 26.
“In dialogue, there is only one language; in monologue, you would have the language of Kalashnikovs, detonators, AK-47s, et cetera, et cetera,” Soyinka said.
The Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, WCC general secretary, said Nigeria cannot become another battlefield where religion is used to promote division and hatred. “We must remain prayerful and vigilant regarding the developments in Nigeria as they are potentially destabilizing not only for Nigeria, but countries in Africa and other regions,” Tveit said in a Jan. 26 letter to the Nigerian president.
