NIGERIA: Riots and Religion

November 2002: 24’20”

 

Unreported World: Nigeria

 

Nigeria has become a patchwork of religious and tribal conflicts in which thousands die every year.

I was approaching one of the frontlines.

Up ahead: an army checkpoint.

The soldiers are supposed to keep the peace. But they’re badly paid, and often a law unto themselves.

 

ROAD TO ZAKI-BIAM

ACTUALITY: [Conversation between driver and soldier]

Soldier: Where are you?

Driver: We're coming from Abuja to Makurdi.

Solider: What are the contents of this bag? Those bags?

Driver: We're going to Makurdi.

Bribes are part of everyday life. Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries on earth.

(Up Music)

There are over 250 ethnic groups in this West African country.

We’d crossed over from land controlled by the Jukun tribe into an area belonging to their rivals – the Tiv.

PTC:

This is the middle belt where the highest concentration of different tribes and ethnic groups live side by side. They are also some of the poorest people living in the country. In fact this whole area is known as the Zone of Poverty.

(Need more room for the following)

 

 

 

I was heading for Zaki Biam: a town besieged by violence.

 

For years Nigerians have been told that if they bought into western ideas of democracy and capitalism life would get better.

But somehow it hasn’t. And now they’re deciding to live their lives by their own rules.

The violence surrounding Miss World should come as no surprise.

 

 

TITLE SEQUENCE: "NIGERIA – THE COUNTRY THAT DOESN’T WORK"

NIGHT ARRIVAL IN ZAKI-BIAM

 

It was a nervous ride.

We were travelling through countryside where the the Tiv and Jukun tribes are battling for control of the farmland.

Already this year scores of people have died.

At 9 o’clock I finally arrived in the town of Zaki Biam - a stronghold of the Tiv tribe.

ROADBLOCK

 

ACTUALITY: [Roadblock action]

 

A curfew was set to begin at 10 o’clock.

Already people were being told to hurry home.

I thought it was the police giving orders.

But they were vigilantes. Farmers by day; volunteers by night.

PTC:

These guys are pretty serious and pretty mobile. They seem to just set up, stop people, make sure that everyone in the area is in check and move on.

 

CURFEW

ACTUALITY: [Bikes travelling through town]

As curfew approached, the vigilantes began to patrol.

There wasn’t a policeman in sight. Nigeria’s police force is understaffed and underpaid.

The Tiv tribe have decided if they want something done, they do it themselves.

The local commander Terzungwe Kuhwa, told me that he and his men often went where the police wouldn’t go, because the areas are far too dangerous.

INTERVIEW: [Vigilante leader]

Vigilante: We're trying to make sure that anybody we see him we stop him and we question him. Where he is coming from and what he is doing outside right now.

They were soon in action.

Man sitting on ground [more pics]

Eventually they decided he wasn’t a criminal - Just someone late getting home.

Actuality Go Home

People outside houses

What’s happening here isn’t unusual.

Vigilante groups are springing up across Nigeria.

Moped

Just before midnight they spotted someone else breaking the curfew.

In other places vigilantes dispense summary justice. Suspects are brutally beaten, sometimes doused in petrol and burnt alive. Here they take suspects off to the police station.

ACTUALITY: [Curfew Breaker and bike stop]

In: Here. Who are you …

Out: Tiv language as man is led away.

DAY ARRIVAL IN ZAKI-BIAM

There are other reasons the people of Zaki Biam are turning their backs on the Nigerian State.

In the morning I could see large areas of the town are in ruins.

The culprits? The Nigerian Army.

A year ago the soldiers who’re meant to keep the peace went on a killing spree.

Flash first archive

The slaughter began in the town market.

PTC:

This is the country's biggest yam market and it was obviously a very busy and packed place when the soldiers came here and opened fire.

Archive

The soldiers were out for revenge. 19 of their colleagues had died after being caught up in the tribal war near the town.

In all the soldiers killed two hundred people. Among the dead were children as young as five.

Village now

Many of those who survived were still too frightened to tell their stories.

INJURED MAN INTERVIEW:

X told me the soldiers had decided not to kill him. Instead they mutilated him. To my horror I realised they’d cut off his penis.

Kyle: The soldiers did this to you, right?

Man: The soldiers. Yes, sir.

Kyle: But why? Why do you think this is?

Man: [Answers in Tiv]

It turned out he’d only survived at all because he’d pretended not to be a member of the Tiv tribe. The other men he was arrested with were executed.

Kyle: He says the soldiers came and rounded up fourteen people and when he said he wasn't Tiv, he's Ibo, they didn't believe him at all and they said, well, you're with the Tiv anyway and they're animals so we're going to treat you like an animal as well and that's why they chopped off his penis and sliced him up with knives.

 

FORMER SPEAKER SEQUENCE

Benjamin XXX is a former speaker of the Nigerian Assembly.

A local policeman ran to warn him that the soldiers were coming.

That’s why he and his family are still alive.

INTERVIEW:

Kyle: So is this what used to be your house?

Ben: Yes.

Kyle: It's been absolutely demolished.

Ben: That's right.

X told me the massacre meant people had turned their backs on the Nigerian state whose army had attacked them.

Everybody would believe they're soldiers. With armoured cars, machine guns and all.

Kyle: So were they not firing on people who they might have thought were responsible for the previous killing of the soldiers?

Ben: No. It was random killing.

The President has apologised for the killing. But no soldiers have been brought to justice.

 

HELICOPTER OVER PORT HARCOURT

It’s not just the Tiv who are returning to their tribal identity.

Three years after democracy returned to this country, more and more people are starting to ask if it’s time to break up this country.

I was in a helicopter belonging to the Shell oil company, heading south, along the River Niger.

(tilt up)

Nigeria is the one of the largest oil producers in the world.

80 per cent of the government’s income comes from oil, but somehow the money has never reached ordinary people.

Three years ago when democracy returned to Nigeria people hoped that would change. But billions are still siphoned off by corrupt politicians.

My destination was the oil town of Port Harcourt. I expected a public relations speech from the local Shell spokesman.

But instead Bobo Brown told me local Nigerians were seething.

Bobo: There's no question that the level of poverty in the Niger Delta is outrageous. Indeed, outrageously high.

Kyle: So it adds insult to injury then to see a huge developing industry right on their doorstep?

Bobo: It increases the tension regarding the political questions about the ownership of the oil wealth. That is one level of the tension. The people also face the reality of everyday survival. They need to eat. They need a job. They need to build a career and therefore fulfil their lives. At that level they confront Shell and say, You have opportunities we need. But even if Shell were to disengage all the staff it has in its employment today and turn those opportunities to the unemployed, it would still only be a small drop, indeed, in an ocean of want.

 

BOAT SEQUENCE (?Respace slightly? )

I could see what he meant. I took a boat ride from the oil complex to the shanty towns where many of Port Harcourt’s people live. Most of them are mebers of the Ijaw tribe.

No signs of oil wealth here. The World Bank says people are worse off now than when oil was discovered 40 years ago. It’s a measure of Nigeria’s failure.

Word spread a journalist was in town, and a crowd quickly gathered.

Man 1: We want to be independent on our own. We want to be independent of Nigeria. We want to We don't want to be with Nigeria anymore.

Kyle: You want to break away altogether?

Man 1: We want to break away from Nigeria because we've been marginalised.

Dr Kobo: What people want essentially is to take care of themselves. Not always going cap in hand to somebody else. You need to have an equitable share of whatever is coming.

Man 2: Ninety percent of Nigeria comes from oil but we are benefiting nothing of it. We are being marginalised. There is no jobs. Look at us. No jobs. No nothing.

One of the men was Alhaji Dokubo Agari the president of the Ijaw tribe’s youth council. It boasts 200,000 members . He took me on a whistlestop tour of the town.

PTC: These are people's houses, right here. And that's basically a flow of defecation right across … below all of the houses and what seem to be outhouses and it's just total sewerage all across the area right across to the lake.

 

ELIJIH INTERVIEW

Elijih: We're running out of space because the wealthy people, the people working for the oil companies are living up there and the rent is so high. This is the only place the poor people can afford.

Kyle: And they're still building houses over here.

Elijih: Yes, they are building. All of this is foundations.

Kyle: These are foundations:

Elijih: Yes. This is somebody's house.

Government spending on health and education have fallen as a proportion of spending.

A promised campaign against corruption is making little headway.

The Ijaw tribe’s politicians want independence for themselves and other tribes.

MORE ELIJIH INTERVIEW

Elijih: There are no Nigerians! We have Ijaw people. We have Effy people. We have Yorubas. We have Hausas. We're different nationalities. So we cannot make a constitution for ourselves. For non-existent people. There is nobody called Nigerians. We are different nations that were brought together, tinkered together by British colonialists. We want Nigeria to disintegrate. Nigeria is a false creation. It's not natural. It should disintegrate naturally like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Republic.

I found his words chilling. Thirty years Nigeria had a civil war when the eastern oil region broke away to form the short-lived state of Biafra. A million people died.

Driving to Kano

Ethnic division and poverty make for an incendiary mix. But there’s an additional component.

PTC:

We're going up this road into West Africa's oldest city, Kano. It's in the North of Nigeria where, I'm told, people tie their identities more closely to religion.

The southern tribes are mainly Christian. In the north they’re muslim.

Kano is close to the worst of the recent violence. It’s a Muslim city that two years ago defied the federal government and adopted strict Islamic law, or sharia. Theft is punished with amputation. Sex outside of marriage with stoning. Sharia law has now swept across the north of the country.

 

At daybreak I set off to see the man who runs the Hezb, the Sharia police.

X said muslims had decided it was time to go their own way.

Kyle; How do you monitor people's respect for Sharia Law?

Abubakah: This is your last solace. In as much in Nigeria, there are no social amenities in Nigeria. There is absolute poverty in Nigeria. There is no security in Nigeria. We have been suffering. What will be our solace? Unless somebody be close to his lord, his creator, that is what we have been trying to awaken people to understand because it is only when they understand that the Sharia is their solace in this world and in the hereafter then they will be a little bit happy. But if you take the material point of Nigeria being a no go area, you see nothing special in Nigeria, believe you me. Nothing special in Nigeria.

 

 

I was taken to a secret location.

 

(I’d arranged to meet a condemned woman, sentenced to death by an Islamic court for having sex outside of marriage. )

 

Amina Lawal is in hiding.

Her lawyer watched anxiously.

 

Once Amina has weaned her baby, the state government want her buried up to her neck in the ground and stoned to death.

 

The sentence is illegal under the country’s constitution.

 

Even before the violence, some of the Miss World contestants had dropped out in protest at Amina’s plight.

(Her case has put the Muslim north on a collision course with the central government.)

 

Kyle:I'm very sorry to ask this question because I realise it's extremely sensitive but how do you feel about the fact that you're baby is ultimately going to be punished by this judgement if, indeed, she is left without a mother?

Amina: [Speaking in Hausa]

Kyle: This is hard to translate. She says, if they decide to kill me, she says, let me just look at my baby one more time to appreciate herall over again.

Amina: [Speaking in Hausa]

Kyle: She hopes that everyone will stand by her and pray for her so that God will answer their prayers and save her life and save the life of her child.

Amina doesn’t know whether she’ll live or die.

If the central government stops the sentence from being carried out, they risk a major clash with the Islamic north.

And a further slide towards the dissolution of Nigeria.

 

Driving

Sharia law doesn’t apply to Christians. But tension between Muslims and Christians has risen since it was implemented.

 

Thousands of people have been killed in religious violence.

Last week’s rioting isn’t unique. A year ago Zango was a thriving Christian village on the outskirts of Kano. When the Americans started to bomb Afghanistan a mob of angry young muslims arrived.

 

 

PTC: This is an area that looks like it's been burned down to the ground. These people are the survivors in a place where there's no longer the church, which used to be over there. All the other houses down at the end of here have been burned to the ground. These are perhaps a small percentage of the people who used to live around here.

INTRODUCTION TO PASTORS

Kyle: I'm Kyle. Good to meet you. Hi, I'm Kyle.

It was a desolate spot, but some baptist clergymen were waiting to meet me.

So we have pastors all around. I feel like I'm in safe hands now.

CHURCH WALK AROUND

They showed me the ruins of a church where six people had died.

Kyle: Was this … ? These are the new pillars then? This is what you were trying to build up?

Pastor: Yes, these are the new pillars. That was after the riot. The churches were all burned down…

They’d tried to rebuild but the authorities had stopped them.

Kyle: So this looks like it was stopped in mid-building then? You were in the middle of it and then stopped. Why is that?

Pastor: There was a problem going on between us and the people of the land. They told us not to build at all.

To reinforce the point, local officials had sprayed the church walls with orders stopping all building.

The pastors told me we were being watched.

Pastor: One of them is that man there in the blue kaftan with the white cap. He is one of the informants.

Kyle: So he's watching you.

Pastor: He's watching this very church.

Scores of people had died here. The violence was exacerbated by tribal differences. Most muslims here are hausas, most Christians, Ibos.

 

ACTUALITY: [Motorbike sound]

 

Suddenly I heard the sound of motorbikes.

PTC: And now we're seeing that a bunch of people from the Muslim community are actually coming to threaten the pastor. As soon as we came here, we've drawn attention to the fact that …

[Natsound: [Interruption from pastor advising us to stop filming]:

PTC: We're going to have to stop filming. The people from the Muslim community are telling us … they're threatening us and the pastor and their telling us to move on right now.

Natsound; [Argument as camera points to the ground].

We couldn’t film openly. But a crowd gathered and the argument between Christians and muslims became angrier and angrier. Eventually the police arrived.

It was five hours before we returned to our hotel

PTC: The police took us away but then they interrogated us for a while, took us to four different police stations before finally letting us go. I don't know what to make of all this. Spies, vigilantes, near riots on two different occasions. Kano is such a constant state of tension and you never know when it's all going to blow.

Lose Car? Is there a better buffer?

 

PTC:

I'm on my way to see the man in charge of policing Sharia, the Deputy Governor of Kano.

MEETING THE GOVERNOR

[Hausa greeting]

X is the architect of Sharia law in Kano.

Kyle: Now Sharia law was implemented a couple of years ago. Since then there has been quite a bit of violence between Christians and Muslims. Do you not feel responsible for that at all?

Dep Gov: Well, I think it is an issue of misunderstanding on both sides. Even from the Muslim side you find some youth, you know, who are exuberant, who are over zealous about it but it's a matter of time, you see. As time goes on there will be full understanding and people will continue to stay together peacefully.

Kyle: A lot of the churches that have been burned down have been stamped with signs saying Stop rebuilding. The department for the environment prohibits them from continuing with any rebuilding at all

Dep Gov: What happens is that before you erect a building, whether a mosque or a church, you need to get an approved building plan, so you find that some people go and build without getting the town planning to approve the building plan that will go against the master plan of the city or the planning regulation of the city.

 

Christians here don’t accept that planning regulations are why they can’t rebuild their churches. They fear that they’re about to be driven out of the city. That Nigeria’s muslim north and christian south are heading for civil war.

This church is run by the chairman of Nigeria’s Christian Churches association.

Mindful of our camera Joseph Fadipe called for the forgiveness of muslim rioters.

Fadipe: The topic for consideration this morning is Forgiveness. God's way for progress. We don't care what is happened to the Muslims. We have developed a hatred sprit against them that, left to us, they should all go to Hell. But is that what God wants … ?

Unless something changes Joseph Fadipe is pessimistic that muslim and Christian can carry on living together.

He took me to a nearby street where scores of Christians had been killed.

Fadipe: I know of one man who eventually ended up becoming insane. They carried him home. Because he felt he had been here for forty years and he lost everything he has gained in the forty years. They killed the wife and the children in his own presence.

Christians have now fled this area.

Fadipe: Okay. This is the church. They're not around. You see Stop Kaseppa.

On the walls the familiar order that the churches are not to be rebuilt.

Football

The children know all the latest premiership scores.

But our modern westernised world is passing Nigeria by.

They’re too good for me

In turning to their tribes and religions Nigerians are doing what countless other poor people are doing across the globe : searching out new identities that offer a sense of belonging in an indifferent world.

That’s why as the 21st century begins, so many countries face unrest, revolt, and civil war.

ENDS