Jos: Not as you think

“You’re going to Jos? God forbid,” Jeff said, shock showing on his usually calm face. “God has not forbidden this. I have been transferred to Jos and I’m going.” Med told his friend. “God! Jos of all places. Why did they do this to you? Why would they take you to Jos?” Jeff asked. Lamely, […]

“You’re going to Jos? God forbid,” Jeff said, shock showing on his usually calm face.

“God has not forbidden this. I have been transferred to Jos and I’m going.” Med told his friend.

“God! Jos of all places. Why did they do this to you? Why would they take you to Jos?” Jeff asked.

Lamely, Med replied, “It’s the decision my office has made. They have the right to move me anywhere they so choose.”

Med had many worried friends and relations to handle. They worried over each mention of his transfer from his company’s head office in Ilorin to Jos.

One particularly uncharitable friend told him: “So, you are going to Jos. I hope you know that I won’t come to see you. I won’t be visiting you. I like my life.”

A sister of his, after chewing on the news of his transfer and feeling a need to encourage him, said, “I’m not comfortable about this transfer at all, but God will keep you from all the troubles. And I will keep praying that your office does not keep you there for long.”

UNPLEASANT IMAGE

The perception of Jos, the Plateau State capital, by people living outside the state is not a pleasant one. Repeated communal conflicts which first occurred in 1994 and have continued since then have intensified such impression in the minds of ‘outsiders’ who have frequently been fed exaggerated accounts of such conflicts.

The state which was once known for its hospitality, peaceful atmosphere, a friendly tic condition and rich cultural heritage has over the last decade become known for deep rooted ethnic rivalry, religious prejudice and internecine violence which have in turn caused segregated living patterned along religious lines. Indeed, it has largely been about subsisting across boundary lines where Muslims now live mainly only among Muslims and Christians among only Christians.

This order of clannish living paints a gruesome picture especially for an outsider visiting the state. Even the people living in neighbouring Bauchi and Nasarawa states as well as Abuja are always apprehensive when a relative says he or she is travelling to Jos or just passing through. This fear is fuelled by recent instances when some commuters passing through the city have been caught up in cross fires.

And the fear of such a possibility is ever present in the consciousness of people who experienced or heard stories of such mishaps. Less than two months back, on August 21, security agencies in Plateau State had to issue rebuttals of a rumour which made the rounds via telephone messages speaking of attacks on travellers around the Hawan Kibo stretch of the Jos to Abuja highway.

Even Bauchi State which shares a boundary with Plateau at a point no more than five minutes’ drive from the northern tip of Jos and which should know Jos better has an exaggerated view of Jos and is afraid of it. Many cases attest to this.

Mohammed Saleh, a Bauchi resident whose sister is schooling in Jos says if not for her persistence to graduate, he would have moved her to Bauchi State.

“We are always telling her to be careful but anytime something happens and we call her, she tells me the town is calm but I always wonder how the town can be calm when there is crisis here and there,” Saleh told Sunday Trust.

He admitted however that by his discovery, those living outside Jos city are more frightened of the violence often reported than those living in the city. He attributed this to the mass media.

He explained: “It is the media that paints a negative picture of Jos, some of them amplify the issues in the city and for some of us who depend on the media to know what is happening, we immediately become paranoid.”

JOS AS IT IS

For Hauwa Idris who works in Abuja but whose parents live in Jos, bad news about Jos spread through non-residents of the city who rely on information from people who cast Jos in terrible images. Hauwa who said she was born and lived in Jos until recently, explained, “My friends think Jos is Nigeria’s Iraq where you hear gunshots and see armoured tanks everywhere. In fact, some people just believe that the entire city is burning and when you say you want to go home they look at you as if you are mad.”

Hauwa said she has on several occasions tried to convince other people who have never visited the city or not visited it in a long time that the city is not in a shambles and that people are going about their businesses just as in other places.

“It is just unfortunate that some people passing through the city on their way to other places have been attacked. And of course relatives of the victims will have a bad memory of the city. How can you then start to explain to them that it is not so? They will never understand,” Hauwa says.

Steven Pam who lives in the city expressed his own views this way: “It is true that we in the city try to be careful about certain areas since the Jos crisis has been persistent, but the media only talks about Jos during crisis situations. That is why those living outside the city think the situation here is out of control. But I tell them to come and see for themselves, it is not as the media portrays it.”

He described how drawn-out ‘facts’ about Jos go out: “During crisis situations, people see empty streets on the television and what comes to their mind is that the city is a ghost town. What they wouldn’t know is that it is usually only a few affected streets that are shown. They would not know that at almost every crisis, streets exist right within the town where people only hear or see signs of the crisis on television the way people in other pats of the world see or hear it.”

Pam clarified that with few exceptions of crisis periods, the people of Jos live a happy and fulfilled life despite the security challenges. He added: “People still get married in Jos and live happily; we still go partying and clubbing, so our social life is still very active.”

And social life in Jos is active. Certain places have been devoid of the bubbling that was hitherto their hallmark by the relocations from places where people feel their families were not so safe to places they sense better rest of mind. But by so doing, people have only shifted their social lives to their new places of abode. So, social life zones have basically only closed here and opened there.

Perhaps more than any other aspect of life, though, business has kept Jos residents together. A resident and observer, driving through Terminus, the commercial heartbeat of Jos, commented, “Terminus is the unifier. This is the Jos that brings all of Jos together, whatever happens. When people have expressed their madness elsewhere, they come here to do business together.”

In August when the Plateau City Renewal Taskforce started a demolition exercise which significantly affected the Railway Market, an extension of Terminus, a trader whose makeshift stall was shattered complained, “This is one market where you come and forget that you are in Jos. This is a place that brings all tribes, all religions, and all socio-economic classes together. Now, government which ought to be preserving it has chosen to destroy it.”

TERMINUS BRINGS us ALL TOGETHER

Indeed, Terminus, the nucleus of Jos city, brings the huge neighbouring Hausa community comprising Gangare, Nasarawa Gwong, Rikkos, Anguwan Rogo, the extensive Bauchi Road axis, and other parts of the community out of their clannish dwellings for transactions with the rest of the world. It is Terminus that attracts Igbo residents from their communities around the city for what they do so well: trading. It is Terminus that brings out the minority Christian tribes around West of Mines/Ibrahim Dasuki/Stadium axis, Tudun Wada, Genta Adamu, and so on into a place so gregariously shared but which the rest of the world thinks is perpetually fighting itself.

The pattern is similar in smaller settlements. The Katako Market brings together the Hausa-Muslim Laranto community with the Igbo community in neighbouring Akpata. They share an intriguing division of labour: while the Igbo traders sell the wood (Katako in Hausa), Hausa artisans put their machines to work and cut the wood into value-added pieces for furniture making and other desired uses.

Arch. Umar Audu, a Laranto non-Hausa Muslim resident, reacting to the question from a visitor observing how only a trickle of Igbo wood traders mingle freely among their Hausa counterparts, explained how the Katako Market men deal with crisis situations: “The Katako market people know how to protect one another. Now and in times of crisis, the Hausa artisans in Katako and the rest of the Laranto Market have their ways of protecting the Igbo men among them. No Igbo man has ever been hurt in Katako market any time in the past.”

The significance of the unifying role that the Laranto Market plays in Jos lies in this fact: although Laranto was a fairly mixed community with many Igbo families living in houses they built by themselves, outbursts of violence gradually made the Igbo families pull out, most of them selling their houses, to join their Igbo kindned in nearby Akpata and some other parts of the municipality.

WHERE CHURCHES & MOSQUES STILL STAND SIDE BY SIDE

Places of worship have been the most affected by the unrests that have characterised Jos-Bukuru intermittently along the past decade. Unlike them when mosques and churches existed side by side in most parts of the city, many Churches in places dominated by Muslims have been destroyed while many Mosques in Christian-dominated places have similarly been ruined.

But some Churches and Christian establishments still exist in ‘odd’ places, while some Mosques and Muslim establishments also remain in places they, in view of the crises under reference, would not be expected.

The Muslim-dominated part of Laranto just mentioned, for example, is home to St Augustine’s Major Seminary, a large complex for constant Christian programmes. Someone once remarked that if not because some reasoning still prevails against sometimes inexplicable violent eruptions, enough Muslim youths exist in Laranto to overrun the monastery however closely guarded by security forces it gets. And the seminary is rarely ever guarded by any noticeable armed men except the usual guards to be seen in establishments of its kind in Nigeria.

And in the midst of the sprawling Muslim-dominated Kwararafa Cinema neighbourhood, a shouting distance from the Jos Central Mosque, is Assemblies of God Church, which a curious visitor was surprised still houses Christian worshippers on Sunday, and on days of special worship programmes.

On Adebayo Street, a threshold of the expansive Hausa-Muslim Community of Jos North, a little way north of bustling Terminus is the First African Church Mission next to which is a Muslim facility, the Nakande House, where the Darikatul Tijjaniyya Sect regularly holds their Wazifa.

On a fork of the same Adebayo Street further down the Hausa community with increased presence of Yoruba-speaking residents, a stretch tipping over an adjacent Pump Street where a mosque, Nurudeen Society of Nigeria, and a branch of First Baptist Church, stand one next to the other.

Jos leader of the Tijjaniya Sect and head of the Nakande family, Khalifa Uba Salihu Nakande, explained that the sect and next-door First African Church Mission had been harmonious neighbours for decades. He said, “Jos has had many crises which have taken up religious connotations over the past decade but nobody has ever even attempted to touch that church and it is not likely that anyone will ever touch it.”

Alhaji Sani Mudi, spokesman of the Jos Muslim Community, told Sunday Trust that Jos Muslims are a misunderstood people. He said, “I would say that the Muslim Community here, especially those around Jos city, have been badly misunderstood. Especially when this indigene and non-indigene question comes up, we are seen by many as people who have come to take other people’s land. When you talk about religion, we are seen as people with a Jihadist agenda, especially because places of worship get destroyed in times of crisis. There is no truth in any of these things. If churches and mosques get burnt during crisis, it is because perceived enemies associate one another with their respective religions and these places of worship become the valued possession that are readily available for destruction.”

He said tolerance level between Muslims and Christians in Jos has been better than ever appreciated. He explained: “Although we hardly tend to recognize it because it is less obvious when what seems to be a general dislocation in relationship flares up, but Muslims shield Christians and Christians shield Muslims during every crisis, depending on who is in the right position to shield who in particular places. A lot of goodwill flows among people of the different faiths even in the midst of the worst crises that we’ve experienced.”

THE GENESIS

How in the first place did Jos come to be polarized between Christians and Muslims? Is it really a religious crisis? A lot of times, the whole story can be confusing. It wears several garbs: ethnic, religious, political, economic. Whichever way it starts, it often quickly becomes religious. This is why those who insist the crisis is not religious usually have a hard time proving their point.

September 7, 2001 was the day Jos lost its innocence as a peaceful town. The crisis was essentially the height of ethnic struggle for the control of Jos North Local Government Area, the star council area of Plateau State in view of its political and economic position. The crisis lasted much of three days, taking a religious turn and causing clossal human casualties on both sides of the divide.

Unrests shifted from Jos to the southern part of the state not long afterwards, peaking in 2004 with the Yelwa-Shendam uprising that ended with a state of emergency imposed on Plateau by the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency.

Jos went on the boil again in 2008 when an election to pick a chairman for the controversial Jos North Local Government Council raised ethno-religious dust that got bloody. And on Sunday January 17, 2010, a misunderstanding over a deserted building being renovated in the Dutse Uku area of Jos North snowballed into a riotous face-off, once again causing destruction on religious fronts around the state capital, Jos.

In March of the same year, in an incident believed to be an offshoot of the Dutse Uku uproar, villages in Dogo Nahauwa, Jos South, a close neighbourhood to Jos North, were overrun by attackers who, wielding guns and other deadly weapons, snuffed the life out of several inhabitants.

So, beside the conflicts in Jos metropolis, there have been violence also in the neighbouring local government areas, Barkin-Ladi and Riyom, which are as close to the Tin City.

So, prevailing attacks close to Jos, particularly in Barkin-Ladi and Riyom, which further give the city a bad name peaked nearly three months ago, when scores of people lost their lives, including two lawmakers of the federal and state legislators, Dr Gyang Dantong who until July 8 was representing Plateau North Senatorial Zone in the Senate where he was chairman of the Health Committee; and Hon Gyang Fulani who, till the fateful July 8, was representing Barkin-Ladi in the Plateau State House of Assembly where he was the majority leader.

The Tin City itself would possibly have been celebrating a fairly long period of peace today but for the advent of the sect infamously known as Boko Haram. Attacks attributed to members of the sect rocked Jos three times within this year; first on February 26 when a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into the Church of Christ in Nigeria (COCIN) headquarters, killing two people and wounding 38, leading to a reprisal that claimed at least two lives; then on March 11 when another suspected suicide bomber attacked the St Finbarrs Catholic Church in the Rayfield area, causing the death of people eventually estimated to be 11 in number and rousing a reprisal that took the life of at least 10 persons; and then June 10 when a suicide bomber drove to the entrance of the Christ Chosen Church on Rukuba Road, blasted himself and wounded worshippers just coming out of church and leading to a counterattack said to have caused the death of no less than two persons.

All these incidents strengthen the reputation of Jos as a volatile city, and because the stories are garnished as they pass rounds from sundry sources, the final picture it forms in the minds of non-residents are of a municipality that is so inhabitable that it ought to be avoided by all means.

PEACE NOW REIGNS

Jos is however currently enjoying peace and the security agents working under the Special Task Force (STF) to quell uprising and keep peace are beginning to find little to do. The flashpoints remain Bakin-Ladi and Riyom villages where three isolated cases of attacks have been reported since July.

But reconciliation meetings are being held, including a stakeholders meeting in Barkin-Ladi which the STF organized September 24, bringing together community, religious and youth leaders from seven local government areas of Plateau and two from neighbouring Bauchi State.

The Plateau State Command of the Nigeria Police has similarly been organizing stakeholders meetings to reconcile especially the Berom and Fulani communities of the Riyom and Barkin-Ladi local government areas who have remained hostile towards each other for quite a while.

Religious leaders have similarly been active in efforts to bring back the peace. Catholic Archbishop of Jos, Ignatius Kaigama, who has been in the forefront currently has a peacemaking collaborator in the Chief Imam of Jos, Sheikh Balarabe Dawud with whom the archbishop has met at the Central Mosque in Jos a number of times in the last couple of months.

The Plateau State Government has made moves in its own way to douse tension. It has organised series of stakeholders meeting usually attended by religious, traditional, political and opinion leaders at its usual venue in the Government House located in Rayfield. Such meetings frequently come up especially when a violent conflict has just occurred and a way out is sought.

Governor Jonah Jang surprised many when he visited a camp in Rikkos, Jos North, for internally displaced persons shortly after the flooding that affected Rikkos and some other Hausa-dominated residential areas of Jos North in July. Against the background of a governor who had not visited any Hausa-dominated community in Jos North for a long while, that visit surprised observers of the government-Hausa community relationship. While he surprised many by that visit of July 26, his hosts surprised many too with their open appreciation of the governor that many expected the crowd to view with indifference.

Peace is now reigning in the city. And at present residents could heave a sigh of relief. Even the Plateau North Senatorial election that was held last Saturday, October 6, witnessed not as much as a heated verbal conflict anywhere in the six local government areas comprising the senatorial zone and where the election held, namely Barkin-Ladi, Bassa, Jos East, Jos North, Jos South, and Riyom.

As the election was being held and speaking in his Ali Kazaure Ward of Jos North, Gyang Pwajok, the candidate who eventually won the election, described the election atmosphere in these words: “This Senatorial Zone was known for peace until the security challenges that we have experienced in the last few years. But we have had peace for a while and the countdown to this election has been peaceful and a lot of maturity has characterized the process. It shows that we are indeed returning to the peace that we were known for.”