After hundreds were slaughtered there in January, army presence was stepped up heavily in Jos, the capital city of Plateau State, in north-central Nigeria. The security forces, however, were nowhere near the outlying village cluster of Dagan-Na-Hauwa when, over four long hours, hundreds were hacked to death on the morning of Sunday, 7th March. Jos has been the scene of mass violence in 2001, 2008, and now twice this year. The multi-ethnic former colonial mining city lies on Nigeria’s roughly Northern-Southern, Muslim-Christian divide, and the sporadic killings have been put down to ongoing feuds between the heavily segregated religious communities of Jos. The facts, however, do not fit so simple an explanation, and these periodic murderous riots and rampages are in fact a disturbing manifestation of some of Nigeria’s deepest-rooted problems, both cultural and systemic.
On 17th January, protests at the building of a mosque in a Christian area of Jos sparked off four days’ intense fighting. Mobs set aflame mosques, churches and over a thousand houses, shops and vehicles. Of the 492 who were burned, hacked or shot to death, 364 were Muslims. Among them were all 150 inhabitants of one Muslim village. Less than two months later, at 4am on 7th March, machete-wielding gangs descended on the Christian and Animist Berom community of Dagan-Na-Hauwa. They set fire to homes, used fishnets and animal traps to catch fleeing villagers and killed between 100 and 500 people. This recent slaughter has been seen as a reprisal by Muslim Hausa-Fulani herdsmen for January’s violence, but the tribe’s expansionist agenda and aggressive protection of their grazing rights have been mentioned as possible motivations. In reality, though, these two motivations are examples of the same kind of inter-ethnic power struggles which have fuelled violence in the area, and indeed throughout the country, for decades.
Tribal and village loyalties come before nationality for most Nigerians - a policeman might conspicuously fail to notice crimes committed by a kinsman, or a civil servant might promote someone from his own village over someone more qualified. While this is in no way true in most cases, it has generally been a problem in Nigeria that collective, community-based thought and action is invested not in Federal or even State government, but in tribe and village. At best, this is nothing more sinister than friendly parochial-style rivalry, but at worst it manifests itself in mass murder. Nigerian nationhood is tenuous; “Nigeria” as a word and as an entity being a more or less arbitrary creation of British imperial officials. The many groups living in this vast, rich swathe of land were ruled under imperialism as one, fought for independence as one, and have been ruled as one by military governments or a tiny political élite ever since. A complete lack of common language, identity, religion or perceived interests have stunted any effort to make a united nation of this geographical expression and have fuelled the kind of violence that has plagued Jos.
In such a context we can understand, when we consider that the Muslim Hausa-Fulani are Nigeria’s largest ethnic group, making up 30% of the population, why accusations of complicity in the recent massacres have been directed at people in high public offices. Plateau State’s governor, Jonah Jong, a Christian, was informed of the likelihood of violence as early as 9am on Saturday 6th. He passed word on to security chiefs, who failed to respond until 2.30pm on Sunday 7th - when the murderers had long since escaped after a massacre lasting four hours. The National Security Advisor has been replaced, security forces are clamping down heavily on the area and dozens of arrests and charges have been made, but more boots on the ground in and around Jos will not uproot the causes of the violence.
Protests of crowds of women in Jos and Lagos on 12th March illustrated the ethnically divided nature of Nigerian politics, as they demanded that the Northern Muslim oligarchy end their encouragement of the aggressive expansion of the Hausa-Fulani around Jos. The Hausa-Fulani are seen as “settlers” and “invaders” in Jos, despite a presence going back decades. However, they have done little to encourage integration, clustering away from the locals while expanding, often violently, outside this zone. Like the Igbo and the Yoruba, Nigeria’s other major tribes, they speak a language unintelligible to others. With rapid urbanisation as the 20th century drew to a close, such strong cultural differences became a catalyst for violence in many Nigerian cities, and today in Jos the Hausa-Fulani are expanding their power. Because “settlers” are treated as effective second-class citizens by local and state government, the Hausa-Fulani must rely on high tribal connections in the Federal establishment. These powerful Muslims identify with the Hausa-Fulani as kinsmen on a national level, and at the local level of Jos religion is an easy visual and cultural symbol for tribal affiliations. The killings therefore are a national, and not a local or a religious issue, and one which poses tough questions to Nigeria’s tribal-based politics and society.
The Most Rev. Dr. B. A. Kwashi, Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria stated, following the recent massacre, that: “In Jos we are coming face to face in a confrontation with Satan and the powers of hell.” This could easily be mistaken for part of an extreme anti-Islamic rant, but the Archbishop’s statement on the violence was more pertinent than that. He insists that religion is being used as a justification for a quest for money and power by mobs of unemployed, demoralised, hopeless young men. He believes that they are young men with no religion, no values whatsoever, made so by the hopelessness of their environment. Professor Kibiru Mata of the University of Abuja agrees. The government of Plateau State and the Federal government alike, he says, have failed to appropriate public resources in such a way as to alleviate suffering. He calls the killings “a manifestation of economic alienation”, the actions of a generation with no opportunities.
To understand why and how the Jos massacres happened, we should examine the economic realities of Nigeria today. Though the country is abundant in natural resources and production, is potentially self-sufficient and has a huge and young working population, most of its citizens live in poverty and squalor. Of the nation’s 154 million inhabitants, and of the hundreds of thousands who apply for third-level education, only 35-40,000 are accommodated in the country’s universities. 31% of Nigerians are completely illiterate. Hundreds of billions of dollars are owned by a tiny number of Nigerians and business-savvy foreigners for purposes of speculation and short-term profit, making the material basis for real progress impossible by squandering or looting the country’s potential wealth. The continuing deregulation of the oil sector is taking even more of the country’s natural wealth out of the hands of its citizens.
In this context, it is little surprise that some of the country’s tens of millions who are permanently unemployed, and the many more who are on precarious livelihoods, might resort to violence to defend what they see as their tribe’s interests, and by extension their own. The segregated and tense nature of society explains why such a small élite can seize and hold so much of the nation’s wealth with so little outcry. Struggle between rival groups, made up of the powerless and penniless, for political and economic advantage is seen as the only means of advancement. Since community consciousness goes no further than tribe or village, class-consciousness is practically nonexistent. Rival ethnic groups, victims of the same inequality, fight for the scarce resources left to them, encouraged and often given impunity by wealthier and more powerful members of their tribe. This is a battle fought at the cost of lives, most graphically illustrated by the rioting, violence and massacres that have periodically broken out in places like Jos.   
Dozens of suspects have been arrested by the time of writing, some with blood still staining their clothes. Charges have been made against many, heads in authority have metaphorically rolled and security forces are bolstering their presence around Jos. It must be recognised, however, that the occurrence of such hideous atrocities must be a sign of massive systemic and cultural problems. A suppression of the symptoms, assuming even that is achieved, will not address the root problems of inequality, disenchantment and militant ethnic division that have once more brought death and destruction to Jos.

Greece’s terrible public finances have not just been caused by its budgetary extravagance but credit-rating agencies have also been cited as triggers of its economic misfortune by having unhelpfully downgraded Greek government bonds. France and Germany have called for an investigation into the so-called “naked” trading of sovereign CDSs and some blame has been shifted onto the unprincipled speculators who had bet against bonds, helping to increase borrowing costs. One other problem for Greece has been the lack of a central Eurozone authority for helping out cash-strapped countries. Even worse for the nation, the ECB is going to tighten up its lending rules again after the deceleration of the global recession. The country will find it difficult to borrow if Moody’s Investors Service cuts Greece’s credit rating, meaning its government bonds would no longer be collateral at the central bank. The Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou recently designated €4.8 billion of additional deficit cuts in a bid to convince other European nations and investors he could regain control of the budget. The government aims to reduce its shortfall below the EU’s 3% of GDP limit by 2012. An “EMF” (European Monetary Fund) has been proposed to help deal with Greece’s problems and German Chancellor Merkel and Finance Minister Schäuble seem serious about the scheme. According to the Financial Times, some have accused them of using the idea to persuade German public opinion and “prepare a short-term fire brigade operation for Greece”. By the time an EMF could be set up, however, it would be irrelevant to Greece. The purpose of the fund now would be to ensure that a repeat of the Greek situation could be prevented in any other European nations in the future. A Greek official said to the FT on 10th March that: “Support from European partners is key in this kind of situation. An institutional format such as an EMF would be an advantage for us or any other small Eurozone country.”
When Schäuble brought up the idea of an EMF, he said it would act as a lender to Eurozone countries that could not raise funds in capital markets. It would not be a “competitor” to the IMF (based in Washington, DC) but it would try to regulate the fiscal policies of negligent member countries. Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank President, hinted that he might support the proposals and some ECB policymakers are supportive of the plans to strengthen the political effectiveness of Europe’s 11-year-old monetary union. The rules governing the operation of the single currency proscribe a bailout for a country on the brink of insolvency. Mr. Trichet has backed the idea that in extreme cases outside help should be provided. Greece is supportive of the proposal as a potential lifebelt to get it out of its debt crisis. There are no major policies to change the central bank’s workings, however, and Trichet said in a speech at Stanford recently that: “We view the pre-crisis operational framework as a very natural reference point for our phasing-out process.” The ECB has “relatively little reason to change fundamentally what has served our monetary policy well, both in normal and crisis times”. He also said that “we do not wish to breed dependency” and therefore “...a delayed exit from extraordinary liquidity support would distort market behaviour and misallocate credit”.
The European Commission has been using powers recently instated by the Lisbon treaty to establish more “budgetary surveillance” on the 16 participatory countries. More economic policy co-ordination between the nations is seen as an essential tactic in preventing a repeat of the Greek situation and European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Ollie Rehn said that: “The Greek case is a potential turning point for the Eurozone; if Greece fails and we fail, this will do serious and maybe permanent damage to the credibility of the European Union. The euro is not only a monetary arrangement, but a core political project of the European Union ... In that sense, we are at a crossroads.” A new single currency regime will be unveiled next month by Rehn of “rigorous surveillance of national budgets”. Also Eurostat is to be given new auditing powers over Eurozone member states.
Axel Weber, Bundesbank President, had warned that the proposals would be a distraction from attempts by countries such as Greece to bring their public sector deficits back under control and the French Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, said that it was not an “absolute priority” for the European Union. The idea would most likely be met with much resistance from elsewhere in Europe if it required changes to European Union treaties and Angela Merkel has acknowledged an EMF could not be set up without changes to the EU, which seems a daunting task. Other policymakers have argued that Europe would be better served by finding ways to work better with the IMF instead of setting up an entirely new institution because the ECB’s big worry is that an undertaking could undermine the effective implementation of the EU’s financial policies. Stephanie Flanders of the BBC believes that the economic problems afflicting the Eurozone PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are serious and that there are two big issues standing in the way of the liquidity solution. There is the problem, firstly, of diverging European competitiveness. It is essential that countries in trouble, such as Greece, try to restore their competitiveness and this can only be achieved with more balanced growth. Solvency is the other problem and many economists think that the floundering members of the Eurozone are going to come out of the process of restoration with unsustainable levels of public debt. A mechanism to effectively restructure sovereign debt is what is required and according to one American financial expert, Carmen Reinhart, “an organisation that could oversee orderly sovereign defaults in the Eurozone would fill a useful gap in the existing financial architecture...the Eurozone needs a crisis response mechanism for dealing with the likes of Greece.” It also needs “bold new policy initiatives”. This would help Eurozone countries expand, grow, and restore together.