Political decentralisation and conflict: The Sharia crisis in Kaduna, Nigeria

Abstract

When states in northern Nigeria started processes for implementing Sharia laws in 1999, it triggered sentiments all over the country. In Kaduna State, the proposal led to demonstrations and violent clashes. The article examines the ways in which different scales of politics are mutually constituted in the Sharia case and how the Sharia proposal subsequently resulted in clashes in Kaduna. It is argued that the Sharia initiative, even though it started as a sub-national question, was connected to a national power contestation. However, the federal government remained passive and diverted the issue to local political space. In Kaduna, the issue took dimensions that incurred with apprehensive local political contention that made it escalate into violence and polarising people according to religion. An analysis of the crisis in Kaduna is offered that does not regard the conflict as locally confined, but as inherently related to wider political and historical processes.

Keywords:

• conflict
• decentralisation
• ethnicity
• Nigeria
• religion
• Sharia

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Lars Lindström, Rickard Lalander, Björn Beckman and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. A travel grant by the Nordic Africa Institute is also acknowledged.

Notes

1. However, in May 2010, former deputy governor Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, a Christian from southern Kaduna, became governor in a chain reaction to the death of former president Yar'Adua, as the new president, Jonathan, chose the Kaduna State governor, Namadi Sambo, to succeed him as vice-president.

2. Gadani (Gadani, Mark Jacob. Press relations officer, Southern Kaduna People's Union. 2008. Interview by Henrik Angerbrandt. February 23 Kaduna): ‘SOKAPU intends to unite the 53 minority tribes … We try to bring the different tribes in southern Kaduna to understand that we have a common plight, and we must think and reason together to better our future. We feel marginalised, deprived of so many things; our rights and privileges are being trampled upon, by those who are in privilege in government. We also know that we constitute the workforce of the state, and yet we are marginalised’.

3. Likewise, there is said to be a general perception of associating south-west (with a majority of Yoruba) with the state bureaucracy and south-east (with a majority of Igbo) with commerce (see Mustapha 2004, 265–6).

4. However, this did not seem to be an issue two years later when the federal government approached the Supreme Court for a ruling on the so-called ‘derivation principle’, which states that at least 13% of revenue from natural resources shall go to the state of origin, to be applied only to onshore resources, and not to resources offshore (Suberu 2008, 451–85). But that, of course, relates to the category of fiscal, rather than political, decentralisation.