Nigeria

Falling out, but not yet apart

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IN THE “home of peace and tourism”, as Nigeria's Plateau state is officially known, fighting between Christians and Muslims has grown so heated that President Olusegun Obasanjo this week declared a state of emergency there. In recent weeks, hundreds of people have died.

Plateau, a mainly Christian state in central Nigeria, has traditionally been calm. So calm, in fact, that refugees from communal fighting elsewhere in Nigeria often sought sanctuary there. In September 2001, however, fighting broke out in the state capital, Jos, between indigenous Christians and newly-arrived Muslims. Perhaps 1,000 people were killed.

This year, the violence flared up again. Earlier this month, Christian militias slaughtered and looted in the town of Yelwa, erecting road blocks to keep out any police who might have stopped them. The police showed little inclination to try. The killings sparked revenge killings: Muslims in the northern city of Kano sought to avenge their fellow Muslims' deaths by killing Christians.

Until this week, President Obasanjo remained oddly silent, not even sending his condolences to the families of the dead. Then, on May 18th, he appeared on television to announce that since Plateau's governor and state assembly were incapable of keeping order, he was dismissing them. A Nigerian newspaper called it the “single most dramatic act” of his five-year rule.

But was it wise? Clearly, Mr Obasanjo is rattled. He fears that the fighting, if not scotched, could spread further. His new appointee as governor of Plateau, Chris Alli, warned that if people did not learn tolerance, Nigeria might end up like Rwanda. That is unduly alarmist, but many local politicians do indeed inflame ethnic grievances to win support. Also, last month, the government claimed to have unearthed a serious “breach of national security”—a polite term for a coup plot—reportedly involving Muslim army officers.

In a country with such fresh memories of military rule, the sight of Mr Obasanjo, a former general, ousting elected politicians by decree worries many. “Dictatorship has been restored,” said Femi Falana, a human-rights lawyer. Others view the move as a sign of weakness. Mr Obasanjo, a Christian, is prepared to invoke emergency powers in a majority-Christian state and to oust a governor from his own party. But he dares not do the same in equally violent majority-Muslim states, for fear of provoking a backlash among Muslims claiming that a Christian president is persecuting them.

So far, Mr Obasanjo has given no clues as to what, concretely, he plans to do with his new emergency powers. Failure to halt the mayhem could be disastrous. But predictions that Nigeria is about to fall apart are implausible. The country hung together despite a civil war in the late 1960s in which a million people died, so it can doubtless hang roughly together now.