The Nigerian government must take the lead in ending discrimination against millions of “non-indigenes” — citizens who cannot show that their family roots are native to the community in which they live — in part to better secure the country’s increasingly fragile unity, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released here Tuesday.
The 64-page report, “‘They Do Not Own This Place’: Government Discrimination Against ‘Non-Indigenes’ in Nigeria”, charges that the legal division between “host” and “settler” communities — originally designed to preserve the traditions and cultural identity of most of Nigeria’s more than 250 ethnic groups — has fed a growing sense of tension and conflict in many parts of the country.
Such policies have contributed to communal and religious conflict that has taken more than 10,000 lives and uprooted tens of thousands more since the end of military rule in 1999, including scores killed in February in violence precipitated by protests against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper.
“These politics marginalise millions of Nigerians and fuel the fires of ethnic and religious violence,” said Peter Takirambudde, director of HRW’s Africa division. “The federal government must end its shameful record of indifference by acting decisively to eradicate this discrimination.”
Nigeria’s unity and stability have become a growing concern in many world capitals, given its status as Africa’s most populous nation, biggest contributor to regional peace-keeping forces, and top oil exporter, particularly at a time of record-high global oil prices.
While much of that concern is focused on the perennial tensions between Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups — the Igbo, the Yoruba, and the Hausa-Fulani — and on the unrest among smaller groups in the oil-rich Niger Delta, the new report maintains that discriminatory policies are pervasive throughout the country.
Indeed, the population of every state and local government in Nigeria is officially divided into two categories: indigenes, who can trace their ethnic and genealogical roots back to the community of people who are believed to have originally settled there, and those who cannot.
According to the report, the policy was originally designed to preserve the unique identities — including culture, traditions, and institutions of governance — of smaller groups within a nation of more than 130 million people.
But this goal, according to the report, “has been twisted beyond recognition by state and local policies, often unsupported by any law or other form of legal justification, that marginalise and exclude non-indigenes in ways that have nothing to do with the preservation of cultural identity and autonomy.”
These policies include denying non-indigenes access to civil-service jobs, lower tuition fees at universities, or academic scholarships. In some cases, non-indigene civil servants have been purged en masse from their government posts in order to create more jobs for indigenes.
They are also subject to less formal discriminatory practices, such as barriers to political participation and discrimination in the provision of basic services and infrastructure to their communities, according to the HRW report.
“Discriminatory indigeneity policies often reflect a truly cynical set of political calculations,” said Takirambudde. “Many Nigerian politicians are simply trying to curry favour with their indigene constituents by excluding non-indigenes from scarce opportunities that should be available to all.”
HRW researchers, who last fall visited four states — Kaduna, Kano, Plateau and Delta — where communal violence has been particularly deadly, found that local officials were often openly contemptuous of the problems faced by their non-indigene constituents.
As one young non-indigene in Kaduna state told HRW, “You are completely disqualified from everything.”
The result is a second-class status for non-indigenes who theoretically could, however, gain equal status only in those parts of the country to which they supposedly belonged.
But for the growing number of Nigerians who are unable to prove that they are indigenes of any place at all — for example, for individuals whose forbears have moved to their current place of residence during colonial times — second-class citizenship is a permanent status.
“A Nigerian who cannot prove that he is an indigene of somewhere by producing a ‘certificate of indigeneity’ is discriminated against in every state of the federation and is barred from many opportunities at the federal level as well,” according to the report.
As one elderly Hasua resident in southern Kaduna told HRW, “We feel dissatisfied and unhappy when people tell us that we are not of this place. We have been here for over 200 years. Our parents were born here and we ourselves were born here. We know no other place other than here and so we have nowhere else to go.”
In addition to their direct impact on the lives of non-indigenes, indigeneity policies have worked to worsen inter-communal tensions around the country, whose economic fortunes have plunged since the early 1980s.
“As poverty and unemployment have both become more widespread and more severe in Nigeria, competition for scarce opportunities to secure government jobs, higher education and political patronage has intensified dramatically,” according to the report, which quotes the secretary-general of Nigeria’s Catholic Secretariat: “Poverty in Nigeria has assumed the moral character of war, and this what you see reflected in much of the ethnic violence in this country.”
In some places, including Jos and Yelwa in Plateau state, ethnic conflict has erupted because groups have disagreed over who is entitled to claim indigene status in any given area. In Kaduna, local officials fueled Christian-Muslim tensions by denying certificates of indigeneity to people who do not share their religion.
President Olesegun Obasanjo has publicly denounced indigene policies, according to the report, but the federal government has consistently failed to put forward legislation that would ban the most harmful practices.
In its report, HRW calls for legislation that would outlaw government discrimination against non-indigenes in all matters that are not purely cultural or related to traditional political institutions.
Source: Inter Press Service