Criminal Politics: Violence, “Godfathers” and Corruption in Nigeria

undertaken by Human Rights Watch and Johns Hopkins’ School for Advanced
International Studies, more than 11,000 Nigerians lost their lives in clashes along
political, ethnic, religious, and other lines between the handover of power to the
Obasanjo government and the end of 2006. 32 Nigeria’s National Commission for
Refugees has estimated that more than three million Nigerians were internally
displaced by this strife. 33
This devastation occurred in at least 481 separate incidents that varied considerably
in character and scale. 34 In the most notorious cases, outbreaks of ethnic or religious
violence claimed hundreds of lives in just a few short days—Human Rights Watch
documented several of these large-scale clashes in detail. 35 At the same time,
smaller-scale clashes have been so frequent as to reflect a regular feature of
Nigeria’s political landscape. All told, between May 1999 and December 2006 the
survey recorded incidents of intercommunal and political violence at the staggering
rate of one separate incident every five days. 36
Since 1999 Nigeria has also seen hundreds of intercommunal clashes that were not
overtly political in nature dividing Nigerians against one another along ethnic,
religious, or other intercommunal lines. 37 But in many of the worst cases it was
widely believed that ethnic and religious violence resulted at least partly from the
efforts of politicians and other elites to manipulate intercommunal tensions for their
own political gain. President Obasanjo himself frequently advanced this belief
during his tenure as president, stating on one occasion that many participants in
32 Peter Lewis and Chris Albin-Lackey, “Democracy and Violence in Nigeria” (working title); forthcoming.
33 “Violence Left 3 Million Bereft in Past 7 Years, Nigeria Reports,” Reuters, March 14, 2006.
34 Ibid.
35 See Human Rights Watch, Nigeria - Revenge in the Name of Religion: The Cycle of Violence in Plateau and Kano States, vol.
17, no. 8(A), May 2005, http://hrw.org/reports/2005/nigeria0505; Human Rights Watch, Nigeria’s 2003 Elections: The
Unacknowledged Violence; Human Rights Watch, Nigeria—The Warri Crisis: Fuelling Violence, vol. 15, no. 18(A), December
2003, http://hrw.org/reports/2003/nigeria1103; Human Rights Watch, The “Miss World Riots”: Continued Impunity for
Killings in Kaduna, vol. 15, no. 13(A), July 2003, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/nigeria0703; and Human Rights Watch,
Nigeria—Jos: A City Torn Apart, vol. 13, no. 9(A), December 2001, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/nigeria.
36 Lewis and Albin-Lackey, “Democracy And Violence in Nigeria.”
37 Ibid.
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