THE GROWTH OF ETHNIC MILITIAS AND INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS

The rise and growth of ethnic militia groups in contemporary Nigeria can be located in the internal contradictions and dialects of the Nigeria political economy. First is the nature of the Nigeria state that since its inception has been a violent institution, and has
sought to maintain control and hegemony in society through the mechanics of violence. This became acute under military rule.

The Nigeria military dictatorship survives on the practice of violence and the control of the means of violence. Thus any peaceful agitation by the people and popular movement is often met with official violence and repression. Apart from the state perpetuating the political pedagogy of violence, the tendency for the political society has been to use armed politics as one of the instruments for achieving political ends. Most of the political parties right from the first republic in 1960 have displayed a predilection for a culture of violence in the pursuit of political power.

As Edwin Madunagu (2000) noted:
The nature of politics, whose ultimate form is the struggle for power, compels every political organization at a certain stage in its development to acquire an armed detachment, or be militarised. Some political organizations, utilizing their entrenchment in the state, use national armies, the police and other security forces as armed wings (20).

The argument being made here is that the militarisation of the society and politics in Nigeria was the background and precursor to the militarisation of some civil society organizations now called ethnic militia groups. They do not exist in isolation but are deeply rooted in the internal contradictions of the Nigeria state and its political economy.

Ethnic militia groups emerged in Nigeria in the 1990s when the nation was in the throes of a vicious military dictatorship ( Adejumobi, 2002:4). Specifically, the context for the rise of those groups was the Babangida and Abacha regimes. The character of those regimes deepened the contradictions and crises of the Nigeria state, which resulted in the rise of ethnic militia groups as one of the consequences of that process. There are three salient features of those regimes that reinforced militarism and promoted primordial loyalties in the country.

The first is the phenomenon of personal rule and the high concentration of power perpetuated by those regimes. According to Adejumobi: Evidently, that concentration of power in the hands of an individual entity, whether in a military or civil regime, has a strong potential of promoting ethnic tension in the society as such individuals usually construct an ethnic state access map through which they distribute social goods and scarce resources and create polarisation and division amongst ethnic groups in order to perpetuate their rule (4).

The logic of divide the rule is primary in personalised regimes. This was a marked feature of the Babangida and Abacha regimes. Social differences of ethnic, communal and religious dimensions were played up by those regimes. It was, therefore, not by coincidence that inter-ethnic, religious and communal conflicts were unprecedented during those regimes. From the North to the South, communities and religious groups, which had hitherto, lived together in harmony, suddenly took up arms against each other.

There were no less than ten communal and religious riots during the period. It occurred in places such as Ilorin, Kafanchan, Kaduna, Funtua, Kano, Zaria, Ile- Ife, Zangon, Kataf, while virtually all the oil producing communities of the Niger Delta were the epicenters of communal conflicts (4).

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