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The hundreds of villagers killed with machetes near the central Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday have thrown the sectarian problems of Africa's most populous nation into the spotlight again. Nigerian officials claim the latest bloodshed -- most victims were Christians, many of them women and children -- was retaliation for clashes in the same city in Jan. In that massacre, Christian attackers killed 300 Muslims.
Nigeria has been wracked by periodic episodes of violence for decades. The country's 150 million people are divided about equally between Christians and Muslims, and further splintered into about 250 tribes. Jos, some 300 miles north of Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, sits smack-dab in the center of Nigeria's tumultuous "middle belt," a so-called cultural fault line that divides the country's Muslim north from the Christian south. The "middle belt" is a melting pot where the major ethnic groups of Nigeria -- Hausa-Fulani Muslims and Yoruba and Igbo Christians -- usually coexist peacefully but sometimes collide.
Many Nigerians argue that the real reason for the violence isn't ethnic or religious differences but the scramble for land, scarce resources and political clout. Poverty, joblessness and corrupt politics drive extremists from both sides to commit horrendous atrocities. Although the nation rakes in billions of dollars in oil revenue annually, the majority of Nigerians scrape by on less than a dollar a day. In the Plateau state, where Jos is located, Muslim cattle herders from the north and Christian farmers from the south vie for control of the fertile plains.
That poor distribution of wealth has also sparked conflict in Nigeria's oil-rich southern delta region, where militants lobbying for a greater share of oil revenue regularly blow up pipelines and kidnap foreign oil workers. Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of International Management Development at the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management, says oil companies have at various times pitted ethnic factions against one another for economic gain.
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