2 results
13 - Communal Conflicts, State Responses, and Local Peace Infrastructure
- Edited by Wale Adebanwi, University of Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- Democracy and Nigeria's Fourth Republic
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 02 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 19 September 2023, pp 313-326
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Summary
Introduction
Nigeria's most serious and widespread security challenge is perhaps its least understood: communal violence … most often used to describe land disputes involving farmers and herdsmen or between rival ethnic communities.
(Campbell and Page 2018: 122)I have a rather modest thesis. I believe that the nature and characteristics of contemporary conflict suggest the need for a set of concepts and approaches that go beyond traditional statist diplomacy. Building peace in today's conflicts calls for long-term commitment to establishing an infrastructure across the levels of society, an infrastructure that empowers the resources of reconciliation from within that society and maximises the contribution from outside.
(Lederach 2012: 9)Since the inauguration of Nigeria's Fourth Republic on 29 May 1999, communal violence comes top as one of the factors necessitating Nigeria's description as a country that ‘has not exactly flourished but has not disintegrated’ (Obadare 2016: 2). The instability and insecurity arising from violent communal conflicts across the country has also informed its description as an entity ‘dancing on the brink’ (Campbell 2010). As of 2010, the official Nigerian government statistics indicated that 1.2 million people had been internally displaced owing to religious and ethnic conflict and that at least 13,500 deaths resulted from religious and ethnic conflicts (Campbell 2010). Out of a total of 677 incidents of mass atrocities in 2020, 207 came from clashes between farmers and herders (Global Rights 2020). In the first nine months of 2021, almost 8,000 people were directly killed in various conflicts (The Economist 2021). These are conservative estimates, especially because more people die indirectly from communal conflict than directly. Obviously, communal conflicts are high net contributors to insecurity and fragility because they are life-shortening occurrences. Fatalities that accompany communal conflicts in Nigeria offer additional understanding to the concept of deathscapes as spaces where everyday life has become prone to death because of violence and state neglect or structural violence (Agamben 2005). Although the African Union in 2013 adopted the ‘Master Roadmap of Practical Steps to Silence Guns’ by the year 2020 (Fabricius 2019), communal conflicts or non-state conflicts are still major causes of avoidable deaths as of 2020 (Palik, et al. 2020).
9 - Marginal Men & Urban Social Conflicts Okada Riders in Lagos
- from Part III - MARGINALITY, DISAFFECTION & BIO-ECONOMIC DISTRESS
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- By Gbemisola Animasawun, Centre for Peace & Strategic Studies University of Ilorin
- Edited by Wale Adebanwi
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- Book:
- The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 31 August 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2017, pp 239-265
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Summary
Many of us (okada riders) are not happy with the ban because we see okada business as the only thing we could do. No need of any capital base and it's very lucrative. There are some of us who conspire with armed robbers and other criminals like hired killers for the sake of money from okada charter. (Moyo Fabiyi P.M. News 20 November 2012)
We have okada too in Rwanda. It is a lucrative business. A good number of people are doing okada business in Rwanda. But their activities are well-regulated. There are rules and regulations that define the limit of their operation. We also organise them into groups, such as association of owners and association of operators. The groups help in ensuring that the rules and regulations are duly observed. Because we have rules, institutions and structures in place, we do not have much problem with okada operators. (Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, quoted in Ilevbare 2013)
@desmondc03: FOOTBALL inside POLITICS: Governor Fashola who's a Manchester untd fan has rendered 80 per cent of Chelsea fans (okada rider) jobless in Lagos. (Nwachukwu Egbunike 2012)
‘Struggle’ Economy & City Life
In her preface to the important volume, Money Struggles and City Life, Jane Guyer (2002: ix-xvi) raises interesting questions about the ways in which those of us who live and work in urban Africa witness what de Certeau (1984) describes as the ‘practice of everyday life’, which ‘encompasses systems of employment, provisioning, and meaning-making of impressive magnitude and relentless resilience’ (Guyer 2002: ix). In reflecting on the ‘domain of human struggles and achievement’ – particularly in Ibadan and other urban centres in southern Nigeria – within which ‘chronic uncertainty is pervasive’ (ibid.: x), Guyer argues that ‘(c)ase studies have to be a source both of data for analysis and of witnessed documentation of the realities of life’ (ibid.). In this chapter, I take up the task that she commended to African(ist) scholars in the ‘context of the intellectual and empirical challenges’ of 1990s Nigeria by focusing on an otherwise marginal phenomenon, albeit one that reflects the deep crisis of urban life in Africa in the post-structural adjustment era – an era which still bears not only the structural, economic, including fiscal, and social disasters imposed by Structural Adjustment Programmes, but also dramatizes the consequences of authoritarian rule with its attendant lack of urban planning.
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