APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 24 24 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL The war ended in the midst of high hopes and expectations by the people, but scarcity, inflation, and the rationing instituted during the war prevailed. In addition, the general strike of 1945 hit the supplies of food and consequently, serious anxiety for the population. Each morning, for several weeks, a long line of people waited outside the market to receive their fixed ration of grain from the District Officer. The British blamed the strike and the resultant difficulties on the leading Igbo anti-colonialist of the time, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and the Igbo. They prevailed on Northerners to boycott the strike. What is more, they exploited the situation to incite the Hausa against the Igbo in Jos. In the prevailing atmosphere of inter-communal trade competition and the animosities arising from the settlement of the Igbo in the ‘Native Town’, the Jos communal riots of 1945 became inevitable.27 Other scholars have explored this perspective to explain the tendency in Nigeria by the elite and the masses to exploit ethno-regional and religious dichotomies while in pursuit of economic advantage.28 Ben Nwosu and Ogoh Alubo have chronicled examples involving the Hausas and Yorubas in the 1930s concerning a monopoly over the kola nut and cattle trades, the 1992 Zango and Kataf crisis in Kaduna in northern Nigeria over moving a market from one area to another, and tensions between the Wawas (Enugu people) and Anambra people in the Igbo southeast over asset sharing after Enugu state was created out of the original Anambra state in 1991. They agree with Ake’s postulation that tribalism flourishes because it is useful, especially in the economic sense.29 It is against such a backdrop that one should view eruptions in Jos. Whether they are declared to be inter- or intra-ethnic or religious, they are often purely motivated in the main by economic anxiety, notwithstanding that the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) perceives the problem squarely within a political context.30 In its conclusions, the IPCR might have drawn inspiration from the argument advanced by David Lake and Donald Rothchild on causes of ethnic conflict. They contend that most of the paradigms widely used in explaining ethnic conflict are at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong and that ethnic conflict is not caused directly by inter-group differences, ‘ancient hatred’ or century-old feuds or the stresses of modern life. Their postulation downplays the economic factor in ethnic conflict by suggesting instead that such conflicts stem from ‘collective fears of the future,’ which contain within them the potential for tremendous violence.31 For the purposes here, in spite of other intervening variables, including the fact that ‘places of worship like churches have always been the targets of these riots for 27. Leonard Plotnicov, ‘An early Nigerian civil disturbance: The 1945 Hausa-Ibo riot in Jos’, Modern African Studies, 9:2 (1971), 299–300, cited in Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria, 122. The strike was over the ill-treatment of Nigerian workers by the British colonialists. 28. See, for example, Nwosu, ‘The political economy of citizenship-indigeneship controversy’; Kukah, Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria; and H. Asisi Asobie, ‘Centralizing trends in Nigerian federalism’ in Tunde Babawale et al. (eds.), Re-inventing Federalism in Nigeria: Issues and Perspectives (Lagos, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1998), 49. The latter two focus on elites’ manipulation of ethnicity and religion in furthering their economic goals. 29. Claude Ake, A Political Economy of Africa (New York, Longman, 1981), 2. 30. Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, ‘Strategic conflict assessment of Nigeria’, 66. 31. David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, ‘Containing fear: The origins and management of ethnic conflict’ in Michael E. Brown et al. (eds.), Theories of War and Peace (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2000), 292.