APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 28 28 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL liberties of minority groups.42 Alubo has, however, noted that identity is also used to define individuals and provide responses to the question ‘Who am I?’ To him, it has ethnic, religious, gender, class and other layers, all of which refer to the same person.43 Alubo goes on to underline the multi-layered nature of identity and the tendency for some forms of it to dominate in particular circumstances. Thus, contestations over identity are usually markers of other tensions, particularly in relation to material benefits and opportunities. It is commonplace for people who share ethnic and religious identities in one circumstance to be excluded from rights, privileges, and opportunities enjoyed by others in an ethnic or religious group. Where this happens, Alubo contends, other definitions, such as settler, stranger, or non-indigene, come to the fore. This brings to mind the conflict between the Wawas (Enugu state indigenes) and Ijekebees (Anambra state indigenes), both of which are mainly Christian and Igbo. Following the creation of Anambra state, the issue arose concerning whether indigenes of Anambra should remain in the Enugu civil service or take positions in the new, Anambra civil service. It was resolved that each side, Anambra and Enugu, should retain immovable property in the other side’s dominion. Anambra indigenes had the option of remaining in the Enugu civil service at Enugu or joining the civil service of the new Anambra state in Awka, the capital. Indigenes of Anambra who stayed in Enugu met with such discrimination that they eventually moved to Awka. In Jos, the conflict in the wake of the creation of the Jos North LGA corresponds with the contention that social relations within the states have increased in acrimony as the struggle for resources and development has become more localized. As Alubo notes, crises ensue because of the new spaces and opportunities they offer to exercise power and control over resources.44 It is instructive that while the IPCR identified politics as the central element in the ensuing conflict in Jos, it tended to overlook Richard Joseph’s thesis on prebendalism: Nigerian politics is about the domination of the polity in order to gain control of public resources or an exclusive claim to allocate these resources for private ends.45 Politics in this clime, according to former Senegalese president Leopold Senghor, is ‘politicians politics’—that is, ‘the struggles of clans . . . to place well oneself, one’s relatives, and one’s client in the cursus honorum, that is the race for preferments’.46 The IPCR asserts that behind the citizenship conflict in the Jos crisis, the next significant problem emanates from land resources. At the most fundamental level, this assessment points to an economic underpinning.47 Land is, obviously, a crucial factor in production and does not necessarily hold any significance if not for its economic 42. O. Otite, ‘Managing Nigeria’s ethnic pluralism in a democratic environment’, University of Calabar, 2000, cited in Alubo, ‘Understanding the issues in the citizenship-indigeneship crisis in Nigeria’, 5. 43. Alubo, ‘Understanding the issues in the citizenship-indigeneship crisis in Nigeria’, 4–6; see also Obaro Ikime, ‘The Nigerian civil war and the national question’ in Osaghae, Suberu, and Onwudire, The Nigerian Civil War and Its Aftermath. 44. Alubo, ‘Understanding the issues in the citizenship-indigeneship crisis in Nigeria,’ 4. 45. Richard Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic (Ibadan, Spectrum Books, 1987). 46. Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, ‘Personal rule: Theory and practice in Africa’ in Peter Lewis (ed.), Africa: Dilemmas of Development and Change (Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1998), 17–18. 47. Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, ‘Strategic conflict assessment of Nigeria’, 66.