APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 23 Beyond the Ethno-Religious Theory of the Jos Conflict 23 As the conversion campaigns by Muslims and Christians in these early periods grew in intensity, some communities, Kukah states, used conversion to assert their hegemony over others from neighbouring areas.20 Another scholar argues that conversion to Christianity became an attractive option for some of the many minority ethnic groups that had experienced tribulations under what they viewed as HausaFulani colonialism and imperialism during and after the jihad.21 POLITICAL ECONOMY PERSPECTIVE Approaching the Jos conflict from a political economy perspective is not simply a matter of looking for economic motives behind individual actions or looking for economic explanations for social actions.22 Rather, according to Michael Barratt Brown, ‘it is borne out of the concern with political economy itself as the inter-connection of economic and political structures in social formation in which these social formations remain a complex totality . . . and in which case, economic or material interpretations are not applied mechanically but dialectically, allowing for feedback of human consciousness’.23 Okwudiba Nnoli has identified a link between economic relations and the mobilization of primordial identity in struggles in Nigeria.24 In another study, he notes how ethnic hostility becomes inevitable under conditions that politicize ethnicity and enlist governmental powers in socio-economic competition.25 He buttresses this assertion with W. G. Sumner’s concept of antagonistic cooperation. According to Sumner, the opportunity always exists for inter-human hostility to be aroused by competition for desired but scarce values, such as the satisfaction of economic needs, status, political ambition, or sex partners.26 Sumner, in turn, uses Leonard Plotnicov’s account of an incident in Jos prior to independence in 1960 to underscore how appeal to ethnic differences and animosity was brought to bear on an otherwise purely economic matter. According to Plotnicov, the colonialists tried to check the march of Nigerian nationalism by identifying with and sponsoring reactionary communal interests in the country, particularly in the North, and preying on their communal sentiments and animosities. For example, before the Second World War, the Yoruba and Hausa dominated petty trade in Jos. Igbo traders came during the war and concentrated in a part of the ‘Native Town’ which the Hausa had a sentimental attachment to. The result was tension between the Hausa and Igbo. 20. Kukah, Democracy and Civil Society in Nigeria, 97. 21. Tesemchi Makar, ‘The relationship between the Sokoto caliphate and non-Muslim people of the Middle Belt’ in Yusufu Bala Usman (ed.), Studies in the History of the Sokoto Caliphate, cited in Kukah, Democracy and Civil Society in Nigeria, 97. 22. See Julius Ihonvbere (ed.), The Political Economy of Crisis and Underdevelopment in Africa: Selected Works of Claude Ake (Lagos, JAD Publishers, 1989), 38–40. 23. Michael Barratt Brown, Economics of Imperialism (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1994), 24; see also Simeon H. O. Alozieuwa, ‘The political economy of the presidential system in Nigeria’ (doctoral diss., University of Abuja, 2005), 76. 24. Cited in Ben U. Nwosu, ‘The political economy of citizenship-indigeneship controversy’ in Golwa and Ojiji, Dialogue on Citizenship in Nigeria, 83. 25. Okwudiba Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria (Enugu, Fourth Dimension Publishers, 1978), 122. 26. W. G. Sumner, Folkways (New York, Dover, 1959), as cited in ibid, 215.