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Kaduna — Gunmen killed more than 100 people in an attack on three villages in central Nigeria, an area where longstanding disputes over land, religion and ethnicity often erupt into violence, two local government officials said yesterday.The police confirmed the raids by Fulani herdsman late on Friday on the villages of Ugwar Sankwai, Ungwan Gata and Chenshyi, in Kaduna state, but declined to give a death toll.
Hundreds have been killed in the past year in clashes pitting the cattle-herding and largely Muslim Fulani people against mostly Christian settled communities like the Berom in Nigeria’s volatile “Middle Belt”, where its mostly Christian south and Muslim north meet.
“Fulani gunmen came across from neighbouring Plateau state and just opened fire on the villagers at around [23:00],” said Daniel Anyip, vice chairperson of the Kaura local government authority. “We are still picking bodies out of the bush but so far there is more than 100 killed.”
Human Rights Watch in December said sectarian clashes in the nation’s religiously mixed central region have killed 3,000 people since 2010, adding that Nigerian authorities had largely ignored the violence, a charge they denied.
Though it sometimes takes on a sectarian character, the violence is fundamentally about decades-old land disputes between semi-nomadic, cattle-keeping communities such as the Fulani and settled farming peoples like the Berom, both often armed with automatic weapons.
Such battles, far from economic centres or oil fields in Africa’s second-biggest economy and top oil producer, rarely capture the attention of its elites.
Meanwhile, at least seven people were killed and dozens more were injured in Nigeria’s capital Abuja after thousands of panicked jobseekers stampeded during a government recruitment drive at the national stadium.
The stampede happened on Saturday as thousands gathered to apply for jobs with the immigration department in Abuja stadium.
One witness said the stampede broke out as applicants surged towards a central stage. They said only one entrance to the 60,000-capacity stadium was open. It was unclear how many people were inside at the time of the crush. “I cannot even imagine the number of people that stamped on me,” said survivor Rosemary Ogida. “I just remember being picked up by three men.”
The young woman, who had regained consciousness at the hospital but could barely move her left leg, told AFP she was desperate after having lost the original of her university diploma in the stampede.
No official toll was given, but an AFP journalist at the scene counted seven dead and dozens injured.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party said it was “shocked and deeply saddened” by the deaths of “young citizens who were at the exercise not only to secure jobs but to be allowed the opportunity to contribute towards the development of the nation”. — Reuters
derick.khumalo