Angwan Rukuba: Who did we offend?
Sir: On the night of March 29, gunmen attacked Gari Ya Waye and the Angwan Rukuba area of Jos North. Residents, officials, and rights groups gave varying casualty figures, but
- By Prince Charles Dickson, PhD
Sir: On the night of March 29, gunmen attacked Gari Ya Waye and the Angwan Rukuba area of Jos North. Residents, officials, and rights groups gave varying casualty figures, but the converging picture is grim: more than 20 people were killed, many others injured, panic spread through the community, a curfew followed, and the University of Jos had to postpone examinations because violence had once again entered the civic bloodstream of the city.
What worsens the bloodletting is the bureaucratic paralysis at the floor of government, where urgency goes to die in files, rival chains of command, delayed intelligence fusion, and the old addiction to reacting after the dead have already become statistics.
After Angwan Rukuba, as in so many Plateau tragedies before it, the familiar machinery rolled out: curfews, checkpoints, statements, deployments. But these are often the grammar of aftermath, not the language of prevention. That is why community policing must sit at the centre of every serious conversation about solutions, not as a slogan, but as a structure that treats local knowledge, neighbourhood trust, and early signals as frontline security assets.
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Who did we offend? That is the cry grief asks when language has run out of furniture. But maybe the harder answer is this: we have offended memory, accountability, and truth.
Jos did not begin burning yesterday. Human Rights Watch documented in 2001 that the violence could have been foreseen but authorities failed to act. The city would convulse again in 2004, 2008, and 2010. In Yelwa and Shendam in 2004, hundreds were slaughtered in cycles of Muslim-on-Christian and Christian-on-Muslim revenge. Commissions of inquiry came. Reports came. Recommendations came. Plateau became a museum of unfinished warnings.
So, when people say this is simply religion, they are telling only the loudest part of the lie. Yes, Christians invoke mercy. Yes, Muslims invoke peace. Yet people who can quote holy books still hack at neighbours, torch homes, and baptize terror in the language of righteousness. The problem is not faith in the abstract. The problem is what happens when faith is conscripted by fear, land hunger, citizenship anxiety, electoral arithmetic, memory of previous slaughter, and the poisonous architecture of indigene versus settler.
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The Jos crisis, as Crisis Group put it, sits in the failure to build a citizenship order where residency carries rights and belonging is not constantly litigated with blood.
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That is why the argument over casualty figures in Plateau is never just arithmetic. It is identity politics with a body count. Everybody has an eyewitness. Everybody has a theory. Everybody has a dead person. Christians fear Islamization. Muslims fear exclusion and demonization.
Others whisper about militias, revenge squads, hidden sponsors, demographic wars, and conspiracies too organized to be accidental. In the marketplace of pain, every community clutches its own truth like a court judgment. And because each truth is tied to a grave, contradiction sounds like an insult. So, grief hardens into narrative, narrative hardens into vengeance, and vengeance goes shopping for theology.
But even here, Plateau refuses to be reduced entirely to its worst men. In the aftermath of Angwan Rukuba, there were reports of Muslims and Christians hiding one another, sheltering one another, saving one another from mobs and gunfire.
One Muslim survivor recounted how a Christian man hid him in his wife’s room until danger passed. That detail matters. It matters because it ruins lazy civilizational narratives. It reminds us that when politicians, extremists, and ethnic entrepreneurs try to divide Jos into permanent camps, ordinary people sometimes disobey the script with courage. There are still citizens on this bloodied plateau who have not surrendered their humanity to the crowd.
Yet even that beauty should disturb us. Why must decency be heroic in a place that should have normalized coexistence by now? Why should the benchmark for hope in Jos be that a neighbour did not let another neighbour die?
•Prince Charles Dickson, PhD,
pcdbooks@yahoo.com
