‘Religion is Politics’

Over at NigeriansTalk Benson Eluma on the reasons behind the religious crisis within northern Nigeria:

With its current culture of violent power relations, I don’t think that things would be different in the north (of Nigeria) if everybody was a Muslim or a Christian or an Animist, Pantheist or Atheist. People who want a fight will create one, no matter what they share in religion and ethnicity and language. If things continue this way in the north, very soon the certainties of identification, to paraphrase Farah, will be eroded and deleted. In these crises in northern Nigeria the variables of religion and ethnicity are interpenetrating and cancelling out one another. Soon, all that will be left as social residuum is the commitment to do battle on one side against all others.