This September 7 marks the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of civil unrest in the city of Jos, the capital of Plateau State. Those terrible six days in September 2001 ushered in recurrent violence that has reshaped the social map and architecture of not only Jos, but Plateau State as a whole.
Twenty-five years is a long time. In that timeframe, a whole generation of Nigerians born in Jos have known nothing but violence, fear and hate. Their entire lives have been shaped by one word: crisis.
One of these Nigerians was Babawo Ilyasu. I knew his parents well. I remember first meeting his mother when she was still wrapped in her bridal veil. I knew when she had her first two children, during which time our families grew close. By the time Babawo was born, the vicissitudes of life forced many to move, some internally displaced when their parts of town were no longer safe.
The last time I saw Babawo, he was still a child clinging to his mother’s hand. Our families stayed in touch, visited each other to celebrate or commiserate, and caught up on old times. Babawo grew up to be a responsible young man, a hard worker who supported his parents with his earnings from the Keke Napep he rode. He eventually got married and had a child of his own.
The day after the March 29, 2026 shooting at Angwan Rukuba, after the curfew had been lifted, Babawo started his Keke Napep, bade farewell to his wife and child, and went to work. Neither he nor his tricycle has been seen since.
Everyone familiar with Jos would know what that means. In the course of his work, he must have strayed into an unsafe part of town, been set upon, murdered and disappeared. His father, his bewildered mother, his waiting wife and little child will not even have a corpse to bury. They have no hope for closure or justice. He would be just one of the many hundreds who have been lost this way.
Across the divides, there are hundreds of Babawos, or Promise Gideon Ayuba, born in 2003, murdered a day before by the gunmen who opened fire at Angwa Rukuba and murdered over 20 people.
Since September 2001, there have been thousands of families left grieving like the Ayubas or the Ilyasus, some with corpses to bury, some with nothing, just a haunting emptiness over children born post-2001 who have known neither peace nor justice their entire lives.
Those six days of murderous lawlessness in September 2001 epitomised a monumental government failure that has persisted for 25 years now. Several governments, at state and national levels, have failed to address the cause of the crisis and to stop the haemorrhaging because they have continued applying duct tape to a bursting water tank. The leaks will continue; the threat of a complete explosion remains.
While the government has preoccupied itself with cosmetic approaches to dealing with the crises, Human Rights Watch and the Plateau State Peace Building Agency have documented between 6,000 and 7,000 fatalities.
No society could be losing this number of people in unrecompensed deaths and expect to be normal. The social and economic impact cannot be quantified in terms of the billions worth of goods and property fed to the flames of rage, but crucially in the billions worth of investments that were withdrawn from the state or diverted elsewhere. Before 2001, Jos was growing into a tourism and commerce hub. Post-2001, Jos has become the fractured capital of a fractured state that once was genuinely the home of peace and tourism. For people in the generation of Babawo and Promise, that motto, stamped on licence plates and government banners, must ring hollow, like the requiem to a dream that died before they were born.
With an ageing population and a growing younger population, the memories of what Jos and Plateau State used to be and represented are fast fading and getting lost in the mists of time. A less charitable person might even say it is now the capital of Nigeria’s ethno-religious violence map.
The evidence of the devastation scars the face of the state. There were once thriving streets in Jos that are just ghostly reminders of themselves, deserted, overgrown with weeds growing in the middle of the streets and hiding the demolished, blackened ruins of houses where people once lived, loved and laughed.
In the centre of the city, the ruin of the Jos Main Market stands as the greatest monument to the history of violence and loss. A market that was once a pride of the state, drawing local and international tourists, consumed in the inferno and hate, and now just a painful reminder of what was and could have been. It stands as the symbolic economic ruination that has plagued the state since 2001.
The government’s approach to rebuilding the market has mimicked its approach to dealing with the crisis-tenuous, weak and lacking political will.
While in the last few days there have been some reflections on what has been happening in the state over the last 25 years to commemorate this sad, long tragedy-some civil society interventions, some prayer sessions and the like-it is pertinent that the authorities reflect deeply on how political ambition and avarice triggered this crisis and have sustained it, how badly the government has managed it and its aftermath, and how poor its strategy of addressing it remains.
There is an urgent need for decisive measures to put a permanent end to the recurring violence-measures that must be practical, logical, unbiased, sincerely aimed at restoring lasting peace, instead of transient reprieve.
Clearly turning Plateau into a garrison state, dotted by now permanent military posts and checkpoints, having soldiers guard towns and villagers while they sleep is not only impractical and unsustainable but has failed as often as it has succeeded. The recent massacre of some 20 villagers in Mangu despite the presence of soldiers in the area demonstrates this. The protest by the residents over the effectiveness of these military deployments evidences growing frustrations over this enduring crisis. This approach suggests a lack of commitment to peacebuilding and shows that the approach has always been to patch the cracks before passing the buck to the next government.
There has to be a decided deliberateness to peacebuilding, as John Kennedy proclaimed: ‘Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.’
While the populace needs these massive changes in opinions about what peaceful coexistence is and should look like on the Plateau, the government must first change its opinion on how it will achieve this peace.
Plateau must choose peace and peaceful coexistence. The temporary solutions that have been put in place, which are now dangerously at risk of becoming permanent, do not address the real issues.
Martin Luther King proclaimed that ‘peace is not the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.’ On the streets and hills and villages of the Plateau, there has been no justice since September 2001. Neither for Alhaji Hamza who was murdered on September 8, 2001 on the Ring Road around Tina Junction, and his burnt corpse left on the street for days, nor for Mr Pam who was murdered in Angwan Rogo the night before and his burnt corpse left to rot in the ruins of his house. Neither for Promise Ayuba who was shot dead alongside dozens of others on March 29, 2026 nor Babawo Ilyasu who was lost the day after, and the hundreds of others whose remains will most likely never be found.