IRIN Focus on militant south-western group

For many Lagos residents, there is nothing abnormal about fearing the Oodua Peoples’ Congress (OPC), blamed for most of the communal clashes that have swept the Nigerian southwest since Olusegun Obasanjo took office as elected president in May 1999. In the past fortnight, a faction of the organisation has been linked to two episodes of violence which appear to illustrate its reputation as both a self-appointed scourge to crime and a threat to civil order in south-western Nigeria, which includes Lagos. On 5 January, armed militants said to belong to the OPC invaded Mushin, a Lagos slum, on a mission to flush out criminals, particularly armed robbers and drug dealers. After two days of fighting at least 20 people had died - most of them set ablaze with car tyres around their necks - and over 40 houses had been burnt down, according to local newspaper reports. Barely a week later, action had shifted to the Bariga suburb of Lagos, where OPC militants invaded a police station to free a comrade held for alleged robbery, kidnapped and killed the station’s commander and drenched two other policemen with acid. Founded in 1994 by medical doctor and politician Frederick Fasehun “to protect the interests” of the some 20 million Yorubas in Nigeria, the OPC’s final goal is the creation of Oduduwa (Oodua) Republic, named after the legendary ancestor of the Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s main ethnic group. Its creation was a response to the annulment of the 1993 presidential elections by the northern-dominated military. A Yoruba businessman-politician, Moshood Abiola, had been poised to win the polls. Former military dictator Sani Abacha, who seized power in the confusion following the annulment, jailed Abiola for laying claim to the presidency and went on to suppress all opposition to his rule. The OPC was among emergent groups that were beginning to offer a more militant challenge to Abacha’s rule when he suddenly died in June 1998. The OPC boycotted efforts made after Abacha’s death to end more than 15 years of military rule in the country of over 108 million people, and focused on its avowed objective of ethnic separatism. However, cracks emerged when a faction led by one Ganiyu Adams accused Fasehun of selling out to Obasanjo and began to engage on increasingly militant action towards achieving separatist aims, even as it sought with messianic zeal to rid Yorubaland of criminals. “We didn’t build OPC for this type of violence,” Fasehun, whose hospital in Lagos was recently partly burnt down by his factional rivals, told IRIN. “We built the OPC to protect the interest of the Yoruba and do justice to everybody in this country.” He accused Adams, on whose head the police have put a price, of seeking to unleash death and chaos on the country. The more militant OPC faction has been linked to a long list of violent incidents, including clashes in Lagos with Hausas, a Muslim ethnic group from the north, and with Ijaws from the southeast. It has also been associated with disturbances in the south-western towns of Shagamu and Ilesha. In December, Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu narrowly escaped death when an OPC gang fired on him near his official residence. “The recent events have shown clearly that we are moving towards a state of anarchy,” Tinubu told journalists after the latest violence. He pledged efforts to check the trend. Obasanjo has accused Tinubu of ineptitude in curtailing the violence and threatened Lagos with a state of emergency. This has sparked a bitter political row, with Tinubu accusing the ruling People’s Democratic Party of coveting the country’s biggest city, home to more than eight million people and controlled by his Alliance for Democracy party. Despite Fasehun’s claim that more than three million Yorubas are registered members of the OPC, the group’s aims are not seen as necessarily representative of Yoruba aspirations. Its militancy has often put Yorubas in other regions in danger, provoking retaliation as occurred in the northern city of Kano and Port Harcourt in the southeast. One consequence of the activities of the OPC has been to heighten ethnic tension in Nigeria, which has over 200 distinct ethnic groups. There is now growing evidence of the emergence of ethnic militias in different parts of the country, including the volatile Niger Delta, where minorities accuse the government and oil companies of depriving them of their share of proceeds from the region’s oil wealth. Disturbed by the trend, the government has warned it will no longer tolerate such violence and that it will take firm action to contain future outbreaks. “This administration now has more than its fair share of acts of lawlessness being perpetrated in some parts of the country under the guise of protecting ethnic interests,” Vice President Atiku Abubakar said earlier this month. For many Nigerians, the recent events bear a worrying resemblance to those which led to the first coup, staged in 1966, six years after independence from Britain. In that year, disturbances in the southwest led to emergency rule and the appointment of a special administrator for the region by the central government, supplanting the elected government which was led by an opposition party. As the political crisis persisted, the military struck and swept the first post-independence government from power. Nigeria then continued its slide towards the 1967-1970 Biafra war in which more than one million people died as the southeast fought unsuccessfully to secede from the rest of the country.