RELIGION, POPULATION GROWTH AND VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIAN NATION

Abstract

With a population of about 190 million, Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation by double and fertility levels remain higher than most other sub-Saharan African nations. Throughout the last decades, the fertility gap between Christians and Muslims has widened with significant political implications for her nascent democracy. Since Nigeria's return to democratic rule in 1999, thousands of people have died in the wake of identitybased vicious, murderous and destructive violence mostly fought along ethno-religious lines. In 2009, a radical Islamist sect from north-eastern Nigeria, Boko Haram, started a campaign of terror that has so far intensified the schismatic and apprehensive religious atmosphere in the country. This had been preceded by the vicious Maitatsine sect of the 1980s. The formal institutionalization of Sharia law in the North in 1999 have also not helped matters. While the Boko Haram crisis cannot be said to be strictly religious, this paper will locate the group within the context of the mobilization and politicization of religion in Nigeria, which along with the heavy-handedness of Nigeria's conflict management processes, informs religious militancy and sectarian violence in the country. The paper argues that a process of transition from a killing society to a non-killing society is needed to provide an alternative perspective to the existing pedagogy of religion, violence and population growth for which northern Nigeria is notorious.