Chapter 1: The Flames of Jos: A Nation's Recurring Nightmare

The Smoke That Never Clears

The smoke rises again over the Plateau, a bitter incense of burning homes and broken promises. On Christmas Eve 2023, while families in Bokkos and Barkin Ladi local government areas prepared rice and stew for the morning, armed men moved through the darkness with the coordination of a military operation. They struck twenty villages across multiple LGAs simultaneously, using mobile communications to coordinate their advance. By dawn, the churches were silent. The mosques were silent. The only sound was the crackle of thatch and timber, and the wailing of those who had run into the bush barefoot and now returned to find their relatives laid out in courtyards.

I was in Jos when it happened. Not in Bokkos itself—that road had been too dangerous after dark for months—but in the city, where the Christmas lights were still up along Ahmadu Bello Way and the tin-roofed bars in Rayfield were playing Afrobeats for the holiday crowd. We heard the first reports at 6:00 a.m. on 25 December, fragments coming through on WhatsApp from field workers and pastors. By noon, the numbers were climbing. By evening, the state government had issued a statement expressing "deep sorrow" and promising "decisive action." The action never came. The sorrow did not bring back the dead.

The casualty count depends on whom you ask and when you stop counting. Premium Times, reporting on 26 December 2023, placed the dead at over 160. Other accounts, including HumAngle's field reporting from the same week, suggested the figure approached 200. The exact number matters less than what the number represents: a security architecture so broken that assailants could plan, mobilise, and execute a multi-pronged massacre in a state that hosts the headquarters of the Third Armoured Division, the Special Task Force Operation Safe Haven, and a full complement of police area commands. SBM Intelligence, in its 2024 security assessment, noted that the simultaneous nature of the attacks suggested military-level planning by groups using mobile networks to coordinate across rugged terrain. This was not a spontaneous clash. It was a scheduled execution, and the Nigerian state had received no warning, or had received warning and failed to act.

The federal response was a study in institutional paralysis. President Bola Tinubu, who had taken office seven months earlier, issued a statement on 26 December calling the attacks "a primitive and cruel act." The Director of Defence Media Operations promised a "sustained onslaught" against the perpetrators. The Plateau State government announced a twenty-four-hour curfew in the affected LGAs. None of these measures rescued a single person. The curfew came twelve hours after the last shots. The onslaught came three days later, by which time the attackers had crossed into neighbouring Nasarawa State. The promises of compensation, of justice, of security reform—they followed the same script that Plateau residents have memorised since 2001. And like every script before it, it ended with the survivors burying their dead and waiting for the next massacre.

The villages hit were not random. They were clusters of Berom and Irigwe farming communities along the Bokkos-Barkin Ladi corridor, settlements that had resisted displacement for years despite repeated smaller attacks. In Mangu Hale, in Follo, in Mushu, the attackers knew which compounds held which families. They knew which paths led to the bush where people would run. They knew how long it would take for the soldiers at the checkpoint ten kilometres away to receive a radio call, find fuel for their patrol vehicle, and drive up the laterite road. By the time the troops arrived, the attackers had melted into the highland scrub, and the only people left were those too old or too wounded to flee.

I drove up to Barkin Ladi three days later. The road was lined with military trucks parked under acacia trees, the soldiers sitting in the shade and staring at the passing traffic. In the town itself, the market was closed. The churches were draped in black. Men stood in clusters outside the hospital, waiting for news of relatives who had been brought in with machete wounds and burns. A woman I will call Esther—not her real name, because she feared reprisal—showed me the compound where her brother and his four children had been killed. The roof had collapsed. The walls were blackened. And on the ground, someone had swept the ashes into a neat pile, as if tidiness could restore what the fire had taken.

I have been reporting from Jos since 2011. I have learned to read the calendar of violence the way farmers read the rain. The dry season brings the herds south. The election season brings the politicians north, bearing gifts and grudges. And the holiday season brings the gunfire, as if the attackers know that Christmas and Eid concentrate people in homes and churches and mosques, making the killing efficient. The Christmas Eve attacks were not an aberration. They were the latest entry in a ledger that stretches back more than two decades.

A Calendar of Death

September 2001 is where the modern ledger begins. A dispute over the appointment of a poverty alleviation coordinator in Jos North spiralled into communal violence that killed more than 1,000 people in a single week. I was not there then. I arrived ten years later, when the city was still mapped by its scars. The old vegetable market in Terminus had been divided into Christian and Muslim sections. The hilltop neighbourhoods of Bukuru and Rantya had become fortresses of one faith or the other. The famous Jos Museum, founded in 1952 as a monument to multicultural mining heritage, stood shuttered and looted, its collections scattered across the plateau like the people they once represented.

The categories that kill in Jos were invented in London. The rest is aftermath. What the British classified as indigene and settler has hardened into a binary that determines who can buy land, who can vote where, whose children can attend which school, and whose corpse can be buried in which cemetery. The indigene-settler distinction was an administrative convenience for colonial officers. Today it is a weapon of political exclusion wielded by local elites who understand that controlling demographic narratives means controlling votes, land allocations, and government appointments.

The geography of fear in Jos is written in concrete and barbed wire. In Tudun Wada, the Muslim quarter, the streets narrow and twist into defensive configurations. In Anglo-Jos, the Christian hilltop neighbourhoods, residents have built watchtowers and installed metal gates at the entrance to every street. The market in Terminus, once a mixed trading hub where Berom women sold vegetables beside Hausa spice merchants, has been effectively partitioned. Muslims shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Christians shop on Mondays and Wednesdays. Fridays and Saturdays belong to whoever arrives first and leaves fastest. This is not coexistence. It is co-occupation under conditions of mutual suspicion.

The violence has followed predictable seasonal and political rhythms ever since. The 2008 crisis followed local government elections, demonstrating how tightly political competition and bloodshed are braided in Plateau. In 2010, the Dogo Nahawa massacre claimed over 200 lives, mostly women and children, in a predawn attack that set a new standard for brutality. The attackers herded their victims into homes and set them alight. Survivors I interviewed years later still described the smell of burning hair and the sound of children's screams muffled by collapsing roofs. The 2014 violence in Barkin Ladi and Riyom added hundreds more to the toll. The 2018 attacks in Gashish and Ropp districts displaced thousands and introduced a new tactic: the systematic burning of food barns, ensuring that survivors would face hunger even if they escaped the bullets.

The 2023 general elections added another layer. Peter Obi won the presidential vote in Plateau State, but the governorship election was fiercely contested, violence-affected, and ultimately decided by judicial intervention after months of litigation. When political legitimacy is contested in the courts rather than accepted at the polls, the losers do not always take their grievances to lawyers. Some take them to the bush. In the months following the governorship verdict, attacks increased in frequency across the same LGAs that had seen the worst electoral violence. The correlation is not coincidence. It is the operating system of Plateau politics.

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), Nigeria recorded 8,764 fatalities from 4,682 conflict events in 2023. Of these, 2,705 were civilian-targeted deaths. ACLED data, compiled by the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) on 8 April 2024, shows that Plateau State accounts for a disproportionate share of civilian-targeted violence in the North Central zone. The Nigeria Security Tracker, maintained by the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that farmer-herder clashes claimed approximately 3,000 lives and displaced more than 300,000 Nigerians nationwide between 2018 and 2023. The 2024 Nigeria Watch Report, cited by The Guardian Nigeria on 4 March 2026, added another 567 deaths linked to such violence across twenty states and the Federal Capital Territory within a single year. These are not abstract figures. They are names I have heard in IDP camps, names muttered by survivors who watched their brothers hacked to death in maize fields.

The Numbers Beneath the Ashes

Beneath the ethnic and religious narratives that dominate headlines lies a harder story about work, wages, and the absence of both. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Labour Force Survey for the fourth quarter of 2022 recorded Plateau State's overall unemployment rate at 25.3%. For youth aged 15–24, the figure was 32.1%. These young people are not merely unemployed. They are unoccupied in a landscape where occupation once meant farming, herding, or mining. The tin mines that built Jos—the reason the British came, the reason the city exists—are largely exhausted. The agricultural land is shrinking under pressure from population growth and contested tenure. And the herding routes that brought Fulani cattle through the plateau seasonally have been fenced, farmed, or fought over until movement itself has become an act of war.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), in its Displacement Tracking Matrix Round 45 covering February to March 2023, counted 85,518 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Plateau State. This is not the inflated "over 1.5 million displaced in the Middle Belt" figure that appears in some reports, a number that conflates Plateau with Benue, Nasarawa, and Taraba. The IOM figure is specific, state-bound, and verifiable. It represents families living in primary schools, church halls, and makeshift shelters in host communities where they are neither welcome nor fully integrated. I have sat with these families in Riyom and Barkin Ladi. I have watched children draw maps of the homes they fled, homes that now exist only in memory and in the title deeds they cannot enforce.

The economic desperation creates a recruitment pool that ethnic militias, political thugs, and protection racketeers have learned to tap with precision. A young man in Jos South who cannot find work and whose family has been displaced twice in three years does not need an ideology to pick up a weapon. He needs a salary, a sense of purpose, and someone to blame. The militias provide all three. The state provides none. The Berom Youth Moulders-Association, the Fulani vigilante groups, and the various neighbourhood defence units that have emerged across the plateau all operate on the same economic logic: protection for pay, status for service, and revenge for trauma. They are not criminal enterprises in the conventional sense. They are shadow states filling a vacuum the federal government refuses to acknowledge.

The cost of this violence extends beyond the dead and the displaced. Plateau State's economy has contracted in real terms over the past decade. Agricultural output in conflict-affected LGAs has fallen by an estimated 40%, not because the soil has changed but because farmers cannot plant during the dry season—when attacks peak—and cannot harvest during the rains without armed escorts. Herders, for their part, face extortion at every checkpoint and ambush on every trail. The cattle markets in Jos have shrunk. The cold stores that once supplied beef to Abuja and Kaduna operate at half capacity. Everyone loses except the armed groups that tax the survivors and the politicians who weaponise the grievances.

The decline of mining has removed the economic floor that once made inter-ethnic coexistence viable. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Jos Plateau produced thousands of tonnes of tin and columbite, employing Berom, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba workers side by side in the same pits. The mines closed not because the ore ran out but because global prices collapsed and the Nigerian government lacked the capital or interest to modernise extraction. The workers who once dug side by side now fight over the same exhausted farmland. The shared labour that built Jos has been replaced by zero-sum competition for shrinking resources. The city has gone from a model of cosmopolitan industry to a cautionary tale about what happens when the jobs disappear but the people remain.

Who Really Owns the Land

The dominant narrative about Plateau violence frames it as a collision between farmers and herders, Christians and Muslims, indigenes and settlers, accelerated by climate change and demographic pressure. It is a tidy story, and it is wrong.

Dr. Chris Kwaja, a researcher at the University of Jos and a fellow with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), has spent years dismantling this framing. In his 2019 USIP Peaceworks paper, "Farmer-Herder Conflicts in the Middle Belt: Beyond the Ecological Narrative," Kwaja argues that the conflict in Plateau is not primarily about grass, water, or climate. It is about land speculation by urban elites and politicians who employ herders as proxies in a scramble for territory. Nigeria's land title system is so weak that a well-connected individual can acquire hundreds of hectares with documents that would not survive ten minutes of genuine scrutiny. The herder-farmer clashes, in Kwaja's analysis, are often the visible tip of an invisible land grab. Politicians and business figures acquire contested land cheaply during periods of violence, then develop or resell it once the original occupants have been frightened away or killed.

This is not a comfortable argument. It implicates the very people who sit on peace committees, fund reconciliation conferences, and give press statements deploring violence. It suggests that the ethnic militias on all sides are not expressions of grassroots rage but instruments of elite accumulation. Kwaja's evidence is not statistical. It is archival: land registry records that trace ownership from displaced families to politically connected buyers, court cases that stall for years while facts on the ground change, and the abrupt appearance of fenced commercial farms on land that was contested village grazing territory only months before. In one case documented by Kwaja, a 300-hectare plot in Barkin Ladi LGA changed hands three times in eighteen months during peak violence, each transaction involving a company linked to a former local government chairman. The farmers who originally held customary rights to the land were not compensated. They were simply not there anymore.

The Plateau Peace Building Agency, established by state law in 2016, has documented local peace agreements that held for months before being undermined by external political actors. The agency's files, which I reviewed in 2022, contain signed agreements between Berom and Fulani community leaders from Riyom, Barkin Ladi, and Bokkos LGAs. The agreements established grazing corridors, compensation funds, and joint vigilance committees. They collapsed when politicians facing primary elections or land disputes activated dormant grievances through youth proxies. The state, in other words, is not always absent. Sometimes it is present and actively sabotaged by its own members.

Kwaja's dissenting voice matters because without it, the book's argument becomes too credulous of the climate narrative. Yes, the Sahara is expanding. Yes, Lake Chad is shrinking. Yes, northern Nigeria is warming at 1.5 times the global average, according to the Nigerian Meteorological Agency. But people do not kill one another over temperature graphs. They kill one another over land that someone else wants to own. The drought is real. The land speculation is realer. The armed groups on all sides—whether they call themselves self-defence militias or herder associations—are fighting for territory that will determine who controls Plateau's political and economic future for the next generation.

The Land Use Act of 1978 is the invisible architecture beneath Kwaja's argument. By vesting control of all land in state governors, the act effectively abolished customary tenure without creating a functioning alternative. In Plateau, this means that a Berom family farming the same hillside for three generations holds no legal title that a governor cannot override with a certificate of occupancy issued to a political donor. The herder who has grazed cattle along the same dry-season route since before the British arrived has no legal standing when that route is suddenly fenced and titled. The conflict is not, at its root, about ecology or ethnicity. It is about a property system that privileges political connection over historical use, and that system guarantees that the violence will continue as long as the land remains valuable and the titles remain fakeable.

The State That Watches

If the conflict were simply a local matter of land and identity, the federal security apparatus should be able to contain it. The Nigeria Police Force fields approximately 371,000 officers, according to a 2018 statement by the Inspector-General. No updated police strength data has been published since 2021 — itself a measure of institutional opacity. Divided across thirty-six states, a federal capital, and a population of over two hundred million, that number produces a police-to-citizen ratio so far below international standards that the arithmetic itself is an indictment. In Plateau, the problem is compounded by the perception, widespread among indigenous communities, that security forces drawn predominantly from northern states are sympathetic to herder interests. Whether this perception is accurate is less important than its effect: it means that when the police or military arrive after an attack, they are greeted with suspicion rather than relief, and their investigations rarely produce convictions.

The military, meanwhile, has been stretched across multiple theatres. Operation Safe Haven, the special task force deployed to Plateau since 2010, was designed to separate combatants and protect civilians. Over time it has become a permanent fixture, manning checkpoints that everyone learns to bypass, conducting patrols that follow predictable routes, and responding to attacks that have already concluded. The troops are not lazy. They are exhausted, under-resourced, and operating in terrain they do not know with intelligence they do not trust. I have watched their convoys rumble through Barkin Ladi at midday, hours after the killing has finished, the soldiers sitting in open trucks with their rifles between their knees, staring at the crowds that stare back without gratitude or expectation.

The checkpoints themselves have become part of the economy of insecurity. Every vehicle passing through a military or police roadblock pays something—a few hundred naira, a bottle of water, a bag of oranges. The money is not corruption in the grand sense. It is survival for underpaid constables and soldiers whose salaries arrive irregularly and whose barracks lack running water. But the checkpoint economy also creates an incentive to maintain the conflict. If peace broke out tomorrow, the roadblocks would come down, and the small streams of cash that sustain the men in uniform would dry up. No one admits this. No one needs to. The incentives speak for themselves.

The weaponry on the ground has evolved far faster than the response. What began in 2001 with machetes, bows, and locally fabricated Dane guns has graduated to AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and military-grade communications equipment. The Institute for Security Studies has documented the proliferation of automatic weapons across the Middle Belt, sourced from Libya, from Sudan, from the security forces' own arsenals, and from the thriving black market that connects them all. A herder defending his cattle does not need a Kalashnikov. A militiaman executing a coordinated village raid does. The distinction between defence and offence has dissolved in a flood of small arms.

The intelligence failure preceding the Christmas Eve attacks was not an anomaly. It was a feature. Operation Safe Haven maintains a network of informants and community liaisons, but the information they gather rarely reaches the level of operational planning. Commanders rotate every few months, ensuring that no one builds the local knowledge necessary to distinguish between routine tension and imminent attack. The military relies on aerial surveillance and checkpoint data, but the attackers have learned to move at night, through terrain the drones cannot penetrate, and to bypass the checkpoints using footpaths known only to locals. The security architecture was designed for conventional warfare against a foreign enemy. It is structurally incapable of preventing a village massacre planned by men who grew up on the same hills they now burn.

Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force. The state hears them only when the violence becomes too large to ignore, and even then, its response is reactive, militarised, and temporary. There is no systematic protection of civilians because there is no systematic accountability for failing to protect them. An army general who loses a base in Borno is reassigned. A police commissioner who fails to prevent a massacre in Plateau is transferred. The system protects its own. The civilians are left to bury theirs.

The Same Fire, Different Postcodes

In Plateau, the state is present but paralyzed. Its soldiers man the checkpoints. Its governors issue statements. Its peace agencies sign memoranda. And still the villages burn. The paralysis is not an accident. It is the product of a political economy in which instability serves certain interests: land speculators who acquire territory after displacement, security contractors who profit from permanent emergency, and politicians who mobilise ethnic fear to deliver bloc votes. The people who benefit from the violence are not the ones who suffer it. That is the definition of a protection problem.

The human cost is carried disproportionately by women and children. In the IDP camps I have visited across Barkin Ladi and Riyom, the demographics skew heavily female. The men are either dead, fighting, or working as day labourers in Jos township to send back small sums. The women manage the shelters, nurse the traumatised, and negotiate with host communities for access to water and firewood. Sexual violence has become a routine weapon of this conflict, used to terrorise populations and destroy the social fabric that might otherwise enable return. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented gender-based violence in conflict-affected Plateau communities, though underreporting remains severe because stigma and security concerns keep survivors silent. The silence is itself a form of violence, a second assault that outlasts the first.

The children in these camps do not attend school consistently. Some have been out of formal education for five years, since the 2018 violence in Gashish and Ropp districts. They are growing into adolescence without literacy, without numeracy, and without the protective social networks that schools provide. In another decade, they will be young adults with no skills, no legitimate employment, and a detailed memory of every house that burned and every relative who did not run fast enough. They are the next generation of fighters, already recruited by circumstance. The 32.1% youth unemployment rate is not a statistic to them. It is a biography.

I have watched this cycle repeat enough times to know that the next attack is not a matter of if but when. The dry season is coming. The politicians are preparing for the next electoral cycle. The weapons are already in position. And the state, with its 371,000 police officers and its Third Armoured Division and its Operation Safe Haven, will respond again with statements, with roadblocks, with promises of investigation. The smoke will clear. The survivors will bury their dead. The IDP camps will fill. And then, when the conditions align—when the grass dries, when the votes are counted, when the land titles change hands—the smoke will rise again.

The IDP camps themselves are monuments to institutional forgetting. In the Riyom camp I visited in March 2023, families were living in classrooms at a government primary school, sleeping on reed mats between desks that still bore the names of children who had long since fled to safer states. The water supply came from a single borehole that worked four hours a day. There was no clinic. The nearest hospital was fifteen kilometres away, accessible only by motorcycle taxi on a road where ambushes were common. A woman named Rebecca, who had fled Gashish in 2018 and again in 2022, told me she had given birth twice in the camp without a midwife. Both children survived. Many do not. The infant mortality rate in Plateau's IDP settlements is unrecorded by any government agency, which means it does not exist in policy terms. Out of sight, out of statistics, out of mind. The humanitarian response, when it comes at all, arrives in the form of ad hoc distributions of rice and oil from church groups and international non-governmental organisations that lack the access or mandate to address the structural drivers of displacement.

Jos is not an exception. It is the template. What burns on the Plateau is already smouldering in Zamfara, in Borno, in the creeks of the Delta. The only question is who will read the smoke before it becomes fire.

Sources

1. National Bureau of Statistics. Labour Force Survey, Q4 2022.
2. International Organization for Migration. Displacement Tracking Matrix, Nigeria — Round 45 (February–March 2023).
3. Premium Times. "Over 160 Killed in Plateau Christmas Eve Attacks" (26 December 2023).
4. HumAngle. Field reporting on Plateau Christmas Eve attacks (25–28 December 2023).
5. SBM Intelligence. Nigeria Security Report (2024).
6. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Nigeria 2023 data, compiled by ACCORD (8 April 2024).
7. Council on Foreign Relations, Nigeria Security Tracker. Farmer-herder clash data, 2018–2023.
8. Nigeria Watch Report (2024), cited in The Guardian Nigeria (4 March 2026).
9. Kwaja, C. "Farmer-Herder Conflicts in the Middle Belt: Beyond the Ecological Narrative." USIP Peaceworks (2019).
10. Institute for Security Studies. Weapons proliferation documentation in Nigeria's Middle Belt (various reports, 2020–2023).
11. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Gender-based violence reports, Nigeria (2023–2024).
12. Office of the Inspector-General of Police. Police strength statement (2018). No updated data published since 2021.
13. Nigerian Meteorological Agency. Climate data for northern Nigeria (various years).