A FRIEND captured part of the gravity of the latest outbreak of violence in Jos, Plateau State when he reported in a discussion, that the elder brother of another friend of his, an officer of the Nigerian Army had broken down in tears when he saw, first-hand, the extent of the tragedy. The soldier leading other ranks to quell the violence had said that from the front of NASCO, all the way to Rayfield, corpses littered the streets in Jos. Wasted Nigerian lives!

Many of the victims were still alive but they had been cut into pieces, they could only writhe in pain, awaiting the cessation of death throes and the inevitable. The soldier not knowing what to do started weeping. The conventional wisdom is that soldiers are supposed to be toughies not expected to break down in tears at the war front. War is bound to produce casualties. What happened on Sunday January 17 in Jos, with Christians and Moslems slaughtering each other deserves no other name but WAR. A senseless war. And yet on the battle-field, the soldier who had been brought in to make peace was so touched, he wept. He must have seen that there was neither rhyme nor reason to the attendant death and destruction. But increasingly, in Nigeria, too many things do not make sense.

Tragedy in its most elemental form moves us to tears even beyond the call of duty. So, in Jos, a soldier wept. I am immediately reminded of the tragedy in Haiti, with Anderson Cooper of CNN throwing aside his camcorder, rushing to carry a bleeding young man in his hands to ferry him to safety, away from a band of shop looters who had bloodied his head. In one instance, soldiering had to wait. In the other, journalism. The critical difference is that the earthquake in Haiti is a natural disaster. In Nigeria, the conflict is entirely man-made, turning the entire Nigerian nation itself into something of a natural disaster. In Haiti, the earthquake has produced thousands of casualties. In Jos, it is the same - the casualty figure according to one newspaper is 446, all within two days! The Independent newspaper UK puts the figure around 500.

Given the Nigerian gift for understatement, it could be worse. The Haiti earthquake produced aftershocks that have been just as devastating. The Jos incident is equally an aftershock arising from previous religious earthquakes, brewed in the cauldron of politics. Whereas the rest of the world is rushing to the rescue of the people of Haiti, the outside world is not shocked by the crisis in Jos. There is scarcity of food and water in Jos as well as in Pankshin and Mangu to which the violence has spread, about 5, 000 persons have been displaced, but neither the UN nor the Red Cross is likely to send relief materials. Sectarian violence in Nigeria has assumed a familiar and monotonous shape.

Human Rights Watch has advised that the use of force should be restrained, but every outside response is bound to be a ringing indictment of Nigeria - a country that has turned itself into a disaster on the basis of religion, ethnicity and poor politics. With an absentee President and widespread disregard for the rule of law, the international community which has been expressing anxiety about Nigeria would take this as confirmation of its established prejudices. Nor is it good news that the Jos sectarian violence was preceded by religious riots in Bauchi and both by the December 25 Abdul Mutallab terrorism incident involving a US Detroit-bound aircraft.

The United States which had placed Nigeria on a terror watch-list must feel that its position has been vindicated. What further proof does anyone need that Nigeria breeds terror? What terror can be worse than Christians and Muslims, Biroms and Hausa-Fulanis turning guns and machetes on each other on a Sunday morning? There were reports that "fake soldiers" wearing a pair of slippers joined in the madness. Could this be why the soldier of our narration wept?

Thisday newspaper has published the photograph of the house which purportedly caused the latest mayhem. The Christian Association of Nigeria denies that the crisis had anything to do with the location of a house being built by a Moslem in a supposedly Christian neighbourhood, but that a group of Moslems stormed a church - St. Michael Catholic Church - during Sunday worship and murdered a member of the congregation. Each time there is sectarian crisis in any part of Nigeria, nobody ever knows what the actual cause is. The real truth is usually lost in a maze of partisan explanations. The seriousness of the incident is however easily measured in terms of lives lost, and properties destroyed. It is terrible that Nigerian cities are divided into Christian and Moslem neighbourhoods. Fifty years after independence, and forty years after the official end of the Nigerian civil war, Nigeria nevertheless remains perpetually at war with itself.

Sectarian violence has become recurrent because of the failure of leadership. Committees are set up to inquire into the remote and immediate causes (a much abused phrase) but in the end, nothing happens. The latest outbreak of violence occurred against the background of two different panels of enquiry: the Prince Bola Ajibola-led panel and the General Emmanuel Abisoye-led panel which investigated the November 28, 2008 outbreak of violence in Jos North. Is it likely that those who wielded guns and machetes last Sunday are not aware of the moves to ensure reconciliation and peace? The people do not care because they know that government is not serious and that the leaders in politics are divided. What further evidence of disagreement does anyone require other than the differences that produced two different panels of enquiry on Jos North in 2008? The Federal Government had one panel. The state government, another. Same subject. Two panels. Outcome? Many Nigerians do not trust their governments. So at every opportunity, they take the law into their hands.

The over 400 lives or more that have been lost in Jos, this week are wasted lives. Their murderers may never be brought to book. The corpses will be packed away, dumped in a mass grave, and life will gradually return to normal. The same streets that were lined with corpses would come alive again, like withered leaves sprouting anew. Where a body once writhed in pain, slashed into pieces, one Nigerian would erect his suya stand and other Nigerians would queue up, buy saut?ed meat and have fun. No one will remember that where they stand, innocent corpses - victims of a culture of intolerance, once lay. We have no respect for human lives. Postponing every problem until it degenerates into a crisis is a peculiar trait in this country of impossible paradoxes.

Peace will return to Jos only when both the Federal and state governments and the religious/traditional rulers in Plateau state decided to address the fundamental issues of citizenship and ownership of the land. Peace may return also when Nigeria generally becomes a land of equal opportunities and human rights are respected. But that cannot be achieved when there are lasting doubts about governance and the leaders are more interested in pleasure rather than work, rhetoric rather than concrete action that can transform the country and the people's lives.

The NYSC has threatened to withdraw national youth corps members from Plateau state should the crisis continue. What is the Director-General of the NYSC still waiting for? With tragedy in Jos becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, very few parents will be bold enough to allow their children to go into a community where the threat of ending life's journey in a mass grave is real. The lamentation of those who knew Jos in the past when it used to be a peaceful city and a melting pot of religious and ethnic nationalities notwithstanding. There is an Institute of Peace and Conflict Resolution in Abuja. It is a Federal Government parastatal. It is run by a Director-General and a Board of Directors. They travel abroad regularly, collecting estacodes. Every month, they receive salaries too.

There is also something fancifully called the Council for Inter-Religious Harmony (Understanding? Or Dialogue?). But what has been the impact of peace and conflict resolution in Nigeria? The day is not long in coming when Nigerian Christians would go to church with a pistol and an Ak-47 carefully hidden in their clothes and bags and Moslems would carry daggers about like the men of Yemen. When both begin to put their weapons to use, the price for the failure to address the politics of sectarian violence in Nigeria would have been paid.