These ethnic cleansings were allowed to go on by the Gowon's government and these arsonists and murderers were left unpunished till today. This was immediately followed by the one of the worst genocides in Africa in which over one million Igbos were killed in the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War and no Nigerian army officers involved in these acts of war crimes against the Igbo were ever tried for war crimes.
The year 1980 in Nigeria witnessed the beginning of a major religious violence on a large scale in Nigeria. It started in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano by a religious bigot and a radical preacher by the name of Mohammed Marwa Maitatsine who led riots in Kano. He was killed by security forces, but his followers were never arrested or prosecuted with the laws of Nigeria. These remnants later started other religious uprisings in other northern cities throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the watch of the successive military governments in power in Nigeria at that time.
The mid 1990s was the beginning of ethnic cleansing of the Ogonis and the political uprising in the Nigeria's Niger Delta region led by late Ken Saro Wiwa against the multinational oil companies operating in Nigeria for environmental degradation of the region and for more share of the Nigeria's oil wealth for that region of Nigeria. The regime of the late General Sanni Abacha supported a state sponsored murder of Ken Saro Wiwa via a Kangaroo court system despite the various international appeals and oppositions against his trial and conviction. His murder gave birth to today's reign of terror in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria by the various militant groups operating freely in that part of Nigeria.
The beginning of the 4th democratic dispensation in Nigeria witnessed the introduction of the Sharia law in many of the states of the Northern Nigeria by a number of their civilian governors in direct violation of the Nigerian 1999 Constitution that stands for secularism in the governance of the affairs of the Nigerian nation. These developments led to the several religious and sectarian riots in the Northern Nigeria under the regime of Olusegun Obasanjo without any serious prosecutions of these fanatics, arsonists, looters and murderers.
The late President Yar'Adua inherited these religious crises, and he followed the same approaches and patterns used by the successive Nigerian governments to address these crises since the 1960s. In 2009, today's most dreaded terrorist group in Nigeria by the named of Boko Haram was born under Yar'Adua's watch and is inherited today by President Jonathan Goodluck. The nation's security apparatus has proved to be totally helpless in addressing the menace of Boko Haram and the Niger Delta militant groups despite a security budget of over $7 billion a year.
The most important question today is this:what is the way forward for the future of the Nigerian nation in crises? The government of Jonathan Goodluck should immediately convene a National Sovereign Conference of all ethnic nationalities and religious groups in Nigeria to decide the future of this nation. Two different political possibilities and outcomes are practically possible in all reality which are:(i) A confederacy system of government that will break Nigeria into six or more geopolitical regions that are political and economically autonomous and with a weak central government in Abuja. (ii) Secession of the federating units in Nigeria into independent nations like what was done to the former nations of Sudan in 2011 and USSR in 1990s.
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