September 7, 2001: 25 years after, remembering Jos, remembering ourselves

By Solomon Dalung

Today, 7 September 2026, marks exactly 25 years since that terrible Friday in 2001 when Jos was plunged into one of the darkest episodes in its history.

For those who were there, it is not merely a date in a history book. It is a memory of fear, confusion, loss and grief. For many families, it is the day a loved one did not return home. For others, it is the day a home, shop, church, mosque or business was destroyed. For some, it is the day a friendship that had survived years suddenly became impossible to repair.

And for a city that had long been known for its remarkable mixture of peoples, it was the beginning of a profound rupture in the social trust that had held many communities together.

The immediate incident that afternoon is now well documented.

According to the findings attributed to the Justice Niki Tobi Judicial Commission of Inquiry, the crisis had two immediate triggers. One was the controversy surrounding the appointment of Alhaji Muktar Mohammed as the federal poverty-alleviation coordinator for Jos North. The other was the confrontation involving a young Christian woman, Miss Rhoda Haruna Nyam, at Congo-Russia on Friday, 7 September 2001, where Muslims had gathered for Juma’at prayers.

Rhoda was not a stranger to that route.

Accounts of her testimony indicate that she had passed through the area during Friday prayers before. That afternoon, however, she attempted to use the road while the congregation was gathered and was prevented from passing. An argument followed. The precise details of the confrontation differ in the accounts presented to the inquiry and in subsequent reconstructions, and that is why we should be careful not to turn a contested sequence of events into an unquestionable story.

What we do know is that the confrontation did not end there.

Violence spread rapidly.

And here lies one of the most important lessons of 7 September 2001:

Rhoda Haruna Nyam did not cause the Jos crisis.

She was the immediate human figure around whom the first confrontation occurred, but the city was already carrying a heavy burden of unresolved political, ethnic, religious and economic tensions.

The Niki Tobi Commission itself identified the Congo-Russia incident and the appointment of Muktar Mohammed as the immediate causes. But the wider history was much deeper: disputes over political representation, the indigene and non-indigene question, competition over access to opportunities and political power, mistrust between communities, and the increasing entanglement of ethnicity and religion in political competition.

Human Rights Watch reached a similar conclusion in its contemporaneous investigation. Its account makes clear that the violence cannot responsibly be reduced to a simple story of Christians against Muslims. Christians and Muslims were both victims, and people from both communities also participated in the violence.

That fact was established.

Because when we reduce a complex tragedy to “they attacked us,” we make it almost impossible to learn from it.

There is another part of the story that deserves to be remembered.

Rhoda survived.

The woman whose confrontation became associated with the immediate outbreak of the crisis was not killed in the violence. She later gave evidence before the Judicial Commission of Inquiry.

Think about that for a moment.

A woman whose name became permanently attached to one of the most painful chapters in Plateau’s history survived the event and lived to tell her story.

Her survival should also caution us against the mythology that sometimes grows around tragedies.

She was a human being, not a symbol of one religion against another.

And the people gathered for prayers that afternoon were human beings too.

The thousands who subsequently died, irrespective of their religion or ethnicity, were human beings.

The mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children, friends and neighbours left behind were human beings.

That is how we must remember them.

Not as competing numbers.

Not as Christian victims versus Muslim victims.

Not as “our dead” and “their dead.”

They were Nigerians. They were Plateau people. They were human beings.

The days that followed were devastating.

Homes and businesses were destroyed. Places of worship were attacked. Communities were emptied. People fled for safety. Human Rights Watch documented attacks against both Muslims and Christians, including extensive destruction and displacement.

There were also grave allegations of abuses by security forces, including the deaths of 22 detainees at Jos Prison during the night of 9–10 September. These too form part of the uncomfortable history we must be willing to remember.

Because remembrance that excludes inconvenient truths is not remembrance. It is propaganda.

Twenty-five years later, we should also have the courage to admit something else:

The greatest tragedy of Jos 2001 was not only that people died. It was that trust died with them.

People who had lived beside one another suddenly began looking at one another through the prism of religion and ethnicity.

The neighbour became a potential enemy.

A name became suspicious.

A place of worship became a marker of territory.

An old friendship could be destroyed by a new rumour.

And once trust is destroyed, rebuilding it can take generations.

Yet, even in that darkness, there were people who refused to surrender their humanity.

There were people who protected neighbours.

People who sheltered people of another faith.

People who refused to participate in revenge.

People who continued to visit friends and maintain relationships across the religious divide after the violence.

And here is perhaps the most extraordinary and moving part of Rhoda Haruna Nyam’s story.

The story did not end with the crisis.

Rhoda herself later recalled that when she got married, some of the very Muslims who had known her and were connected to the events surrounding that terrible day came to her wedding. When she later gave birth, some of them also visited her in hospital.

Think about the meaning of that.

A woman whose name had become permanently associated with the beginning of one of the bloodiest episodes in Jos could still sit at her wedding surrounded by people from the other side of that terrible divide.

People who could have allowed the events of 2001 to define their relationship with her chose not to.

And that, perhaps, is one of the most profound lessons Jos can take from its own painful history.

If human beings who lived through such a terrible episode could find their way back to one another, then perhaps our society is not condemned to remain imprisoned by its worst memories.

Rhoda did not spend the rest of her life fighting those people.

They did not spend the rest of theirs defining her by what happened that afternoon.

They found a way, however imperfectly, to remain human to one another.

That is the part of the story I want our children to hear.

Because if we remember only the violence, we teach the next generation how to inherit anger.

But if we remember that even after the bloodshed people found their way back to one another, we teach them that reconciliation is possible.

Twenty-five years later, that may be the most important lesson of all.

I believe 7 September should therefore be a day of remembrance, reflection and recommitment, not a day for reopening old battles.

We must tell our children what happened.

We must tell them that hatred can grow from seemingly ordinary disputes when societies allow grievances to accumulate unchecked.

We must teach them that political competition becomes dangerous when politicians turn identity into a weapon.

We must teach them that religious differences should never become permission to dehumanise another person.

We must teach them that being indigenous to a place does not make another Nigerian less human, just as being a long-term resident does not erase the history and legitimate concerns of indigenous communities.

And we must teach our leaders that security is not merely about deploying soldiers after people begin killing one another. Good governance means identifying grievances early enough to prevent them from becoming violence.

Twenty-five years later, we should also ask ourselves whether we have truly learned.

Have we become better at resolving disputes before they become bloodshed?

Have we become more careful with rumours?

Have our political leaders become more responsible with identity?

Have we learned to distinguish justice from revenge?

Have we taught the next generation that another person’s religion is not a threat to their own?

These are difficult questions.

But they are necessary.

Because the people who died in September 2001 cannot answer them for us.

We must.

Today, I remember every innocent person who lost their life.

I remember the families whose lives were permanently altered.