I want to caution you on the quick feeling of relief over the Kano incident, it was not as light as you are assuming. The wrong reasons were adduced by CNN when it reported that it was a Shari'ah riot and that Muslims were killing Christians, this was not so. But the reality was that an organised gang of hoodlums went around killing Christians and destroying their property. This provoked a reaction by Christian armed gangs to exact revenge on any Muslim and their properties they can find.
Finally when the security forces arrived on the scene, they shot at both Christian and Muslim gangs. the dead bodies of these gang members plus thier victims made the number killed look large, but in actual fact half the dead were hoodlums. But CNN reported that ALL the dead were Christians killed by Muslims.
To be frank, quite a number of people were killed, possibly more than 200, but some 95% of Kano was blissfully unaware of the happenings. So the question that need to be asked is, who is doing the killing? Who organised the gangs? Why? The same thing happened in Jos, Benue, Kaduna and recently in Ibadan. In the dead of night these hoodlums will go to burn a church/mosque or two and it will be spread around that it is either burned by Muslims or Christians and the stage is set for conflict.
This is a very serious matter since this generates a situation of perpetual tension between the groups and hardly anything meaninful can ever be achieved and we will do well to understand who is benefitting from this situation. We know the agitators for break-up of the country have failed due to the stability of the north, they have now figured that the only way succeed is to distabilize the north. This we must not allow them to achieve.
