The history of northern Nigeria is complex and can be confusing. Nigerians frequently use the term the ‘North’ to designate the old Northern Region, inherited from colonial powers until the creation of new states in 1967. Thus, Nigeria’s ‘One Northern’ myth is related to the Premiership of Sr. Ahmadu Bello who, on the eve of Nigeria’s independence, attempted to weld together a political community in the northern part of Nigeria to confront other regions for power sharing agreements. The first of these components was the Sokoto Caliphate, which includes the emirate provinces of Adamawa, Bauchi, Bida, Ilorin, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto and Zaria. The second component was the Borno province and third was the Middle Belt provinces of Kabba, Plateau and Benue. He referred to the northern Muslims as ‘Jama’ar Arewa’, meaning a trans-ethnic community of the North while the Christian parts where arrogated the derogatory Pagan Province.

The Middle Belt region, according to Ishaku, ‘connotes the mid-lands between the southern and northern part of the country’. Providing further demarcations on what constitutes the geographical middle belt, Ballard says that ‘the middle belt is the area roughly inscribed by the
Hausa-speaking area to the north, and the Yoruba, Edo and Ibo-speaking areas to the south’. With this apparent delineation of the Middle Belt region, Shilgba goes on to name the territorial states to include Benue, Nasarawa, Taraba, Adamawa, Plateau, Southern Kebbi, Kogi, Kwara Niger, Southern Kaduna, FCT, Southern Gombe, and two minority local governments areas of Tafawa Balewa and Bogoro in southern Bauchi state.

However, the fear of the majority dominance and the politics that surrounded oil revenue allocations forced the late General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s foremost military dictator, to divide the country into six geopolitical zones in 1995. The southern region comprises the South-West, South-South and South-East. The three northern geopolitical zones are the North-West, North-East and North-Central. In North-Central there are six states in addition to the Federal Capital Territory Abuja, Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger and Plateau states.

Current controversies in Nigeria’s political discourse are about the political and ideological understanding of the difference between the North-Central zone and the Middle Belt region. While the North-Central zone is perceived as a political division, the Middle Belt region is more or less an ideological conception. It is ‘an anti-feudal political tendency directed against what has been coined the Hausa-Fulani oligarchy’. More importantly, it is a ‘vehicle for political mobilization and a rallying point in the struggle for identity and political participation’ by Christian minorities of Lord Lugard’s northern Nigeria. Sklar is therefore right to have posited that ‘the Middle Belt area comprises of people who were either non-Hausa speaking, non-Muslim or both’. The Middle Belt became a category, activating non-Muslim and non Hausa-Fulani consciousness against northernization perceived as a ploy to Islamize the Christians and other non-Muslim groups of the North, while keeping ethnic minorities marginalized in the socio-political development of Nigeria.

"I come from a small tribe - the Tarok tribe in Langtang. It is a small tribe from a small group. If the north secures independence from the rest of the country the Hausa/Fulani will be so dominant and will lord over us whether we like it or not. A bigger Nigeria will check such excesses. So the bigger Nigeria, the freer my tribe and myself will be". - Domkat Bali

Obviously, this definition of the Middle Belt region remains very contentious. For example, if viewed from the perspective of self-emancipation of non-Muslim and non-Hausa-Fulani ethnic minorities in the north, then the geographical definition negates the non-Muslim and non Hausa-Fulani
minorities in northern states of Borno, Jigawa, Kano and Katsina. They are not captured by the geographical definition, yet they share in the religious quest of rejecting the Islamic hegemony over northern Nigeria. Another point deserving attention is that the ideological/political definition of the Middle Belt excludes those who live in the region geographically, but whose political sympathy is with those from elsewhere. For instance, some emirates in Niger state such as Bida, Kontagora and Lapai emirates, although they belong to the Middle Belt territorially, they will identify with the religious aspirations of Islam symbolized in the Caliphate in Sokoto. This is because they act as ‘traditional and religious’ leaders of the Muslims in their emirates. In the same way, the Yoruba in Kogi whose ambition will win the sympathy of the South-West is likely to identify with that region politically rather than with the Middle Belt. And alternatively, how the Yorubas of Ilorin will also rather align with the Muslim north both politically and socially than with the greater Yoruba nation. Whatever the contentions, one thing is obvious, the beginning of the Middle Belt region is seen as the mid-lands between the southern and northern part of the country, with indigenous ethnic groups that pre-date colonial experience in the sub-region.

However, the activities and legacies of both the colonial masters and the Muslim Hausa-Fulani imperialists brought the Middle Belt region to be what Dan-Suliman, quoted by Ibrahim, describes as a ‘grossly marginalized region with an endangered species on the brink of extinction and cultural annihilation’ . Thus for Dan-Suliman, the legacies of both the colonial administration and Muslim Hausa-Fulani imperialists, especially during the period of decolonization in the 1950s, marginalized the indigenous ethnic groups of the Middle Belt region who are mostly Christians and worshippers of the African Traditional Religion (ATR).

Violent conflict in the Middle Belt region has flared up periodically over the last 10 years, pitting Muslims against Christians, settlers against indigenes, one ethnic group against the other, including confrontations between different Islamic sects.