By Tolu Ogunlesi
Lagos, Nigeria (CNN) — Last Sunday the world woke to news of ethnic and religious violence in Jos, central Nigeria.
Television footage soon emerged of hundreds of bodies, mostly of women and children, hacked to death by bands of marauders who invaded defenseless villages under cover of darkness. It was the second time this year that Jos would be making breaking news on CNN.
On both occasions, while Jos burned, Nigeria’s corridors of power battled their own “fires”: A series of intrigues that raged as insiders struggled for power in the absence of President Umaru Yar’Adua, who in November 2009 traveled abroad for medical treatment and has not been seen in public since.
Jos is not the only tragedy that has happened in the absence of the president. On Christmas Day 2009, a month after Yar’Adua literally vanished, a 23-year-old Nigerian national was arrested while allegedly trying to detonate explosives aboard a U.S.-bound flight, minutes from landing.
That action put Nigeria in the news and earned us a place on a United States terrorism watch list. Alas, there was no president to defend us before a curious world.
Tolu Ogunlesi 
My friend. You are on a dangerous, but erstwhile essential journey. I have known and worked with your country men and women, all committed to professional effort and advancing the Nigerian and African voices.
You have accurately desribed the numbing of reality that the INET and social network have brought to us all. The real battles are in the streets, the hallways of power, and in schools and civil organizations …. yet to reach a constructive and purposed progressive/results driven civil society.
These religious or otherwise ethnic “events” have NO place today. Resources for communities too long devoid of full education, health, and social development networks allows the killing to continue.
In the name of WHO do these cowards, Muslims, Christians, or simple thieves and bandits kill, and why….if it is outside forces, be it western, eastern, or near eastern ….those sources have to be identified and understood as to what their real mission is.