Plateau State — the colonial Tin Belt centred on the cool highlands of Jos — was settled in the 20th century by Hausa-Fulani migrant tin workers and Igbo and Yoruba traders alongside the indigenous Berom, Anaguta and Afizere ('Jos indigenes'). The constitutional category of 'indigene' (Section 318(1) of the 1999 Constitution), which restricts access to land titles, scholarships, civil service quotas and elective office in a Local Government Area to families historically resident there, made the Jos indigene-settler line politically and economically lethal.
The first major outbreak — 7–17 September 2001 — was triggered by the appointment of a Hausa-Fulani Coordinator of the Federal Poverty Eradication Programme for Jos North LGA. Approximately 1,000 died; the Justice Niki Tobi panel report was never published. The Yelwa massacre of 2–3 May 2004 — when Christian Tarok militiamen killed approximately 630 Muslim Hausa-Fulani at Yelwa Shendam in a single day — provoked the retaliatory Kano killings of Christian Igbo migrants (12–14 May 2004) and the Obasanjo State of Emergency in Plateau (18 May 2004), the only such emergency in a state in the Fourth Republic.
The 28–30 November 2008 outbreak — disputed Jos North local-government election — produced an official 700+ dead, with the bodies of Hausa-Fulani recovered from the Central Mosque and Christian families killed at Bukuru. The Dogo Nahawa massacre of 7 March 2010 in which approximately 500 Berom Christians were killed in night-time attacks by armed Fulani herdsmen on three villages south of Jos was unprecedented in its concentration: women and children machetted in their homes between 03:00 and 06:00, no security response despite the location being 20km from a Mobile Police base.
Total Plateau dead 2001–2025 conservatively exceed 7,000. The Plateau Peace Conference (Solomon Lar, 2004) and the State of Emergency (2004) produced no prosecutions; the Special Task Force ('Operation Safe Haven', deployed 2010–) has not produced a single conviction for any of the recurring atrocities. Plateau is the laboratory case for climate-driven grievance insurgency — the southward push of pastoralists out of the Sahel meeting an institutionally encoded indigene-settler hierarchy and a stateless rural night.