Hausa and Yoruba are currently engaged in a deadly fight at the Mile Area of Lagos and all shops are under lock and key.

Witnesses told SimonAtebaNews that roads are blocked and traffic jam has started piling up.

Details were still sketchy but witnesses said pandemonium started after a man’s car was hit by a car driven against traffic by an Hausa man.

After bitter exchanges between both drivers, the Hausa man went to call his brothers who came with rage and stabbed the driver of the other car who happened to be a Yoruba man.

The Yoruba men around swung into action to rescue their stabbed brother or avenge him (it wasn’t clear whether he had died) and things only got worse, SimonAtebaNews learnt, from a Yoruba witness who could be biased.

Tensions between Yoruba and Hausa decreased last year after both ethnic groups came together to boot out former President Goodluck Jonathan, an Ijaw man from the Niger Delta region.

President Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani man from northern Nigeria replaced him on 29 May. While Yoruba, Hausa and Fulani celebrated, others including the Igbo watched in anger.

But shortly after taken office, voices began to rise that Buhari was an ethnic bigot and had sidelined his Yoruba partner, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Although the recent clashes are not related, many are already anticipating bigger political clashes in the ruling All Progressives Congress.

The clashes at Mile 12 area of Lagos are not new. Hausa traders often claim that Yoruba landlords try to take advantage of them by extorting them and by calling them Aboki, a word used out of context to mean illiterate and stupid. Yoruba say that’s not true.

There are often bitter sentiments between Yoruba and Igbo in Lagos, with Yoruba claiming that Igbo are criminals who could give away their mother and only child for money, and Igbo alleging that Yoruba are extremely tribalistic and lazy people who sell all of their lands to hard working Igbo and turn around to blame Ndi Igbo for working hard and succeeding in foreign lands.

But despite calls for secession, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and other ethnic groups have lived together almost peacefully for 102 years since the amalgamation of Nigeria by callous colonial Britain in 1914.

A civil war between 1967 and 1970 left more than a million Igbo people dead and threatened the existence of Nigeria as one nation, but since then, things have been better and examples of South Sudan and elsewhere show that secession may not be the answer after all.