Kenya is going through what Uganda did a little over two years ago — a fight over Mau Forest, a key source of water for the country.

In Uganda in 2007, there was an energetic campaign by various groups to oppose the Kampala government’s decision to give away chunks of the important Mabira forest to a sugar company to cut and grow cane.

Because the sugar company, Lugazi, is owned by a Ugandan-Asian family, a pro-Mabira demonstration tragically ended in the killing of an Asian trader whom a mob set upon to vent their anger.

The remarkable thing about the Mabira protests, and now the tug of war over Mau, is that they simply blow away traditional political blocs and create all sorts of new alliances.

In Uganda, the campaign to save Mabira was the largest coalition of disparate political groups and pressure groups the country had yet seen.

Mau too has broken political alliances, and brought together political elements that were at each other’s throats in the violence that followed the December 2007 elections.

Even if they turn nasty, we need more, not less of these kinds of conflicts in Africa. Anything that breaks tribal solidarities, as we are seeing currently in Nigeria, can only be good.

Nigeria has both a long-running environmental conflict in its Delta region, and the latest attacks by militants seeking sharia law in Borno state that have left over 400 people dead, conjure up previous clashes between Christians and Muslims in other parts of the country.

Though religion-fuelled conflicts sometimes have a nastiness that far surpasses tribal-driven ones, and the Christian-Muslim bloodbaths are a truly frightening aspect of politics in countries like Nigeria, they can still claim to have better elements for stability in the decades to come.

When a country is bedevilled by tribal conflict, it is much more difficult to resolve it, partly because international intervention has little effect.

If Catholics are locked in a deadly fight with Protestants, you can get the Pope to mobilise the local archbishops to reach out to the Catholic militants.

But if, for example, there is a conflict between the Banyoro and Batooro in Uganda, like most African ethnic groups, they don’t have international extensions the way the Irish have with the Irish-Americans. So you end up with a hyper-local, impenetrable feud, too complex for any external mediators.

Also, you can change your religious beliefs to save yourself if your side is threatened with extinction. However, you can’t change your tribe.

Then, the range of views you find within religions is not as common within tribe.

You are either a tribalist, or not. But you can have hardline, moderate, left-leaning, or ecumenical Muslims and Christians to work with.

This offers various possibilities for a solution to a religion-based conflict.

However, there is nothing like a moderate tribalist.

When you are talking to a tribal warlord or politician, you are invariably talking to a hardliner.

In Africa, therefore, tribal conflict is more likely to be a fight to the death, than a religious one.

In that sense, the killings in Nigeria can be said to be “good” in the way that the ones in Somalia, or Darfur in western Sudan, in which “Arab” Muslims are murdering “black” Muslims, are not.

An earlier version of this article referred to Kakira as the sugar company that was given Mabira Forest. This was a mistake. It is Lugazi Sugar Company. Apologies to Kakira for the harm the reference might have caused.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is executive editor of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Division.