Boko Haram – praag.org

Blast kills dozens in Nigeria

A bomb blast hit a busy meat market in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Maiduguri on Tuesday, killing as many as 50 people, an eyewitness and a hospital source told Reuters.

The bomb which was concealed under a butcher’s table in the market went off at around 1pm local time, killing shoppers and travellers, a military source said.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the latest explosion, which follows two bomb attacks over the weekend that killed at least 30 people and bore the hallmarks of militant Islamist group Boko Haram.

The group, which new President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed to crush, has killed thousands of people and displaced around 1.5 million in its bid to establish an Islamic caliphate in the northeast of Africa’s biggest economy and top oil exporter.

Lawal Kawu, a paramedic, said 31 charred bodies had been evacuated to the teaching hospital in Maiduguri, and several other people were brought in with severe injuries.

Witnesses said they heard a loud explosion.

Source: Reuters

Minister wants to arrest white ‘mercenaries’ fighting Boko Haram

The South Africans going to help the Nigerian army against terror group Boko Haram should be arrested on their return, Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said in Beeld on Thursday.

She labelled them “mercenaries” in comments made to reporters on the eve of the African Union’s summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Beeld has reported that a multinational team of over 100 private military experts was on its way to Nigeria to help against Boko Haram.

Former soldiers of the SA Defence Force [the predecessor of the SA National Defence Force] formed the core.

“There are consequences when somebody leaves the country and provides any form of military assistance that is not part of the government’s deployment,” she said.

The police and prosecuting authority should make examples of the group by charging them under the regulation on Foreign Military Assistance Act.

Their team leader said they were not mercenaries, but would provide training in terms of a contract with the Nigerian government.

Mapisa-Nqakula said no SA National Defence Force member was deployed to Nigeria, and South Africa had not received an official request for assistance or weapons.

On Tuesday Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, expressed her disappointment at the South Africans’ involvement.

Nigeria elects Muslim president

Former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari defeated incumbent Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria’s presidential poll by 2.57 million votes, the country’s electoral commission announced on Wednesday, ending Jonathan’s rule of Africa’s most populous nation.

Three decades after seizing power in a military coup, Buhari became the first Nigerian to oust a president through the ballot box, putting him in charge of Africa’s biggest economy.

The Independent National Electoral Commission said the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate won 15,424,921 votes, or 53.95 percent of the 28,587,564 total valid votes cast.

Jonathan, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), won 12,853,162 (44.96 percent).

As the scale of this weekend’s electoral landslide became clear, Jonathan called Buhari on Tuesday to concede defeat to the opposition leader, an unprecedented step that should help to defuse anger among Jonathan’s supporters.

Jonathan’s quick concession could help alleviate fears of a repeat of post-election violence that saw 1,000 killed after Jonathan defeated Buhari in 2011.

As vote counts rolled in and Buhari’s victory looked ever more assured, thousands of people spilled into the streets of northern Nigeria’s biggest city Kano to celebrate.

For Buhari, 72, it has been a long road back to the pinnacle of Nigerian politics. A former army general, Buhari overthrew president Shehu Shagari – widely seen as inept and corrupt – in a military coup in 1983. As the head of a military government in the 1980s, he earned a reputation for his tough stance against nepotism and fraud.

Voter dissatisfaction with Jonathan – whose time in office has been marked by the rise of militant Islamist group Boko Haram and allegations of failing to tackle endemic corruption in the oil-rich country.

He also promised to stamp out Boko Haram’s insurgency in the north, which has claimed the lives of more than 13,000 people and left some 1.5 million homeless.

Buhari has also managed to bridge the traditional ethnic and religious fault lines of Nigerian politics – typically divided between the mainly Christian south and Muslim north.

As a Muslim from the north, Buhari for the first time won states in the southwest and even took one-third of votes in a southeastern state – an unprecedented development that some say reflects voter dissatisfaction with Jonathan more than it does enthusiasm for Buhari.

Good luck to Nigeria’s president at the polls

Less than two weeks from national polls, Nigeria’s ruling party is facing unprecedented shifts in the politics of religion that could spell trouble for the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan.

While he may still be the favourite on February 14, experts said some factors could remove his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from power for the first time since the end of military rule in 1999.

Opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim, has gained surprising traction in the mostly Christian south, despite sustained PDP efforts to paint him as a religious extremist.

Jonathan has been heavily criticised for his apparent failure to reduce graft in Africa’s most populous country and top economy, where billions of dollars in public money have been stolen, especially in the oil sector.

Boko Haram’s brutal uprising has also worsened each year under Jonathan’s watch, with more than 13,000 people killed since 2009.

For Dapo Thomas, political scientist at Lagos State University, the emphasis on a candidate’s religion and tribe has “driven merit to the backseat”.

Jonathan beat Buhari by roughly 10 million votes in 2011, winning roughly eight million in the north and the religiously divided central states.

If Jonathan’s support in the north collapses and Buhari makes inroads in the south, analysts said the president could lose.

Buhari is helped by the fact that he is leading a united opposition, unlike in 2011 when rival candidates peeled off more than three million votes.

Source: AFP

SA ‘link’ in Niger boat attack

Thirteen police officers were feared dead after their boat was attacked by armed men in the oil-rich Niger Delta, local media reported on Sunday.

The officers were en route late on Friday to a funeral ceremony in which they were to provide security when their boat was attacked in a mangrove swamp in southern Bayelsa state, Nigerian newspaper Vanguard reported.

The officers are assumed to have drowned after their boat was sunk by the assailants, the paper reported.

Three policemen reportedly survived the attack.

No group has claimed responsibility. However, the focus has turned to the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which recently threatened to launch attacks in response to the sentencing of its former leader, Henry Okah, by a South African court to 24 years in jail for a 2010 bombing.

MEND rejected the sentence on its leader, Okah, by Justice Neels Claaseen of the South Gauteng High Court.

He was found guilty of several charges of terrorism in the Independence Day bombings in Abuja in 2010 and sentenced to 24 years in jail.

In a statement signed by “Comrade Azizi,” purportedly on behalf of MEND, the group said, “Boko Haram has killed more innocent Nigerians than any other militancy groups in the country and yet their spokesperson was handed a three year sentence, this is the height of injustice to our region and people which will be resisted by all means necessary.”

The statement said that consultations were ongoing with some stakeholders and elders of the region and that its position will be made known thereafter.

“The gate of hell has just been let loss, (sic),” the statement declared. – Sapa