10-year-old girl used as human bomb in Nigeria New Year's Eve attack

From child soldiers to child suicide bombers, children are badly misused on parts of the continent of Africa.

 One person was seriously injured when a suicide bomber aged around 10 blew herself up in a New Year's Eve attack in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, witnesses and aid workers told AFP Sunday.

   The girl approached a crowd buying noodles from a food vendor in the Customs area of the city around 9:30 pm on Saturday and detonated her explosives, they said.   Although no one has claimed responsibility the attack bore the hallmark of Boko Haram Islamists who are notorious for using suicide bombers, mostly women and young girls, in attacking civilian targets.   "The girl walked towards the crowd but she blew up before she could reach her target," said witness Grema Usman who lives in the area.   "She died instantly, while one person was seriously hurt after after he was hit by shrapnel."   "(Judging) from her corpse the girl was around 10 years old," Usman said...In December two girls aged between seven and eight detonated explosives in suicide attacks on market in the city, injuring 19 people.

   Authorities blamed the attack on Boko Haram, whose seven-year insurgency has killed 20,000 people and displaced 2.6 million others. The conflict has spilled into Nigeria's northern neighbours.
Saturday's attack came a week after Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said the jihadist group had been routed from Sambisa forest, its last stronghold in Borno state:

Yet another forgotten tragedy

Unlike the refugees from Syria and elsewhere, whose perilous journeys to Europe have rarely been out of the headlines, the people of north-east Nigeria have remained almost entirely below the media radar. The UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in Nigeria, Peter Lundberg, says the crisis here is worsening rapidly.

As many as 14 million people could soon be in need of help; an international funding conference is to be held in Geneva next month. The UN and other agencies are urgently appealing for additional funding to help the forgotten victims of Boko Haram. The children’s agency Unicef has raised barely a quarter of the $115m it says it needs.

They are more than three million people in north-east Nigeria who were displaced in what has become one of the world’s worst – and least reported – humanitarian disasters. The UN has warned that up to 75,000 children could die within the next 12 months unless more help arrives urgently. In Borno state,  the medical relief agency Médecins sans Frontières says thousands of children have already died of starvation and disease. According to the agency, a survey conducted in two camps for displaced people in Maiduguri indicated that mortality rates among children under the age of five were more than double the threshold for the declaration of an emergency.

Pauline Bannaman of Oxfam, which provides water, sanitation and hygiene assistance in the area, as well as small cash handouts to enable villagers to buy food in local markets, says: “We think the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better, because large areas are now opening up after the military campaign against Boko Haram, which means that more people will be returning to their homes and finding nothing there.”

The famine which isn't a famine

 The ongoing war with Boko Haram that stretches across Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon has displaced 2.6 million people, both within national borders and across them. It has also left 6.3 million without enough food. The lack of food is the cumulative impact of three years of lost farming seasons, or of crops and livestock left behind, or looted. It is a consequence of towns and villages cut off by fighting, preventing people from leaving or food from coming in.

For the UN to declare a famine, 20 percent of families in a state or province face extreme food shortages, over 30 percent of the population, must be acutely malnourished and hunger causes two out of every 10,000 people to die every day. For those in north-eastern Nigeria not quite meeting the formal definition of famine, it is nothing short of a disaster.

Médecins Sans Frontières alerted the international community of a “catastrophic humanitarian emergency” in June, they were encountering rates of malnutrition and mortality rates in young children that were consistent with famine conditions in newly accessible towns. About 2.1 million people in Nigeria remain completely cut off from any external assistance because of the conflict. We don’t know what their conditions are like, but the conditions in these newly accessible towns raise grave concerns. People still in inaccessible areas are hardly going to cultivate their way out of hunger: even if people could plant crops, the next harvest is more than 12 months away. So aid supplies and the populations we suspect are in the greatest need remain cut off from one another.

We don’t currently have a defined famine in the Nigerian north east, but it’s hardly the point. We have 65,000 people already experiencing famine conditions, people cut off by violence and more than a million people with severe hunger, and we’re only meeting a fraction of the need.

http://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/2016/10/north-east-nigeria-man-made-hunger/

The Tragedy of Refugees

https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2016/10/18/hungry-and-isolated-women-who-survived-boko-haram-face-new-nightmareOver the past seven years, the militant group Boko Haram has set about destroying communities, schools and health facilities in northeast Nigeria and has used sexual violence and the kidnapping of women and girls to terrorize the population. At least 20,000 people have been killed, and an estimated 2.5 million people have been displaced.

Amid the carnage, communities have been unable to tend to their land and multiple harvests have failed. Hunger has taken over. Children and adults have wasted to death. The United Nations’ children’s agency UNICEF warned that 75,000 children could die this year without a major aid effort in northeast Nigeria. Aid has been slow to reach people in the region. Some Nigerians fear corrupt local officials are diverting resources from people in need. The international aid system was slow to recognize the scale of the crisis and has not yet cranked into full gear. Ongoing fighting has complicated the effort – the U.N. estimates that 2 million people remain inaccessible to aid agencies.

In Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, families continue to pour out of their destroyed homes and villages, seeking sanctuary, food and medical care. Maiduguri’s population has almost doubled in size to more than 2 million people in recent years. There are 11 official and unofficial camps for people who have been displaced across Maiduguri.  Even after they escaped fighting for the relative safety of the camps, the threat of violence and sexual assault continues to cast a long shadow over women’s lives. Most of the displacement camps are surrounded by the Nigerian military. Men carrying weapons are visible inside the camps, likely members of a civilian militia that is armed by authorities. People displaced from areas taken by Boko Haram have been met with suspicion in Maiduguri. Local authorities have openly fanned fears that the displaced population may have radicalized Boko Haram sympathizers in their midst. The militant group’s repeated use of women and girls as suicide bombers has roused the fears of the local population. Local officials describe women freed from Boko Haram control as a security risk, some claiming that is impossible to ensure that the camps for the displaced have not been “infiltrated” by “the wives of Boko Haram.” When people in Borno refer to “wives,” it is a euphemism for rape and sexual slavery. While it is possible that some women have voluntarily joined or married fighters, most survivors describe forced marriage and horrific sexual violence, including rapes by multiple men.

“Unspeakable things start happening to girls from the age of 12,” Amina, a 15-year-old girl from Bama who recently gave birth to her first child, said in a maternity clinic on the outskirts of Maiduguri. Women who became pregnant while in Boko Haram captivity have been particularly shunned by local communities.

Aisha, a mother of five, described fleeing her home in Mafa when Boko Haram militants attacked two years ago.

 “They came like wildfire to burn and loot our homes – they showed us no mercy, no mercy at all,” she says. “I picked up my children and ran and have been running since then.”

https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2016/10/18/hungry-and-isolated-women-who-survived-boko-haram-face-new-nightmare

Nigeria's Problems Continue

In Nigeria the Boko Haram insurgency has led to a food crisis the extent of which is only now being uncovered. Farms and food stores have been destroyed in the wake of the insurgency and farming is yet to resume in areas cut off by instability, even more so as the fields remain barren. For most families, their breadwinners and farm hands are either missing or have been killed in the crisis.

Médecins Sans Frontières warned last week that malnourished children were dying in large numbers. The following day, an insurgent attack led to the suspension of the delivery of vital supplies, compounding the crisis. Thierry Laurent-Badin, programme director for Action Contre la Faim in Nigeria, estimates that about 244,000 children are currently suffering from severe acute malnutrition in areas that used to be a complete no-go due to security restrictions, a figure also announced recently by UNICEF who urged donors and other humanitarian organisations “to scale up the response to the emerging disaster in Borno state”, and pledged to continue to work at full strength in Maiduguri.

The insurgency has claimed more than 20,000 lives since 2009 and at one time, Boko Haram had annexed a swathe of land the size of Belgium from the territory of Nigeria and renamed it Islamic State West Africa Province. While joint military operations with Chad, Niger, and Cameroon have led to the reclamation of most of the area pockets of violence remain in small towns and villages in the region. Last week, insurgents ambushed a UN convoy returning from Bama, north of Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, injuring two aid workers. It was the first attack of its kind in the region and prompted all UN agencies to halt missions to areas outside the city. The attack had far-reaching consequences on the distribution of food and other supplies to hundreds of thousands of civilians living outside Maiduguri who have been uprooted by the seven years of violence. Even before the recent travel suspension, only the UN had the capacity to travel to high-risk areas. Some other international aid agencies refused to use armed escorts due to neutrality concerns.

There have long been allegations of rampant misappropriation of resources by government stakeholders. The tentacles of corruption, a major issue in Nigeria, seem to have spread to the humanitarian sector as well. In May, fights broke out between soldiers and policemen in Maiduguri over trucks of rice and other foodstuffs donated by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, when he personally visited the Bakassi and Dalori camps in the city.

A month later, a video showing officials of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency repackaging food items allocated to the IDP camps by NEMA and diverting them for resale went viral on social media.

“A lot of sharing and sorting is done, so not everything gets to the IDPs at the end of the day,” an aid worker told IRIN on condition of anonymity. “Right now in Bakassi camp, IDPs say they are given raw food rations weekly, and left to figure out how they get it cooked, I suppose. The arrangement used to be that NEMA provides staples then SEMA provides firewood and condiments, but SEMA hasn’t been living up to their end. A lot of money has gone down the drain. You need to hear the ridiculous amounts they claim to use to get stuff like firewood.”

The innocent victims

Just under a quarter of a million children in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Borno, where an insurgency waged by jihadists Boko Haram has disrupted trade and healthcare, suffer from life-threatening malnourishment, UNICEF said on Tuesday. The UN children’s agency said the extent of the nutrition problems faced by children in Borno had become clearer as a result of more areas in the northeast becoming accessible to humanitarian assistance. UNICEF said that out of the 244,000 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Borno this year, around one in five will die if they do not receive treatment.

“Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly,” Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for Western and Central African warned. “There are two million people we are still not able to reach in Borno state, which means that the true scope of this crisis has yet to be revealed to the world.” 

The Islamist group Boko Haram’s seven-year rebellion has left 20,000 people dead and more than two million displaced.

Turning children into bombs

One in every five "suicide bombers" used by Boko Haram in the past two years has been a child, a report by UNICEF says.

"The use of children, especially girls, as so-called suicide bombers has become a defining and alarming feature of this conflict," Laurent Duvillier, regional spokesman for UNICEF said. "It's basically turning the children against their own communities by strapping bombs around their bodies."

Boko Haram child "suicide bombings" have surged ten-fold in West Africa in the last year, with children as young as eight, mostly girls, detonating bombs in schools and markets. Suicide bombings have spread beyond Nigeria's borders, with an increasing number of deadly attacks carried out by children with explosives hidden under their clothes or in baskets. Some young children probably did not know they were carrying explosives, which are often detonated remotely, Duvillier said. The tactic has proven effective in increasing the number of casualties as people do not usually see children as a threat.

There were 44 child "suicide bombings" in West Africa last year, up from four in 2014, UNICEF said, mostly in Cameroon and Nigeria. Three-quarters of the "suicide bombers" have been girls. Abducted boys are forced to attack their own families to demonstrate their loyalty to Boko Haram.

Almost one million Nigerian children are missing out on education as Boko Haram has destroyed more than 900 schools and killed more than 600 teachers, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

"Boko Haram is robbing an entire generation of children in northeast Nigeria of their education," Mausi Segun, Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Kings of the World

The Intercept website has a story on a secret US base at Garoua in northern Cameroon, near the Nigerian border. Garoua represents the newest expansion of America’s stealth war against Boko Haram jihadists in Africa.

Piloted and unmanned aircraft have flown from bases in Djibouti — the center of U.S. drone operations on the continent — as well as Ethiopia and Kenya, in addition to ships off the coast of East Africa. Predator MQ-1 drones and their larger cousins, MQ-9 Reapers, have been based in Niamey in Niger, N’Djamena in Chad, and Seychelles International Airport. There is plenty more to come. The National Defense Authorization Act for 2016 appropriated $50 million for construction of an “Airfield and Base Camp at Agadez, Niger … to support operations in western Africa.”

A detachment of Gray Eagle MQ-1C drones and their military support team became freed up from other surveillance operations last year, Africom looked for a base in the heart of the combat zone. The U.S. military already had a relationship with the Cameroon military — Special Forces work with Cameroon’s rapid response brigade, known by the French acronym BIR, an elite unit based primarily along the border with Nigeria — and was familiar with Garoua. The newest drone base constitutes a high-cost, high-tech military enterprise plunked down in a poor, under-developed country in Africa. In early February, the base became fully operational, hosting a fleet of four Gray Eagle drones, a successor to the original Predator, manufactured by General Atomics. The four drones, which can carry out surveillance missions in rotation 24 hours a day, allow U.S. intelligence analysts to gather detailed information about Boko Haram’s movements, bomb-making factories, and military camps.

The alliance is with an unsavory African strongman: Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who has clung to power for 33 years, almost as long as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and is regarded as a corrupt, remote, and authoritarian leader. A Human Rights Foundation report in 2014 stated that “Biya has built a system of corrupt and autocratic power, using the legal and justice system to imprison and bankrupt dissidents, opposition leaders, and journalists. … The secret police prowl university campuses, the army regularly patrols urban centers, and state permission is required for public assembly.” Biya had reportedly amassed a personal fortune of more than $200 million — compared to the average Cameroonian income of $1,350 a year.

The US drones soaring overhead reminds them of Cameroon’s poverty and powerlessness, and heightened their sense of being pawns in a global game. “You Americans are kings of the world, you have no borders,” Djonga said. “All we can do is go along.”

Full Story Here

For Boko Haram Victims Charity Begins At Home

Mohammed Abubaker is angry. Ten months ago, he was a businessman with a comfortable life in Nigeria’s northeastern border town of Gwoza. Now he’s homeless, his life turned upside down by the Boko Haram insurgency, and he doesn’t even own the clothes he wears.
Abubaker, 35, fled Gwoza for Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, 135 kms northwest. In the fear and confusion of Boko Haram’s sudden arrival in his hometown, shooting at everyone they met, he had just enough time to gather his family and run. He doesn't know if his parents and in-laws are still alive.
“I didn’t take anything out of the house; we fled with just the clothes on our backs. We left everything,” said Abubaker. To add insult to injury, he thinks Boko Haram probably torched his shop – he saw other stores burning as he ran.

Now he and his family of five live in one room in a compound owned by a wealthy Gwoza businessman, a distant relative, who is also helping some 50 other people made homeless by the conflict. “He assists anybody, so long as you are not a thief or Boko Haram,” said Abubaker.
But his personal change of fortunes weighs on his mind. “Every day I wake up thinking how I can find food for the children, or get them back into school,” he said. He has friends in town who allow him to take a couple of fares on their motorized tricycle taxis, known as “keke”, now and then; sometimes he finds the odd laboring job. 
“But even the mats we walk on in the room, the clothes we’re putting on - they are all contributions from relatives and friends,” said Abubaker. “I find it very difficult to eat. I just eat for the sake of eating. I’m so disturbed by what has happened.” 

More than 90 percent of the official figure of nearly one million displaced in the northeast live in communities rather than the official centres administered by the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA). It’s a reflection of traditions of hospitality and self-reliance that endure in Nigerian society, but which will come under increasing strain the longer the crisis lasts.
The official centres are usually set up in schools and other government buildings, but are overcrowded and lack toilets and washing facilities. Abubaker said he had registered at one of the 10 centres in Maiduguri, but the poor sanitation put him off.

NEMA has never had to cope with an emergency as big and complex as the crisis in the northeast. Aid workers IRIN spoke to said NEMA is taking responsibility, but is willing to engage with partners and is keen to learn - and to try to address deficiencies.
It has quickly responded to allegations made of rape and trafficking in some of the centres by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), based in southern Nigeria, announcing an investigation panel that will involve ICIR representatives.

More broadly, how to handle the displaced living outside the centres presents a unique set of challenges, which the humanitarian community in general has been slow to address. Management of the centres is relatively straight forward, but interventions to support the needs of those taken in by extended families - who themselves might be vulnerable - is far more complex. “You need to provide assistance to the hosts as well. You might need to try and expand the existing structure where the displaced are staying, for example by adding a room to the house,” said Stephanie Daviot, spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration (IOM). “These types of programmes require a lot of analysis and presence on the ground. They need to be adapted to the context of Nigeria,” she added.
Internally displaced people (IDPs) living in centres have traditionally been perceived by humanitarians to be poorer and therefore in greater need than those settled with relatives in the community. But growing research challenges the notion that IDPs living outside the centres are economically better off, and points to the urgent need to help host families as well. 
Grema Mustapha, 65, fled Kemla, 15 kms from Maiduguri, three months ago. Although Boko Haram was active in the area, the tipping point was when a Nigerian air force jet dropped a bomb on his village. A few days later, Boko Haram arrived and gathered the villagers, ostensibly to preach. 
But it was a “trick”, said Mustapha. Instead of taking political advantage of the military’s mistake, Boko Haram militants opened fire on the crowd. “They killed 50 people,” he said.
Mustapha now lives with his daughter, Fatima, in Maiduguri. But it is clear the household is struggling to cope. Fatima’s husband - who sells vegetables in the market - has also taken in IDPs related to his second wife. All told, he is responsible for 22 people – including 14 children. 

NEMA is re-thinking its approach. It is developing a “best practice” strategy, in conjunction with IOM, “on how to access this group of [community-based] IDPs and also integrate the hosts in the assistance plan”, said Daniel Gambo, NEMA’s director of training. “We aim to identify and reach out to them through the ward heads in the communities,” who are aware of the arrival of each new displaced family.
Some assistance is reaching the IDPs in the communities, “but not as much as is required”, acknowledged Gambo. 
Abubaker doesn’t know who to blame for his predicament. He is frustrated by what he feels is insufficient support from the authorities for what he has become: an indefinite squatter in another man’s property. He is exasperated Boko Haram was able to march into Gwoza despite the tip-offs he says the military had received. 
Abubaker hopes that the regional military intervention involving Chad, Cameroon and Niger - launched last month - will perform better than the Nigerian security forces have managed thus far. However, he won’t risk his family’s safety by returning to Gwoza just now.
“We will go back when the time is right,” he said.
from here

Chad V Boko Haram

The Chadian army is considered to be one of the strongest in the region, mainly because of its knowledge of the terrain. In 2013 it helped French forces to repel Islamists from northern Mali.

In addition to fighting in Cameroon, Chad is now fighting against Boko Haram on Nigerian territory. For Chad, more is at stake than just keeping the terror group out of its territory, Norbert Cyffer, professor emeritus of African studies and an expert on the region, said in an interview with DW.

Chad is to a large extent dependent on supplies from outside its borders, he said. "Supply routes run through Maiduguri in the northeast – the center of Borno State – and then to the west to the Nigerian border, to Gambaru and then to Fotokol on the Cameroonian side." This meant that Boko Haram attacks were also a threat to Chadian economic interests. Another important aspect is the wealth of resources believed to lie beneath Lake Chad which Chad wants to protect against attack. The region around Lake Chad is inhabited by large numbers of the Kanuri ethnic group. In Nigeria, there are believed to be between four and five million of them, and about one million in Chad. Many members of Boko Haram are thought to belong to the Kanuri. Boko Haram attracts mercenaries who join the group for a few hundred dollars without sharing their ideology or even being familiar with it, Cyffer said.

For Lucien Pambou, university professor and co-publisher of the magazine Geopolitique africaine, there are two reasons why Chad is fighting Boko Haram. Firstly, because Boko Haram wants to establish an Islamic caliphate in various countries, and secondly, because Chadian president Idriss Deby wants to show that Chad is important for the security of countries in the Sahel zone as well as in Central Africa. Deby is also facing criticism from within and so "providing help for Cameroon increases his popularity and improves his image," Pambou said.

Boko Haram is now believed to control an area in northern Nigeria the size of Belgium. Cyffer points to a longterm problem. "Chad is trying to repel Boko Haram. It seems not to be possible to eliminate them completely. And so Boko Haram fighters are pushed back from Cameroon to Nigeria, and from Nigeria they flee again to Cameroon." This meant the problem was just being shifted from one area to another while a solution remains elusive.

http://www.dw.de/the-role-of-economic-interests-in-chads-fight-against-boko-haram/a-18234847

Boko Haram War Hotting up

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-africom-commander-calls-for-huge-military-campaign-in-west-africa/5429010

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) head General David Rodriguez called for a large-scale US-led “counterinsurgency” campaign against groups in West Africa.

The US should prepare for operations in at least four West African countries as part of a “huge international and multinational” response aimed at forces affiliated with Boko Haram, Rodriguez said. AFRICOM is already preparing an “across the board response to the threat,” Rodriguez said. Rodriguez called on the Nigerian government to “let us help more and more.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to Nigera said that the US is ready to “do more” militarily in Nigeria.  Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Ed Royce is scheduled to meet with the Nigerian ambassador to the US, Ade Adefuye, known to be a strong advocate of US military intervention in Nigeria, according to Nigeria’s the Guardian. Representatives Patrick Meehan and Peter King demanded that the US implement “a comprehensive strategy to address Boko Haram’s growing lethality” in letters to Secretary Kerry posted in mid-January. The Obama administration is also preparing to approve the sale of Cobra jet fighters to Nigerian government, according to the Guardian.

At a the US Army West Point academy last week, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) chief General Joseph Votel said that US commando teams must prepare for new deployments against Boko Haram and the Islamic State. “[Boko Haram] is creating fertile ground for expansion into other areas,” Votel said. “While it isn’t a direct threat to the homeland, it is impacting indirectly our interests in this particular area and creating another area of instability,” the top US special forces officer said. Votel warned that radical Islamic groups are gaining tens of thousands of new fighters.

Rodriguez and Votel’s statements coincided with plans announced by the African Union last week to deploy a 7,500-strong multinational force in the name of fighting Boko Haram and “other extremist groups.” The AU multinational force will serve as the vehicle for further infiltration of US forces into West Africa, while providing support for and legitimizing the already significant US military presence in the strategically crucial, resource region. The intervention will proceed amidst elaborate war game exercises led by US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), known as Operation Flintlock, to be coordinated with a number of West African and European militaries beginning in mid-February. Last week, Chadian jet fighters and ground troops launched cross-border attacks against the Nigerian towns of Gamboru, Kolfata and Malumfatori, reportedly driving Boko Haram fighters out of the area. Boko Haram launched repeated assaults against northern capital of Maiduguri, home to some 2 million residents, reportedly utilizing heavy weapons including RPGs and artillery. The Nigerian military claims that hundreds of Boko Haram fighters were killed during the attacks.

Boko Haram - Would The West Care More If Nigerians Were White?

The UN has called on Nigeria to restore law and order in the northeast and investigate mass killings alleged to have been carried out in the past few weeks by the militant group, Boko Haram.
Boko Haram’s the same lot that last spring kidnapped 276 girls, most of whom have never been recovered. This January, while world attention was focused on the killings in Paris, Boko Haram waged an assault on two northern towns. Satellite imagery "before and after" shows Bega and its neighbor razed to the ground.

The Nigerian government says 150, human rights groups say more than ten times that many were slaughtered. The exact numbers are hard to confirm. But one thing’s pretty certain: if what's been dismissed as a religious squabble in the north was taking place in Nigeria's oil pipeline territory in the south, neither the government in Ajuba, nor the world's most powerful nations, would be watching the violence escalate.

Black lives don’t matter as much as white to the West, that’s clear. But everywhere #profitsmattermost.

Western media stereotypes notwithstanding, Nigeria’s not some tin-pot state. The largest economy on the continent, a founding member of OPEC, one of the world's leading oil producers, it's not the government that's poor, only the vast majority of its people. Nigeria's seen billions of oil dollars flow through it, the lion’s share to corporations including Chevron, Exxon and Shell, but the oil giants have kicked back plenty to Nigerian leaders, elected and not, in exchange for protection.
As a result, the military’s annual budget today exceeds $6bn, and they've never been reluctant to use it to protect pipelines.

In the mid 1990s when demonstrations by the people of Ogoniland threatened to shut down oil production, much of the Niger Delta was put under military rule and "maintaining law and order" led to the killing of leading Ogoni activists including Ken Saro Wiwa.
Nigerians are going to the polls in mid February. President Goodluck Jonathan may be replaced. But it’s the wealth that needs shifting, not just the politicians in Nigeria. More oil money going to taxes, and things the Ogoni activists were demanding, like schools and clean water, might have produced more democracy and less corruption, and perhaps less of that military budget would be ending up in generals' pockets. Who knows? If poverty was a bit less dire and popular discontent a bit less severe, Nigeria just might be less fertile territory for misogynist maniacs promising power and vengeance.

Would the West care more if Nigerians were white? No doubt. But one thing's for sure, if you could make money from school girls, the most powerful people in the world would be all over this.

from here

A Hierarchy of Victims - Why?

Are African lives worth less than the lives of people elsewhere in the world? For a brief period it was fashionable to show concern for the victims of political extremism in Africa. Remember the ‘BringBackOurGirls’ hash tag when the militant Islamist organization Boko Haram kidnapped schoolgirls in Chibok in Nigeria in 2014? The interest however soon died away. As the media spotlight was shone elsewhere, Boko Haram continued to make major territorial gains killing thousands in the process. Today, as reported by RT, the group now controls an area of 52,000 square kilometers, the size of Slovakia. While Islamic State and their territorial advances became front page news in 2014, the gains made by Boko Haram have, like the group’s victims, been ignored. Instead the focus is on the very small ‘threat’ terrorists pose to Europe. Last week 17 people were killed by terrorists in France. The events were shocking and quite rightly the murders were subject to unequivocal condemnation. At the same time, considerably more people were reported to have been killed by gunmen in Baga, Nigeria, with figures ranging from 150 to over 2,000. But it’s the French victims who we focus on, showing our solidarity with them by declaring ‘Je suis Charlie’. Even Nigeria‘s own President was keener to condemn the Paris attacks than those in his own country. How can this be right? Surely we should be mourning all victims equally?

You’ve probably got more chance of being killed by a lightning strike than by terrorists in Europe but the odds are greater in Africa. It’s clear than in many African countries, ordinary civilians have more reasons to worry about being murdered by al-Qaeda type groups than we do in Europe. It’s certainly more dangerous going to church there than it is in Europe. Dozens of churches were attacked in Kenya and Tanzania in a wave of bombings in 2013. Two worshippers were killed and thirty injured in a bomb attack at the Roman Catholic Church in Arusha, Tanzania in May 2013. Imagine what a major story it would have been had it happened in Europe, but it was in East Africa, so you probably didn’t read about it.

Cameroon is another African country which has more grounds to worry about terrorism than France. Only this week, there’s been a fierce battle between government forces and Boko Haram militants in the north of the country. “You will taste what has befallen Nigeria, Your troops cannot do anything to us,” Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau declared on video.

In Uganda too, the terrorist threat is very real. In 2010 militants from the Somali-based al-Qaeda affiliate group al-Shabaab killed over 70 people in bomb attacks on venues which were showing the football World Cup final. In September 2013 the same group killed at least 67 people in a shopping mall in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Why is there the excessive focus on the threat to ‘the West’? It’s partly about furthering the interests of our political elites. The so-called “war on terror” is being used by our governments as a pretext to restrict our age-old civil liberties and gain more control over our lives. They also want to ‘big up’ the terrorist threat at home to justify their interventionist foreign policies and their continued military presence in the oil-rich Middle East. Acknowledging that Africans face bigger risks than we do also wouldn’t fit in with the dominant neoconservative narrative of a “clash of civilizations” between radical Islamists, and “the civilized West.” The West must be seen to be the prime targets of the terrorists, even though they’ve been backing the same people in Syria and turned a blind eye when they murdered civilians there.

There’s also the fact that drawing too much attention to the advance of al-Qaeda affiliates in Africa would make people ask how these groups have become so powerful. That’s a complex question for which there is no one simple answer. There’s no doubt too that Western policy has contributed significantly to the current problems, especially when one bears in mind that it was the NATO powers which toppled the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi, the main bulwark against al-Qaeda in Northern Africa. Libya, like Syria, saw the West line up on the same side as al-Qaeda.

The neoliberal economic policies that many governments on the continent, including Nigeria’s, have pursued at the behest of Western financial institutions has also had a disastrous effect as it has increased economic hardship and pushed more young people towards extremism. Groups like Boko Haram have undoubtedly benefited from these shifts in economic policies.

From here

Boko Haram Menaces Cameroon Schoolchildren

“I’d quit my job before going to work in a place like that.” That is how a primary school teacher responded when IPS asked him why he had not accepted a job in Cameroon’s Far North region.

James Ngoran is not the only teacher who has refused to move to the embattled area bordering Nigeria where Boko Haram has been massing and launching lightning strike attacks on the isolated region.
“Many teachers posted or transferred to the Far North Region simply don’t take up their posts. They are all afraid for their lives,” Wilson Ngam, an official of the Far North Regional Delegation for Basic Education, tells IPS. He said over 200 trained teachers refused to take up their posts in the region in 2014.

Raids by the Boko Haram insurgents in the Far North Region have created a cycle of fear and uncertainty, making teachers posted here balk at their responsibility, and forcing those on the ground to bribe their way out of “the zone of death.”
Last week, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau threatened Cameroon in a video message on YouTube, warning that the same fate would befall the country as neighbouring Nigeria. He addressed his message directly to Cameroonian President Paul Biya after repeated fighting between militants and troops in the Far North.
Shekau was reported killed in September by Cameroonian troops – a report that later turned out to be untrue.

As the Nigerian sect intensifies attacks on Cameroonian territory, government has been forced to close numerous schools. According to Mounouna Fotso, a senior official in the Cameroon Ministry of Secondary Education, over 130 schools have already been shut down.
Most of the schools are found in the Mayo-Tsanaga, Mayo-Sava and Logone and Chari Divisions-all areas which share a long border with Nigeria, and where the terrorists have continued to launch attacks.

“Government had to temporarily close the schools and relocate the students and teachers. The lives of thousands of students and pupils have been on the line as Boko Haram continues to attack. We can’t put the lives of children at risk,” Fotso said.
“We are losing students each time there is an attack on a village even if it is several kilometres from here,” Christophe Barbah, a schoolmaster in the Far North Region’s Kolofata area, said in a press interview.

The closure of schools and the psychological trauma experienced by teachers and students raises concerns that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on education will be missed in Cameroon’s Far North Region.
Although both government and civil society agree that universal primary education could attained by the end of this year in the country’s south, the 49 percent school enrolment rate in the Far North Region, compared to the national average of 83 percent, according to UNICEF, means a lot of work still needs to be done here.

Mahamat Abba, a resident of Fotocol whose four children used to attend one of the three government schools there, has fled with his entire family to Kouseri on the border with Chad.
“I looked at my kids and lovely wife and knew a bullet or bomb could get them at any time. We had to run away to safer environments. But starting life afresh here is a nightmare, having abandoned everything,” he told IPS.
Alhadji Abakoura, a resident of Amchidé, adds that the area has virtually become a ghost town. “The town had six primary schools and a nursery school. They have all been closed down.”

As students, teachers and parents relocate to safer grounds, pressure is mounting on schools, which have to absorb the additional students with no additional funds.
According to UNICEF figures for Cameroon, school participation for boys topped 90 percent in 2013, while girls lagged behind at 85 percent or less. However, participation has been much lower in the extreme northern region.
According to the Institut National de la Statistique du Cameroon, literacy is below 40 percent in the Far North, 40 to 50 percent in the North, and 60-70 percent in the central north state of Adamawa. The Millennium Development Goal is full primary schooling for both sexes by 2015.

“Many of us are forced to follow lectures from classroom windows since there is practically very limited sitting space inside,” Ahmadou Saidou, a student of Government Secondary School Maroua, tells IPS. He had escaped from Amchidé where a September attack killed two students and a teacher.
Ahmadou said the benches on which three students once sat are now used by double that number.

“In normal circumstances, each classroom should contain a maximum of 60 students. But we are now in a situation where a single classroom hosts over one hundred and thirty students,” he said. “We are redeploying teachers who flee risk zones…we are getting them over to schools where students are fleeing to.
“These attacks are really slowing things down,’ Mahamat said.
Government response to the crisis

The Nigerian-based sect Boko Haram has intensified attacks on Cameroon in recent years, killing both civilians and military personnel and kidnapping nationals and expatriates in exchange for ransoms.
To respond to the crisis, Cameroon has come up with military and legal reforms. A new military region was set up in the country’s Far North Region. According to Defence Minister Edgar Alain Mebe Ngo’o, “The creation of the 4th Military Region is meant to bring the military closer to the theatre of threats, and to boost the operational means in both human and material resources.”
Military equipment has been supplied by the U.S., Germany and Israel, according to press reports.

Mebe Ngo’oo said Cameroon will recruit 20,000 soldiers over the next two years to step up the fight against the terrorists. Besides the military option, Cameroon has also come up with a legal framework to streamline the fight against terrorism. An anti-terrorism law was passed by Parliament in December, punishing all those guilty of terrorist acts by death.
But opposition political leaders, civil society activists and church leaders have criticised it as anti-democratic and fear it is actually intended to curtail civil liberties.

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Boko Haram's Latest Attacks In Nigeria

More than 2,000 people are unaccounted for after radical Islamist sect Boko Haram torched more than 10 towns and villages in Nigeria, a local lawmaker told NBC News. Ahmed Zanna, a senator for Borno state where the attack happened, said the militants razed the town of Baga as well as "10-to-20" other communities in the country's rural northeast over the past five days. "These towns are just gone, burned down," he told NBC News via telephone. "The whole area is covered in bodies."

Zanna said he had spoken to residents who fled the towns. They reported that the spree had been ongoing since Boko Haram overran a nearby military base Saturday. During the days-long assault, the militants chased people out of Baga before returning to kill those left and torch the buildings to the ground, according to survivors who contacted Zanna. Some of those who survived fled on foot the 100 miles south to Maidurguri.

The BBC spoke to Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official in the area, who also said that 2,000 people had been killed in the raids. "This is one of the worst attacks I've seen because so many people are unaccounted for and feared dead," said Zanna, who was elected in 2011. 

Nigeria will hold general elections on February 14, a ballot many expect Boko Haram will attempt to disrupt. The group, whose name roughly translates to "Western education is sinful," has slaughtered and kidnapped thousands and wants to establish a state in northern Nigeria based on strict Islamic law. 

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Will this latest attack on towns and villages in Nigeria generate a similar amount of coverage to that now ongoing around the recent murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo's editorial office in Paris? If not, why not?

 

Nigeria's bombings - How the UK created, fostered and empowered Nigeria's terrorists

In Nigeria the news headlines are of the Islamic organisation Boko Haram's bombing campaign. A MediaLens contributer reminds us the historic role of British divide and rule in Nigeria's past.

Nigeria was the creation of British imperialism and marked the limits of its aims, arms and ambition around Africa's third longest river - the mighty Niger, which gave the country its name. Originally the invaders were only interested in the southern parts of the territory now called Nigeria, especialy its rich forests and their plentiful produce of raw materials in heavy demnd in the west, particularly its palm oil, then required to grease the humming wheels of English industry. The natural deep harbours of Calabar and Lagos with its protective lagoon, were also coveted by the British crown.

However to protect the source of the Niger from the encroachments of its French rivals then enfiltrating southwards from their North African holdings, Britain's colonial army, fresh from subduing the southern tribes east and west of the Niger, marched north and bursting through the forest found the northern Savannah domianted by one of Africa's oldest, most educated and cultivated ruling classes - the Hausa Fulani islamic aristocracy whose relatively spohisticated state structure, monotheism and powerful calavary gave them unchallenged writ across the vast northern grass lands. After subduing their initial resistance, the sultans and emirs were integrated into the coloinal structure as its willing tools, keeping their thrones and faith in exchange for fidelity and subservience to the new conquerors. Kneeling to the west for their power, if still facing the east in prayer.

Unlike the lawless and rebellious tribes to the south, with their weak states and fractious people the universal and unquestioned authority of the northern princes was attarctive to the colnial rulers as it fitted in with British colonial poilcy of occupation lite, ruling in the main through local puppets, an approach they had mastered in india. Hence the new masters favoured the aristocracy in recruitment to the new civil service army and police. Development, as would be expected from a low base proceeded rapildy in the south, while to maintain the power of its islamic allies in the North, education, industrialisation and liberal social policies were restricted in northern nigeria by the British colonial administration.

The quicker urbanisation in the south created an increasingly radicalised working class and restive intelligentsia there who from the 1920's began organising against the colonial regime. By the end of the second world war, strikes, demonstrations and increasingly assertive agitation against coloinal rule was taking place across the sotuhern regions, with its nationalist leaders demanding ever more forcefully and confidently full independence from a severely weakened post war Britain.

To counterbalance the agitation centred in the big southern cities like Lagos, the British bolstered the power of the islamic aristocracy in the North, expanding its regional base and powers and placing the scions of its ruling houses in key positions in the army and emerging civil service. The country's census was also rigged giving the north a fraudulent edge over the far more populous southern regions, at a stroke re-writing the rules of geography by increasing the population of a land the closer it got to the desert.

"... islamic terror in Nigeria first burst on the scene in the same city, Kano, it has returned to with such venom. This was in 1956, when the British colonial Government and its allies amongst the conservative islamic aristocracy in the north reacted to a motion of independence by radical nationalists, by instigating a murderous rampage of islamic mobs in the ancient city of Kano, slaugtering agitators for independence and southern Nigerians, where demands for independence were most vociferous..."

"...another far bloodier episode of apocalyptic Islamic terror in Northern Nigeria, far bloodier in scale and serious in consequence than the 1956 riots which were used to intimidate the country into handing over power at independence in 1960 to the west's prefered faction - the subservient emirs and sultans in the North , the most retrograde and reactionary social layer on the continent, who as in Pakistan, now also disintegrating at the onslaught of right wing islamic terror, the departing British imposed on the country to ensure this potential regional giant remained forever prostrate and subservient to the west.

This second major incident of right wing islamic terror in Nigeria occurred in 1966 when in response to a radical coup by a group of young leftist officers in the Nigerian army, MI6 station oficers and British diplomats in the north brazenly broke cover and together with its conservative allies helped mobilise and unleash crazed islamic mobs across the north against southern Nigerians and suspected supporters of the coup. Men women and children across the north were dragged out of their homes and hacked to death in the streets by frenzied fundamentalist mobs with pregnant women having their foetus ripped out from their wombs before the mothers themselves were butchered.

While this was going on British and American diplomats sipped tea and brandy with right wing military officers, sons and scions of the northern ruling houses, in Lagos's main cantonment, plotting a military domination of the country that would last another 3 decades and bring the country to the brink of ruin.

Almost 30,000 mostly ibo southerners were killed in the massacres of 1966 which led to the Biafran war where a milion more died. The dead were so many in Kano, yes the same Kano, that excavators had to be hired from Julius Berger and other construction firms to pile the heaps of corpses into mass graves hastily dug outside the ancient city's walls..."

"...Boko Haram the Nigerian fundamentalist group behind the Kano Bombings is not the Nigerian wing of Al-Quaeda as the western media suggest, sharing its global apocalyptic vision, although there are undoubtedly links. However like the Pakistani Taliban the groups agenda is largely local.
In reality It is the armed wing of the country's powerful conservative Northern establishment who were edged out of power after 40 years of totally dominating it by the pro-democracy uprisings and struggles of the mid to late 1990's. The current wave of bombings and indiscriminate attacks are the arrow head of a counter offensive by the Northern elite and its conservative alies across the country to regain what they beleieve to be their birth right - the right to rule the cuntry without challenge or even the most rudimentary democratic accountability. The right the British gave them at independence in 1960....As in Pakistan there are clear links between the terrorists and senior memebrs of the countries security establishment, many of whom have now gone rogue."

"...At independence with the power of the British state behind them, power unsurprisingly went to the northern leaders who now in full control of state apparatus, reeaced out to allies across the country creating a pan regional conservative alliance cutting across tribes and regional lines and based upon the direct access to and theft of public resources at the centre and repression of the masses across the country. The discovery of oil and the concentration of its revenues in federal hands increased the powers of patronage of the Northern emirs and further cemented the pan regional alliance of the newly enriched national elite, who fearing the potential power of the millions of dispossessed but increasingly organised and educated masses in the heaving southern cities particularly the teeming megapolis of Lagos were happy to keep real power in the far islamic north from whence it could crush any uprising in the perpetually seething southern cities as it had crushed the Biafran rebellion.

The military dominated by the northern ruling houses was the prefered tool of power and its most powerful arms, the armoured brigades and bomber squadrons were all based in the north. After its crushing victory over the Biafran rebellion in the oil rich south east, it would rule almost unchallenged for 3 decades - from 1970 to 1998.

The north far poorer than the south was frozen in time with a stupendously rich and powerful elite enjoying the most modern amenities and luxuries money could buy while ruling with the help of imams and islamic scholars over a populace whose standard of living had seen almsot no change from the conditions their forefathers had endured over 6 centuries before. In Northern Nigeria the rich live in splendour, the poor in their millions beg in the street, a lumpenised class whose dehumanisation is without equal anywhere on the continent and from wherein the fanatics recruit their foot soldires.

The northern Oligarchy and the ruling class it dominates have devastated Nigeria in 4 ruinous decades of staggering corruption, mismanagement misrule while surbodinating the country in the most servile manner to the most rapacious exploitation of western imperialism - a period in whch the country has earned the equivalent of a quarter of a trillion pounds in oil revene without one of its towns or city's boasting a working electricity, transport, sewage or water supply system.

The combination of miliatry dictatorship and the use of auxillary islamic mobs served to maintain the power of the elite backed at the hieght of the cold war for decades by western imperialism whose policies were then to support the most vile and reactionary right wing regimes in the thrid world regardless of their brutality in an attempt to prevent the rise of popular movements in these countries.

However this changed in the early 1990's due to two reasons; the rise of pro-democracy movements on the African continent, partly inspired by the succes of the struggle in South Africa and secondly the collapse of the Soviet Union and rise of islamic fundamentalism which replaced communism as the West's main bogey man.

In 1993, the Nigerian military backed by the oligarchs cancelled an electrion, the country's freest ever, won by a popular centre left Business man Moshood Abiola, sparking a civilian uprising without precedent in the country's history and plunging Nigeria into its biggest political crisis since the Biafran war. However this time around their western patrons, already distancing themselves from their most brutal cold war allies across the third world, and fearful of creating more hot beds of rising islamic militancy, the chancelries of the west were far cooler and more ambivalent to their old allies in the north.

Isolated internationally and weakened domestically by civil unrest and regional tensions, the millitary dictatorship collapsed in 1998.

The resultant civilian regime was a compromise one which to pacify the people edged out the northern oligarchs and their most corrupt and hated alies from direct control of the state. In 2011, to pacify the oil producing Niger Delta and its long brutalised people who had risen in arms against their oppressioin, under intense western pressure, desperate to calm the Niger Delta, an indigene of the area, Goodluck Johnatahn, was sponsored for and won the presidency.

While slavishly folowing the neo liberal agenda of all his predecessors, his victory has been a step too far for the conservative oilgarchy whose powers are directly linked to the control of the state, its oil and the immense powers of patronage it provides.

In the past the Oligarchy and conservatives would have regained power through a coup detat using the army which they've always controlled. But things have changed - military rule is no longer fashionable internationally and the growth of civil society and labour and environmental militancy particualry in the south and oil producing parts of the country makes this a fraught option - a recent general strike over fuel prices brought millions on to the streets

Any coup now would in all likelihood lead to a break up of the country and possibly a war which the Northern elite facing a changed and less favourable international climate than during the Biafran war, cannot be sure of wining. Hence the use of an armed islamic auxillary force, Boko Haram, backed by shadowy figures within the state to intimidate a civil society they now see slipping away from their autocratic control, forcing the west to re-think and hand them back their 'right to rule' or face the country being made ungovernable..."

"If Nigeria the biggest and most powerful country on Africa's west coast falls the entire region could be set ablaze with the Northern region developing into a badland of fundamentalism and violence so uncontrollable that it would make Somalia look like a sleepy saturday resort park."