Wukari

Wukari is a Local Government Area in Taraba State, Nigeria. Its headquarters are in the town of Wukari on the A4 highway. The Donga River flows through the area and the Benue River forms a boundary with Nasarawa State to the northwest. The town is the base of the Wukari Federation, a traditional state.

It has an area of 4,308 km² and a population of 241,546 at the 2006 census.

The postal code of the area is 670.

References

Taraba (state)

Taraba is a state in Nigeria, named after the Taraba River which traverses the southern part of the state. Taraba's capital is Jalingo.

History

The state was created out of the former Gongola State on 27 August 1991, by the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida.

Geography

Taraba State is bounded in the west by Nasarawa State and Benue State, northwest by Plateau State, north by Bauchi State and Gombe State, northeast by Adamawa State, south and east by Cameroon.

Taraba State lies largely within the middle of Nigeria and consists of undulating landscape dotted with a few mountainous features. These includes the scenic and prominent Mambilla Plateau. The state lies largely within the tropical zone and has a vegetation of low forest in the southern part and grassland in the northern part. The Mambilla Plateau with an altitude of 1,800 meters (6000 ft) above sea level has a temperate climate all year round.

Rivers Benue, Donga, Taraba and Ibi are the main rivers in the state. They rise from the Cameroonian mountains, straining almost the entire length of the state in the North and South direction to link up with the River Niger.

Nigeria

The Federal Republic of Nigeria, commonly referred to as Nigeria ⁱ/naɪˈdʒɪəriə/, is a federal constitutional republic in West Africa, bordering Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in the north. Its coast in the south lies on the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean. It comprises 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, where the capital, Abuja is located. Nigeria is officially a democratic secular country.

Modern-day Nigeria has been the site of numerous kingdoms and tribal states over the millennia. The modern state originated from British colonial rule beginning in the 19th century, and the merging of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate in 1914. The British set up administrative and legal structures whilst practising indirect rule through traditional chiefdoms. Nigeria became a formally independent federation in 1960, and plunged into a civil war from 1967 to 1970. It has since alternated between democratically-elected civilian governments and military dictatorships, until it achieved a stable democracy in 1999, with its 2011 presidential elections being viewed as the first to be conducted reasonably freely and fairly.

Boko Haram

Boko Haram, referred to by themselves as Wilāyat Gharb Ifrīqīyyah (Arabic: الولاية الإسلامية غرب أفريقيا‎, (Islamic State West Africa Province, ISWAP), and Jamā'at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da'wah wa'l-Jihād (Arabic: جماعة أهل السنة للدعوة والجهاد‎, "Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad"), is an Islamic extremist group based in northeastern Nigeria, also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon. The group's leader is Abubakar Shekau. The group had alleged links to al-Qaeda, but in March 2015, it announced its allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Since the current insurgency started in 2009, it has killed 20,000 and displaced 2.3 million from their homes.

After its founding in 2002, Boko Haram's increasing radicalization led to a violent uprising in July 2009 in which its leader was summarily executed. Its unexpected resurgence, following a mass prison break in September 2010, was accompanied by increasingly sophisticated attacks, initially against soft targets, and progressing in 2011 to include suicide bombings of police buildings and the United Nations office in Abuja. The government's establishment of a state of emergency at the beginning of 2012, extended in the following year to cover the entire northeast of Nigeria, led to an increase in both security force abuses and militant attacks.