Media Trust

Media Trust is a privately held Nigerian newspaper publishing company based in Abuja that publishes the English-language Daily Trust, Weekly Trust, Sunday Trust and the Hausa-language Aminiya newspapers, as well as a new pan-African magazine, Kilimanjaro.

History

The Weekly Trust was established in March 1998 and the Daily Trust was launched in January 2001. The two papers are the largest circulating newspapers in Northern Nigeria. The group of newspapers ranks among the top seven in Nigeria in advertising revenue.

Content

The newspapers have online editions, accessible through www.dailytrust.com and content from the newspapers is republished by AllAfrica and Gamji. The company presents the "Daily Trust African of the Year" award, recognizing and celebrating Africans who have made positive contributions that impact the lives of other people and elicit a pan-African attention during the award year.

Personnel

The Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive officer is Kabiru Abdullahi Yusuf. He was a Senior Lecturer of the Department of Political Science, Usman Dan Fodio University, Sokoto, and has worked as a columnist and commentator for companies that include the Daily Triumph, Citizen Magazine, Newswatch and BBC Africa Service.

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.