Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Disaster averted (or delayed)

The Nigerian presidential campaign is heating up. Tensions around Jos remain high. Was this potential truck bomb connected to either?

Explosives-Laden Truck Seized in Nigeria
Security forces in the central Nigerian city of Jos seized a truck laden with bomb-making equipment on Friday, less than three months after explosions tore through Christmas Eve celebrations.

Sectarian violence in the region, where the mostly Muslim north meets the largely Christian south, has killed at least 200 people since the attacks in late December…

Charles Ekeocha, a spokesman for a joint military and police task force, said the truck was carrying fuses, detonators and a large amount of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be used to make improvised explosive devices…

The tensions around Jos are rooted in decades of resentment between indigenous groups, mostly Christian or animist, and settlers from the Muslim north who have been competing with them for control of fertile farmland and economic and political power…

There have also been fire bomb attacks on opposition party offices and campaign rallies in Bayelsa State in the southern oil-producing Niger Delta…

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