The Boko Haram on Monday expanded the territory it controls in Adamawa when it captured the town of Maiha, residents have told PREMIUM TIMES.
Maiha is about 25 kilometres from Mubi, the commercial town captured by the insurgents in Adamawa last week. Maiha is also about 200km from Yola, the state capital.
Even before the town fell to the insurgents, it was already a shadow of itself as commercial and social activities were paralyzed. People were already leaving the town due to its proximity to Mubi.
Fleeing residents said they saw many soldiers running away from the area with some of them hitch-hiking in residents’ vehicles. The soldiers told the residents that if the insurgents caught up with them, it would lead to instant death.
“The insurgents started trooping into the town around 2:30 p.m. and engaged troops stationed at Kosha before advancing to the main town of Maiha,” a fleeing resident, Kabir Musa, said in a telephone interview. “The soldiers, who advanced to the area in their bid to recapture Mubi, started running away as the insurgents overran the entire town.”
Another resident of the town, Garba Baba, said some fleeing soldiers begged him to assist them with civilian clothes so they would not be traced by the insurgents. The soldiers, he said, even threw their guns into the bush.
“The fleeing soldiers asked us to give them our clothes so that they can camouflage and escape from the area safely as some of them discarded their weapons in the bush. A lot of the discarded weapons are currently lying in the bush,” Mr. Baba, who also fled Maiha, said.
He said in a similar situation to when the insurgents captured Mubi, they did not encounter any challenge from the Nigerian troops.
“The insurgents did not encounter any challenge as they stormed the town in APC’s and Toyota Hilux vans firing shots into the soldiers’ directions chanting Allahu Akbar,” Mr. Baba said.
“The Boko Haram insurgents had ordered us not to run, saying that they are not after civilians but soldiers and other security people.’’ Another resident still trapped in Maiha, Dauda Mallam, said, “Many of the residents fled into the bush, particularly soldiers. Some of them may have been killed by bullets.
“The insurgents also hoisted their flags in strategic places in the town.” A soldier of the 23rd Armoured Brigade, Yola, also told PREMIUM TIMES that “we just heard that the insurgents had attacked our men in their base near Maiha town, and some soldiers were killed in a gun battle. We are yet to get full details.”
The military is yet to officially react to the Maiha takeover in Adamawa, which like Borno and Yobe, has been under a state of emergency since last year. The emergency rule has not deterred insurgents from carrying out terrorist activities leading to the death of thousands of people.
Several soldiers including senior officers are currently being investigated and disciplined for fleeing battles with insurgents.
On Monday, the Nigerian government, apparently frustrated by its inability to check the Boko Haram insurgency, accused the U.S. of not doing enough to assist the country.
Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United States, Ade Adefuye, expressed the government’s view when he received a delegation of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.
“I am sad to inform you that the Nigerian leadership: military and political, and even the general populace, are not satisfied with the scope, nature and content of the United States’ support for us in our struggle against terrorists,” Mr. Adefuye said.
“We find it difficult to understand how and why in spite of the U.S. presence in Nigeria with their sophisticated military technology, Boko Haram should be expanding and becoming more deadly.
Premium Times
Related stories: 12 Nigerian soldiers sentenced to death for mutiny
Some Nigerian soldiers refuse to fight Boko Haram until given new weapons
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Nigerian government dissapointed with America's refusal to sell them weapons
The Nigerian government has expressed its sadness over the United States refusal to sell military weapons to Nigeria in order fight against terrorism in the country, Empowered Newswire reports.
Nigerian Ambassador to the United States, Professor Ade Adefuye speaking on Monday while receiving a delegation of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations expressed disappointment.
“I am sad to inform you that the Nigerian leadership: military and political, and even the general populace, are not satisfied with the scope, nature and content of the United States’ support for us in our struggle against terrorists.”
“We find it difficult to understand how and why in spite of the U.S. presence in Nigeria with their sophisticated military technology, Boko Haram should be expanding and becoming more deadly”.
“The U.S. Government has up till today refused to grant Nigeria’s request to purchase lethal equipment that would have brought down the terrorists within a short time on the basis of the allegations that Nigeria’s defence forces have been violating human rights of Boko Haram suspects when captured or arrested.”
The Nigerian ambassador who has urged the Council on Foreign Affairs to put pressure on the US State Department and the US Department of Defence to re-examine the basis of their refusal to sell equipment to Nigeria said: “A stable and secure Nigeria is an invaluable asset to America,” Mr. Adefuye said.
Osun Defender
Related stories: Nigeria threatens South Africa over arms deal
Another secret arms deal between Nigerian and South Africa goes awry - $5.7 million seized
Nigerian Ambassador to the United States, Professor Ade Adefuye speaking on Monday while receiving a delegation of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations expressed disappointment.
“I am sad to inform you that the Nigerian leadership: military and political, and even the general populace, are not satisfied with the scope, nature and content of the United States’ support for us in our struggle against terrorists.”
“We find it difficult to understand how and why in spite of the U.S. presence in Nigeria with their sophisticated military technology, Boko Haram should be expanding and becoming more deadly”.
“The U.S. Government has up till today refused to grant Nigeria’s request to purchase lethal equipment that would have brought down the terrorists within a short time on the basis of the allegations that Nigeria’s defence forces have been violating human rights of Boko Haram suspects when captured or arrested.”
The Nigerian ambassador who has urged the Council on Foreign Affairs to put pressure on the US State Department and the US Department of Defence to re-examine the basis of their refusal to sell equipment to Nigeria said: “A stable and secure Nigeria is an invaluable asset to America,” Mr. Adefuye said.
Osun Defender
Related stories: Nigeria threatens South Africa over arms deal
Another secret arms deal between Nigerian and South Africa goes awry - $5.7 million seized
Monday, November 10, 2014
How Nigeria's education system is developing
It is widely accepted that Nigeria’s education system must undergo major changes if it is to enable the country to develop in a manner that will allow it to continue to grow. Unless the vast majority of the country’s young people receive the level of education they deserve, they will be condemned to a life of poverty and unemployment, which will inevitably lead to widespread unrest and political instability. In simple terms, the only way to overcome the proliferation of extremist groups such as Boko Haram is to stamp out illiteracy and provide a decent standard of education for all.
For some years following its independence, Nigeria’s education system continued to be based on the British model, which was not designed to meet the needs of an emerging African state. However, the Curriculum Conference of 1969 resulted in the staged introduction of a set of National Policies on Education in 1977, 1981, 1998 and 2004.
Unfortunately, not all the government’s policies for improving education in the country have been carried through due to a combination of poor organization, inadequate teacher training, underfunding and lack of forward planning. As a result, the number of unemployed rises annually while vacancies for skilled positions in all sectors remain unfilled.
A secondary school curriculum that was designed to meet the needs of the country’s growing economy was introduced many years ago as part of the National Policy on Education, but it has never been fully implemented; doing so as quickly as possible has to be a key priority. The Secondary Education Board, which is overseen by the Ministry of Education, was set up to implement government policies in all state schools; primary, secondary and senior secondary. The board has many responsibilities, including the construction of new schools, the provision of a safe learning environment; support for the development of the qualifications and skills required by industry and commerce; the preparation of students for their future working and family lives; making them aware of all the options available to them, and offering ongoing training and support to teaching staff. These actions should mean that the number of individuals leaving the country to attend overseas universities can be significantly reduced, thus enabling them to become the type of entrepreneurs the country so desperately needs.
The private sector is already playing its part, especially in terms of further education; for example, the African Leadership Academy helps would-be entrepreneurs and budding future leaders of industry by financing their university education. There is no doubt that Tunde Foliwayo’s profile is one that any aspiring young Nigerian would do well to emulate.
The current secondary school curriculum largely ignores technical, practical and vocational training. This is due, in part, to a lack of facilities and shortage of suitably trained teaching staff; however, the educational system has always leaned more towards an academic rather than vocational curriculum. It is essential that youngsters receive hands-on practical experience so that they can prosper throughout their lives.
The vast majority of the population is not employed as lawyers, company directors, doctors or accountants; most school leavers become farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, nurses, etc. These are the people who form the backbone of the country and who will be responsible for ensuring Nigeria continues to grow economically and culturally and remains a safe and civilized place in which to live.
For some years following its independence, Nigeria’s education system continued to be based on the British model, which was not designed to meet the needs of an emerging African state. However, the Curriculum Conference of 1969 resulted in the staged introduction of a set of National Policies on Education in 1977, 1981, 1998 and 2004.
Unfortunately, not all the government’s policies for improving education in the country have been carried through due to a combination of poor organization, inadequate teacher training, underfunding and lack of forward planning. As a result, the number of unemployed rises annually while vacancies for skilled positions in all sectors remain unfilled.
A secondary school curriculum that was designed to meet the needs of the country’s growing economy was introduced many years ago as part of the National Policy on Education, but it has never been fully implemented; doing so as quickly as possible has to be a key priority. The Secondary Education Board, which is overseen by the Ministry of Education, was set up to implement government policies in all state schools; primary, secondary and senior secondary. The board has many responsibilities, including the construction of new schools, the provision of a safe learning environment; support for the development of the qualifications and skills required by industry and commerce; the preparation of students for their future working and family lives; making them aware of all the options available to them, and offering ongoing training and support to teaching staff. These actions should mean that the number of individuals leaving the country to attend overseas universities can be significantly reduced, thus enabling them to become the type of entrepreneurs the country so desperately needs.
The private sector is already playing its part, especially in terms of further education; for example, the African Leadership Academy helps would-be entrepreneurs and budding future leaders of industry by financing their university education. There is no doubt that Tunde Foliwayo’s profile is one that any aspiring young Nigerian would do well to emulate.
The current secondary school curriculum largely ignores technical, practical and vocational training. This is due, in part, to a lack of facilities and shortage of suitably trained teaching staff; however, the educational system has always leaned more towards an academic rather than vocational curriculum. It is essential that youngsters receive hands-on practical experience so that they can prosper throughout their lives.
The vast majority of the population is not employed as lawyers, company directors, doctors or accountants; most school leavers become farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers, nurses, etc. These are the people who form the backbone of the country and who will be responsible for ensuring Nigeria continues to grow economically and culturally and remains a safe and civilized place in which to live.
Former EFCC chairman Sani Ribadu's brother kidnapped
Gunmen have abducted Sani Ribadu, the younger brother of the former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Nuhu Ribadu.A brother to Mr. Ribadu, Arabi Ribadu, informed PREMIUM TIMES that Sani was abducted in his farm in Yola, the Adamawa State capital, on Sunday.
“He was abducted by gun wielding men in his farm along Fufore road at about 5 p.m. this evening,” he said.
He also said the abductors took away their victim and abandoned his car.“Up till this moment, there is no communication from them,” he said.
Efforts to speak with the police spokesperson in Adamawa State has been unsuccessful as his phone was switched off.
Adamawa is one of the states worst hit by the Boko Haram insurgency, with Mubi, the second largest town in the state, now under the control of the insurgents.
Premium Times
46 students dead by suicide bomb blast during school assembly
At least 46 students have been killed by a suicide bomber at a school assembly in the north-eastern Nigerian town of Potiskum, police have said.
The explosion at a boys' school in the town is believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber dressed as a student.
The militant group Boko Haram is believed to have carried out the attack, police said.
The group has targeted schools during a deadly five-year insurgency aimed at establishing an Islamic state.
It is waging a sustained campaign to prevent children from going to school. It believes girls should not attend school and boys should only receive an Islamic education.
'Devastating attack'
The explosion ripped through the assembly hall at the Government Science Secondary School, reports say.
Police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu told the BBC Hausa service the attack had left 47 people dead, including the suicide bomber. Another 79 were wounded.
By setting off the bomb during the morning assembly, the militants clearly aimed to kill as many students as possible.
Few of the attacks here are ever claimed by any group but Boko Haram will once again be suspected. The jihadists have carried out particularly brutal attacks on schools before.
Chibok is known in many parts of the world because of April's mass abduction of girls from that remote village. But there have been many other horrific attacks on schools which have received less attention - including last February's raid on Buni Yadi, in Yobe State.
Dozens of boys were burnt to death, shot or killed with knives in the dormitory. Female students were spared but told to never attend school again, go off and get married. Boko Haram wants the education of boys to be limited to strict Koranic studies only.
The insecurity in the north-east is so rampant, with entire towns and villages now in the jihadists' hands, it will be extremely hard for other bombings to be prevented.
"At about 08:00am [07:00 GMT], a suicide bomber disguised himself as one of the male students and while the school was holding its normal assembly, the bomb went off," Mr Ojukwu said.
He added that police were investigating the explosion.
One student told the BBC he saw the mutilated bodies of fellow students at the scene, where emergency operations were ongoing. A resident reported seeing parents wailing at the sight of their children's bodies at the hospital.
Soldiers who attended the site of the explosion were met with fury by the assembled crowds who pelted them with stones and accused them of not doing enough to halt Boko Haram's insurgency.
A grieving relative told the BBC: "My brother, a student in the school, died in the blast. He was about 16 years old... We buried him at about 11:00am [10:00 GMT] today."
"The government needs to be more serious about the fight against Boko Haram because it is getting out of control," he added.
Schools in Yobe state have been frequently attacked by Boko Haram militants.
The state is one of three in Nigeria that have been placed under a state of emergency as a result of the group's activities.
Potiskum, one of the largest towns in Yobe, has been targeted before by Boko Haram.
Last week, a suicide bombing killed 15 people in the town.
The bomber joined a religious procession of the rival Shia Muslim sect, before blowing himself up.
In April, Boko Haram sparked global outrage by abducting more than 200 girls from a boarding school in Chibok town in Borno state.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has dismissed government claims to have agreed a ceasefire, under which the girls would be released.
He says the children have converted to Islam, are learning to memorise the Koran and have been married off.
BBC
Related story: Vigilantes fighting Boko Haram
The explosion at a boys' school in the town is believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber dressed as a student.
The militant group Boko Haram is believed to have carried out the attack, police said.
The group has targeted schools during a deadly five-year insurgency aimed at establishing an Islamic state.
It is waging a sustained campaign to prevent children from going to school. It believes girls should not attend school and boys should only receive an Islamic education.
'Devastating attack'
The explosion ripped through the assembly hall at the Government Science Secondary School, reports say.
Police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu told the BBC Hausa service the attack had left 47 people dead, including the suicide bomber. Another 79 were wounded.
By setting off the bomb during the morning assembly, the militants clearly aimed to kill as many students as possible.
Few of the attacks here are ever claimed by any group but Boko Haram will once again be suspected. The jihadists have carried out particularly brutal attacks on schools before.
Chibok is known in many parts of the world because of April's mass abduction of girls from that remote village. But there have been many other horrific attacks on schools which have received less attention - including last February's raid on Buni Yadi, in Yobe State.
Dozens of boys were burnt to death, shot or killed with knives in the dormitory. Female students were spared but told to never attend school again, go off and get married. Boko Haram wants the education of boys to be limited to strict Koranic studies only.
The insecurity in the north-east is so rampant, with entire towns and villages now in the jihadists' hands, it will be extremely hard for other bombings to be prevented.
"At about 08:00am [07:00 GMT], a suicide bomber disguised himself as one of the male students and while the school was holding its normal assembly, the bomb went off," Mr Ojukwu said.
He added that police were investigating the explosion.
One student told the BBC he saw the mutilated bodies of fellow students at the scene, where emergency operations were ongoing. A resident reported seeing parents wailing at the sight of their children's bodies at the hospital.
Soldiers who attended the site of the explosion were met with fury by the assembled crowds who pelted them with stones and accused them of not doing enough to halt Boko Haram's insurgency.
A grieving relative told the BBC: "My brother, a student in the school, died in the blast. He was about 16 years old... We buried him at about 11:00am [10:00 GMT] today."
"The government needs to be more serious about the fight against Boko Haram because it is getting out of control," he added.
Schools in Yobe state have been frequently attacked by Boko Haram militants.
The state is one of three in Nigeria that have been placed under a state of emergency as a result of the group's activities.
Potiskum, one of the largest towns in Yobe, has been targeted before by Boko Haram.
Last week, a suicide bombing killed 15 people in the town.
The bomber joined a religious procession of the rival Shia Muslim sect, before blowing himself up.
In April, Boko Haram sparked global outrage by abducting more than 200 girls from a boarding school in Chibok town in Borno state.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has dismissed government claims to have agreed a ceasefire, under which the girls would be released.
He says the children have converted to Islam, are learning to memorise the Koran and have been married off.
BBC
Related story: Vigilantes fighting Boko Haram
Friday, November 7, 2014
18 suspected Boko Haram militants found dead after taken into custody by Nigerian military
Eighteen men arrested by soldiers in north-east Nigeria have been found dead hours after being taken into custody, residents in the town of Potiskum say.
All the bodies had gunshot and knife wounds, they said.
The men had earlier been accused of being members of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram.
The Nigerian military has denied killing them and announced the release of more than 40 others who had been suspected of links with the militants.
Two residents of Potiskum, who told the BBC they had identified 18 bodies in the town's morgue, said the men had been arrested on Wednesday by the Nigerian military during a search operation.
A nurse at the morgue was quoted by AFP news agency as saying the bodies had been brought in by soldiers.
'Cold-blooded murder'
The news agency said community leaders believed the men had been killed because they were from the Kanuri ethnic group from which Boko Haram draws many of its members.
They have demanded an inquiry into the deaths.
"We believe they were killed on suspicion of being Boko Haram because they were Kanuris," AFP quoted an unnamed community leader as saying.
Another said: "The government should look into this cold-blooded murder and ensure justice is done because being a soldier is not a licence to kill at will on mere suspicion."
Atrocities
Potiskum is the commercial centre of Yobe state and has been the scene of many attacks by Boko Haram, including a suicide bombing on Monday in which 15 people died.
The Nigerian army has been conducting a war against the group and has frequently been accused of committing atrocities itself, including torture and beheadings.
It denies doing so.
In the city of Maiduguri, which has been at the centre of the insurgency, the army said it had released 42 people who had earlier been accused of being members of Boko Haram.
They were given more than $1,000 (£631) each by the military and the local government.
BBC
All the bodies had gunshot and knife wounds, they said.
The men had earlier been accused of being members of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram.
The Nigerian military has denied killing them and announced the release of more than 40 others who had been suspected of links with the militants.
Two residents of Potiskum, who told the BBC they had identified 18 bodies in the town's morgue, said the men had been arrested on Wednesday by the Nigerian military during a search operation.
A nurse at the morgue was quoted by AFP news agency as saying the bodies had been brought in by soldiers.
'Cold-blooded murder'
The news agency said community leaders believed the men had been killed because they were from the Kanuri ethnic group from which Boko Haram draws many of its members.
They have demanded an inquiry into the deaths.
"We believe they were killed on suspicion of being Boko Haram because they were Kanuris," AFP quoted an unnamed community leader as saying.
Another said: "The government should look into this cold-blooded murder and ensure justice is done because being a soldier is not a licence to kill at will on mere suspicion."
Atrocities
Potiskum is the commercial centre of Yobe state and has been the scene of many attacks by Boko Haram, including a suicide bombing on Monday in which 15 people died.
The Nigerian army has been conducting a war against the group and has frequently been accused of committing atrocities itself, including torture and beheadings.
It denies doing so.
In the city of Maiduguri, which has been at the centre of the insurgency, the army said it had released 42 people who had earlier been accused of being members of Boko Haram.
They were given more than $1,000 (£631) each by the military and the local government.
BBC
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Vigilantes fighting Boko Haram
Long before the Islamist militant group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls from Chibok in April, Abba Aji Kalli watched his country descend into madness. Kalli lives in Maiduguri, a city of more than one million and the capital of Borno State, just 80 miles from Chibok, in Nigeria’s impoverished northeast. For months before the girls were taken, refugees flooded into Maiduguri, fleeing almost-daily Boko Haram raids on nearby villages. The militants arrived on motorcycles and Toyota Hilux trucks, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in broad daylight, destroying homes and businesses and killing villagers. By May, a month after the kidnappings, the rebels were coming closer, striking surrounding villages and towns. Maiduguri could only be next.
Kalli was trying to stay calm, but he couldn’t keep the anxiety and paranoia at bay. Recently, the stress had become so intense that he was hospitalized for eight days. Why was the military not protecting his people? He had grown tired of asking the question. Kalli, a wiry, energetic man of 50 with an affable manner, worked as a government auditor. He was also a unit commander in the Civilian Joint Task Force, a thousands-strong vigilante battalion that was formed in June 2013 to combat Boko Haram. The Civilian J.T.F., as it is known, is made up of volunteers — professionals, civil servants, students and traders — and arms itself with machetes, locally sourced guns and homemade weapons. Kalli led a unit of 8,000.
Just after the girls were kidnapped, Kalli and his volunteers, whom he affectionately calls his “boys” — they call him “Elder” — arranged to meet local soldiers in Alagarno, a village near the expansive Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram had set up camps and the girls were thought to be held. But the military’s promised aircraft never arrived, he said. Kalli was angry but not altogether surprised. It wasn’t unusual for the military to fail to keep its promises. The government’s ineffectiveness in fighting Boko Haram was why he joined the Civilian J.T.F. in the first place.
Since the insurgency began in 2009, the military’s response has been both slow and inadequate. Residents report seeing soldiers running away during confrontations with Boko Haram. Soldiers say they do not have enough equipment — they often appear to lack protective gear — and do not get paid on time, if at all. Recently, a military tribunal sentenced 12 soldiers to death for attempted murder and mutiny; they had shot at their commanding officer after a convoy of their fellow soldiers was ambushed by Boko Haram. The governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, angered federal government officials this year when he remarked that Boko Haram outmatched troops in the northeast in both weaponry and motivation. John Campbell, a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former United States ambassador to Nigeria, makes a similar point: “We are talking about a body that is relatively weak,” he says, one that “has been starved of training and resources for a very long time.”
In the absence of an effective military response, the job of combating Boko Haram has fallen to the Civilian J.T.F. “We are responsible for fighting them,” Kalli said. Widely credited with pushing Boko Haram out of Maiduguri a year ago, the Civilian J.T.F. dispenses a summary justice. Much of Kalli’s time was devoted to tracking down and turning over to government authorities the men and boys suspected of having joined Boko Haram.
One Sunday in May, hours before I met up with him at a hotel in Maiduguri that is popular with the military and considered secure, his contact in Yola — the capital of neighboring Adamawa State, where Boko Haram has also waged attacks — called to say someone suspected of being a Boko Haram member was returning to his home in Maiduguri. Kalli guessed that the young man was coming to pick up supplies, perhaps weapons he had stashed somewhere. He gathered his boys and dispatched them to the suspect’s house in one of the unit’s blue pickup trucks.
A few hours later, while Kalli and I sat talking in the hotel, his phone rang. As he listened, he became agitated, twitching with excitement. “We got one,” he said, hanging up. His boys had captured the suspect. Kalli told me he had to go and rushed out of the hotel.
Two days later, I visited Kalli at one of his two homes, a modest bungalow. The power was out, and his third and youngest wife lay on the floor with their three children, fanning them as they napped. I joined Kalli on the couch as he pulled up the cellphone video he shot of the Yola suspect. It showed a young man in black athletic shorts and a red T-shirt, surrounded by men shouting questions at him. The suspect, Mohammed Umar, who could not have been much older than 20, looked dazed. “He confessed that he was a member of Boko Haram and that they have been hiding AK-47s in one house,” Kalli said gleefully. “We asked him to take us to the house. At the first house, we went in and dug but didn’t find anything. He took us to three houses. At the third house, we found two AK-47 magazines.”
When it was over, Kalli and his men, who’d been joined by another Civilian J.T.F. commander, handed Umar over to the authorities. “He ran away from Maiduguri when we started chasing Boko Haram last year,” Kalli explained. “Most of them fled. Even now, many of them are living in Lagos, many of them are living in Abuja, many of them are living in Kano.” During his first operation in June 2013, Kalli and his boys captured 10 suspects with AK-47s. All were turned over to the military and detained. More recently, in April, he and his boys apprehended nearly 40 people suspected of being Boko Haram members in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, 500 miles away. With each mission, Kalli and his unit have become more efficient at rooting out sympathizers. This time, he boasted, the entire operation — from finding Umar to searching the houses to handing him over to Nigerian security forces — took less than 35 minutes.
Kalli grew up in Maiduguri, among 18 brothers and sisters. His father was a cow trader and farmer, and his mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was a housewife. Kalli’s grandfather helped raise him and pushed him to excel at school. As a teenager, Kalli decided he wanted to be a military officer and joined his secondary school’s cadet program, a feeder for the best military academy. But his mother worried that he was choosing a risky career, and he ended up studying accounting at a technical college in Maiduguri. He became an auditor, rising through the ranks of the Borno State government, married and soon was prosperous enough to take two more wives and have 20 children.
Then Boko Haram began its onslaught against his hometown. Once an ancient center of Islamic teaching and trade, Maiduguri is now a city of sandbagged bunkers and security checkpoints. The attacks were sporadic but chilling. In June 2011, Boko Haram bombed a beer garden; last December, it orchestrated bombings near the airport and on a military air base. Boko Haram attacked civilians seemingly at random. Kalli’s brother was assassinated in his own home in 2011. “It really hurt me,” he recalled. “But we were handicapped, we couldn’t do anything. We were even afraid to report it to the military or authorities, because if you report it, a few days later Boko Haram will just come and kill you.” This was not the Nigeria he knew.
Men of Kalli’s generation were among the last to benefit from the country’s post-independence, oil-driven economic expansion. In the 1960s and ’70s, a high-school graduate could easily find a good job. The Nigerian naira was on par with the British pound. Nigeria was so wealthy, in fact, that it almost didn’t matter that billions of dollars were lost to graft. But deep social and economic rifts existed just below the surface. Pieced together in 1914 and controlled by the British until its independence in 1960, Nigeria was loosely divided along religious lines, with a mostly Muslim, ethnically diverse north and an equally diverse, predominantly Christian south. Under British rule, the north was governed via local emirs, which did not interfere with the region’s Muslim identity, while the south was more directly controlled by the British. The south eventually developed an economy centered on oil; the north remained largely agrarian. Because Christian missionaries were concentrated in the south, southerners also had access to Western education. Today, these regional differences persist: Literacy rates are significantly higher in the south than in the north, while poverty is more entrenched in the north than in the south.
After independence, a succession of military governments held the two regions together, suppressing ethnic and religious differences and quelling dissent. Civilian rule returned in 1999, renewing hopes of a more equitable society. Instead, says Max Siollun, a Nigerian writer and historian, “1999 came and went, soldiers left and were replaced by civilians, but nothing changed. The government was still corrupt, poverty was still rife and economic opportunities and jobs were still scarce.” Radical Islamic groups, Siollun says, filled this moral vacuum, as they often had in Nigeria.
Boko Haram got its start in Maiduguri. In 2001, a young Muslim cleric named Mohammed Yusuf began preaching about the government’s failures, blaming Western education for corrupting Nigerian leaders and advocating an Islamic society based on Shariah law. Yusuf’s message resonated with many in the north, especially its disaffected young men. Over the next two years, the group, then known as the Yusufiyya movement, tried to create independent settlements in Borno and in neighboring Yobe State. Most of the efforts began peacefully, though some cells were accused of killing clerics and police officers. Local news media began to use a term for the group, Boko Haram, which translates to “Western education is forbidden” in the regional language, Hausa. The insurgents’ official Arabic name, however, is jama’atu ahlis sunna lidda’awati wal-jihad, which means People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.
In 2009, after the police opened fire on several Boko Haram members at a funeral procession in Maiduguri, shooting 17, the group bombed and set fire to government buildings. The police and the military battled the insurgents for days; more than 800 people were killed, most in extrajudicial killings by the military, and thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes. Yusuf was arrested and died in police custody. In response, Boko Haram staged an uprising. Under a newly appointed leader, Abubakar Shekau, the group burned down schools and police stations; blew up cellphone towers, markets, churches and mosques; and killed scores of students and teachers throughout central and northern Nigeria. Boko Haram has since massacred thousands of Nigerians and abducted hundreds more. In February, the group savagely murdered almost 60 schoolboys; some were burned alive. This year, Boko Haram set off three explosions in the country’s capital, underscoring that not even the federal government was safe from attack. In April, the group took the schoolgirls from Chibok. It still holds at least 200 of them captive.
The Nigerian government’s response to Boko Haram has been fraught from the beginning. President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian southerner, has behaved as if the insurgency is a creation of northern Muslim leaders and thus their problem to solve. It took him more than three weeks to speak publicly about the abduction of the schoolgirls. His wife, Patience, provoked public outrage when she questioned whether the kidnapping had occurred, claiming it was all a ploy by her husband’s opponents to embarrass him. (She later expressed concern over the missing schoolgirls.) Government critics charge that the military has been slow to respond to the threat posed by Boko Haram because officials are benefiting from the war in the north, siphoning money from the country’s $6 billion security budget.
Residents in the northeast have complained frequently of the army’s indifference. But their grievances coalesced around the response to the kidnapping of the girls. Local officials in Chibok say the army was alerted to the possibility of an attack up to four hours before the girls were abducted, but military reinforcements never arrived. Since then, the military has been criticized for not doing enough to look for the girls. It claimed that it had broken up a Boko Haram cell that participated in the kidnapping and that it was on the verge of rescuing the girls, but they never materialized. The United States and other foreign powers have offered assistance, but finding the girls remains a formidable task. “It’s a big, big challenge,” says Stephen Schwartz, the director of Nigeria policy and operations at the State Department. “If it were up to the United States, we would have difficulty trying to rescue that number of girls over that big an area. It’s a really high-stakes kind of effort. I give the Nigerians a lot of credit for having the forbearance to not try anything premature or reckless.” (The military declined repeated requests for comment.)
Meanwhile, Boko Haram continues to fund and arm itself through bank robberies, extortion, ransom demands, sieges on Nigerian armed forces and, some analysts say, help from affiliates of Al Qaeda. In part, Boko Haram can operate with impunity because much of the northeast remains inaccessible, with bad roads and poor phone reception. Large areas along Nigeria’s borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger are vulnerable to Boko Haram. “The northern land mass is just huge, and some parts of it are not very hospitable, so the government hasn’t always penetrated into every nook and cranny,” Siollun says. “Those border areas have always been bandit country; it facilitated the emergence of groups like Boko Haram.”
Despite Boko Haram’s increasing strength, the Nigerian government, says Campbell, the former ambassador, has not pursued a comprehensive anti-insurgency strategy. “The government has done very little to address the pervasive sense of alienation among people in the north,” Campbell says. “If you’re going to address the drivers of the insurgency, that takes time. My sense is implementation is very, very slow.” Fatima Akilu, a director in Nigeria’s Office of the National Security Adviser, told me that a deradicalization program is being created to promote sports, literature and the arts to secular and Islamic schools, and that the government is working on an economic-development plan for the northeast. Akilu says officials also hope to devise “safe passage” for militants who wish to leave the group. She assured me that the Civilian J.T.F. was not a reaction to the military’s failures but rather a natural response on the part of northeasterners to a common threat — a kind of citizens’ brigade. “It was a spontaneous movement that began without any involvement from the state at all,” she says. “These were youths who said, ‘We no longer want you in our communities,’ and they pushed them out. It is an initiative we support.”
From the time Kalli wakes up, around 4:30 in the morning, until he goes to bed, sometimes as late as 2:30 a.m., he receives calls alerting him to Boko Haram sightings, impending or developing attacks and recent abductions and killings. When he hears of a village under siege, he rounds up as many of his boys as he can and heads out to the fight — without protective gear and at times without proper weapons. “Sometimes your gun won’t even work,” he lamented. It was a miracle that only 15 of his men had been killed so far. “God is with us,” he said. When he began this work, his children, whom he calls “my soldiers,” and his wives urged him to reconsider. “I don’t have enough time to get rest or sleep,” he said. “I am always engaged.” Kalli, a Muslim, says he is ready to die for his religion and his country. “These insurgents came to destroy the image of Islam,” he told me. “They are cult members. Islam doesn’t allow anybody to kill anybody, either Muslim or Christian. I want to protect the integrity of this country.” He is still employed by the auditors’ office, but was given an extended leave for this new public service.
When I first met Kalli at the hotel in Maiduguri, he was with three men who had been seized by Boko Haram. The group has turned to forcible recruitment as its violent tactics erode support among northerners. “They began to recruit by force, because they have moved so far from their core ideology,” Akilu says. “When Shekau descended into this indiscriminate slaughter, murdering people for no reason, a lot of people didn’t understand what was going on and did not subscribe to the philosophy of the current leadership.” Sometimes Boko Haram compels the boys and young men it captures to spy or fight for the group; sometimes it kills those it captures, a warning to anyone who would collaborate with government forces. The men with Kalli managed to escape. (This is not unheard of; Boko Haram does not always guard its captives carefully. Right after their abduction, some 50 of the Chibok schoolgirls also managed to get away. One of them, a 14-year-old named Rejoice Yaga, told me that the militants seemed confused and kept asking one another if they should take the girls or leave them.)
Kalli had already debriefed the men, but he wanted me to hear their stories firsthand. The first man I spoke to, Ali Bukar, a tall 40-year-old whose face bears the distinctive scars of his Kanuri ethnic group, was abducted in May while farming outside his home in Konduga, a village in Borno State about 20 miles from Maiduguri. “I had heard people talk about Boko Haram, but I had never seen them until the day they came and captured me,” he said. His wife and children were inside the house, unaware that just a few yards away two gunmen were tying him up with rope. The militants placed Bukar between them on their motorcycle and drove off. He thought he was doomed. “I asked them what kind of offense I committed, but they refused to talk to me.”
It took less than an hour to reach the site where Boko Haram had set up camp. Several men, some in T-shirts, others in traditional dress, milled about. They threw him, still tied up, to one side. Over the next three days, the men debated whether to kill him, occasionally feeding him beans and discussing plans to attack Maiduguri. But his rope was loose, and one day after nightfall with his hands still tied behind his back, he escaped. He ran for nearly 12 hours through the bush to reach his village. When we met, his arms were still severely bruised, marked by puffy, raw lesions; he could barely raise them. “I will never go back to that village,” he said of his hometown, shaking his head slowly. He has since moved some relatives with him to Maiduguri.
The second man Kalli introduced me to, Hamza Alhaji, was more fortunate. A prematurely graying 30-year-old who made his living collecting firewood in the forest outside Maiduguri, he was ambushed by Boko Haram militants while driving back to the city last spring and then unexpectedly abandoned when they retreated into the bush.
As I spoke with Bukar and Alhaji, Kalli kept interrupting, eager to answer the questions himself; he knew their stories so well. For Kalli, the men were proof that Boko Haram must be stopped at all costs. How could anyone be safe when grown men were seized in the middle of the afternoon?
Unlike Alhaji and Bukar, the third man with Kalli that day — Modu Jalomi, a 35-year-old who lives in Yajiwa, a town 45 miles outside Maiduguri — was used to seeing Boko Haram members near his home. “I have seen them before,” he said. “I know some of their members.” The militants occasionally passed through Yajiwa to buy food. At first, residents welcomed Boko Haram; as recently as last year, young men were voluntarily joining the militants. “It was their own wish, because of religion,” Jalomi said. He could count 20 young men, most of them teenagers, who left. He pitied them now, he said, because the situation had changed. “When people saw that what Boko Haram is doing is not the right thing, they started to run away,” Jalomi said.
As Jalomi lay in bed next to his wife one night, four men came into the house with AK-47s. One was his neighbor. “They didn’t even hide their faces,” Jalomi recalled. They took him on a motorcycle to the same area near Alagarno where they had taken Bukar and accused him of feeding information about them to the Civilian J.T.F. and the military. Jalomi was tied to a mango tree for 11 hours before he managed to break free. The militants shot at him as he fled. He now lives in Maiduguri and hasn’t returned to his village since. “They have no support now,” he said of Boko Haram.
In a residential area of Maiduguri, Kalli rented a small office from which he directed his unit. When I visited, bags and boxes of donated items for victims of Boko Haram took up half the room. “When we started this, everybody was chasing the insurgents,” Kalli said, recalling the chaos of the early days of fighting Boko Haram. “Later on, we decided to organize and divide into 10 sectors.” Splitting up the city this way allowed him and his fellow commanders to more effectively monitor different neighborhoods. The Civilian J.T.F. has always relied on residents for tips about insurgents who may be hiding among them. Most readily complied, but as the Civilian J.T.F. gains strength, residents are beginning to fear that the vigilantes are using their power not to fight Boko Haram but to intimidate personal enemies. Men and boys have reported being forced to join the group under threat of being beaten. The Civilian J.T.F., some say, could one day prove to be as dangerous as the insurgents.
The Civilian J.T.F. works closely with Nigeria’s Joint Task Force — the military, the police and other security forces — which has been accused of indiscriminate killings in the counterinsurgency. After a March attack by Boko Haram on Giwa Barracks, a military garrison, troops killed hundreds of people, most of whom were unarmed suspects held there. In Maiduguri, thousands of boys and men have been detained on little to no evidence. Some are taken to Giwa Barracks, from which reports of torture and extrajudicial killings regularly emerge. Others simply disappear; sometimes their bodies turn up at the city’s morgues. In response, residents barricade streets with logs and tires to keep outsiders away. There are entire sections of the city that government officials are afraid to enter for fear of reprisal.
In August, Amnesty International released footage showing what appear to be Nigerian soldiers and Civilian J.T.F. members near Maiduguri, cutting the throats of suspected Boko Haram members and then pushing them into an open grave. Amnesty International also says the vigilantes have made arbitrary arrests and engaged in torture and extrajudicial killings of suspects, both independently and with the military. “From witnesses and victims and families of victims that we have talked to, there is an undeniable degree of frustration and concern and fear against the vigilante groups,” Netsanet Belay, the Africa director of research and advocacy at Amnesty International, told me. “We are seeing the Civilian Joint Task Force increasingly engaged in serious, mass human-rights violations.” Schwartz, the State Department’s Nigeria director, says the United States has pressed and continues to press the Nigerian military on human rights — “Giwa Barracks was a big issue of contention.” The problem with vigilante groups like the Civilian J.T.F., he adds, is that they are essentially unaccountable. “They’re not trained as a law-enforcement group, they’re not underpinned by a law of the land,” he says. “We don’t sanction or condone lawless actions of vigilante groups. I’ve seen a number of these videos, and it’s disturbing.”
Government officials in Borno State express few misgivings about the Civilian J.T.F. One official in the governor’s office, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told me that the Civilian J.T.F. was doing commendable work identifying and arresting Boko Haram members, and that any abuses committed were most likely the fault of the military on joint exercises. The state’s governor, Shettima, describes the emergence of the Civilian J.T.F. as “almost a divine intervention,” though he acknowledges that “one may not rule out some infractions from some overzealous members.” The government, in conjunction with the military, he says, is working to rein in excesses through a training program, the Borno Youth Empowerment Scheme, which began in 2013 and provides a modest monthly stipend. The plan is to train at least 5,000 Civilian J.T.F. members by the end of this year; so far, 3,000 men have begun the program.
Jacob Zenn, an analyst of African affairs at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, argues that to survive, the Civilian J.T.F. has had to evolve from stick-wielding vigilantes to a more sophisticated group. “It’s a catch-22, because if they remain lightly armed, they are at high risk of being massacred by heavily armed Boko Haram insurgents,” Zenn says. “But if they are armed, they essentially become like soldiers.” Once they assume their militarized roles, they may become what soldiers are in the region: both protection and threat.
In his office, Kalli insisted that anyone who fears the Civilian J.T.F. must have a relationship with Boko Haram. “Any good Samaritans will have to support the Civilian J.T.F., because we have done a lot to bring peace to this city,” he said. If his neighbors refuse to understand that he is trying to help them, he will make them understand. Last year, he turned in his 18-year-old nephew, whom he believed to be a member of Boko Haram. He later watched the military execute him. Kalli expressed no remorse. “I saw him with AK-47s, so that proves he’s a Boko Haram member,” he said. When the insurgency began in 2009, his nephew attended Boko Haram’s sermons, and that year he ran away from Maiduguri. His family and neighbors suspected he had joined the group. “I was the first person to see him when he came back to town,” Kalli said. “He was part of my family, part of my blood. But I apprehended him and handed him over to security.” He told his brother and sister-in-law that their son confessed to killing more than 30 people and even threatened to kill him. “I asked him, ‘Is this the way we brought you up?’ ” Kalli recalled. “You know, the first thing before you start this job, you will take an oath. The oath is that you will not hide anybody, whether it’s your friend or relative.” Couldn’t his nephew have been brainwashed? I asked. He was, after all, little more than a child. Kalli’s face contorted into an expression somewhere between anger and disbelief, and his voice took on a hard edge. “Whether he understood or he didn’t understand, his mind was polluted,” he replied. “We have no regret for anybody if you are a Boko Haram member, because we have suffered a lot at the hands of Boko Haram. We have lost so many people.”
Several young men marched into Kalli’s office, greeting him with reverence before sitting down to wait for their training stipends. Among them was Mohammed Musa, an electrical-engineering student at the University of Maiduguri who signed up with the Civilian J.T.F. last year. For many young men, joining the Civilian J.T.F. is a way of retaking power after so much has been lost — relatives, friends, a viable future. His parents are happy that he volunteers, but he recognizes that much of Maiduguri is wary of the civilian police. “Many people fear us,” he said with frustration. “They say, ‘See this Civilian J.T.F., they’re doing bad things.’ They act as if we’re useless or up to no good. They should be praying for us every day.”
Kalli’s son Lawan, a small-boned and polite 17-year-old in his last year of high school, entered his father’s office and slid into a chair. He described how he inspects cars at checkpoints and carries a knife for protection. One charge leveled against the Civilian J.T.F. is that it recruits children. Human Rights Watch reports indicate that some vigilantes manning checkpoints in Maiduguri appear to be younger than 18. The watchdog group says witnesses have seen children working at checkpoints in Borno and Yobe States. “If you are not 18, you are not part of us — that is the truth,” Kalli said. His son was different, he said; he wasn’t allowed to use a gun. “We are not using any children. If we see any under-age ones on the streets, we arrest them and call their parents.” I asked him about worries that the vigilantes could be committing abuses. He again became defensive. “We don’t kill anybody. We hand them to the authorities. We have to protect ourselves, but we normally catch them alive.”
One afternoon, Kalli picked me up in one of his trucks. A new crop of volunteers was jammed into the back. They wore T-shirts and sunglasses, with handkerchiefs and guns slung around their necks. They were talking and laughing loudly and watched with amusement as I climbed into the vehicle.
“I was sitting in my office preparing paperwork for my boys who went for training when I received a call from one of my chairmen,” Kalli said as he drove. “He told me that he’d been told that some members of Boko Haram we were looking for were in town and that he’d seen them at Ecobank. When we rushed there, they had already finished their transaction and left. I drove my boys to the car park and mounted a checkpoint. I left some of them there so that they can maybe trap them.”
He put on the truck’s siren and swerved through narrow spaces between lanes. As we sped through Civilian J.T.F. checkpoints, the young men at the barriers saluted him. “We are suspecting that they might enter the market to buy food items,” he said of the Boko Haram members he was tracking. “So we have already put our members on alert. They sleep in the bush, come in to get money and food items and then go back. But we have our people watching them. If we see them, we will grab them.”
I asked him about the guns his crew was carrying. They looked like relics from the 19th century, short-barreled rifle-muskets with wooden grips. “I personally told my boys to carry guns,” he said. Residents donated money to help buy the weapons, he said; at first they had only cutlasses and sticks to fight militants armed with antiaircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades. “I bought these local guns you have been seeing and distributed them, because my area is the worst area.” His zone, he pointed out, covers “up to Sambisa” and the outskirts of Maiduguri. “Anything can come through us,” he said. The siren blared louder.
As we drove, Kalli returned to talking about the military: “They are not responding the way they should; that is the biggest problem we are facing. It is the fault of senior officers. If I were a soldier, I would not go in, because I wouldn’t have enough equipment to fight the insurgents! I withdrew my men from Sambisa because I knew the authorities didn’t want to finish this job.”
We zigzagged through traffic to pick up medicine for Kalli’s youngest daughter, who was gravely ill with the measles. His phone rang; the caller was reporting yet another attack on a village, demanding to know why Kalli and his men weren’t there. When he hung up, he sighed, and his body slackened. “You know, I’m tired of this thing,” he said. “We gave the security forces everything — information about the camps, where they are, and they’re not doing anything.” I asked him if he has given up on finding the girls. “We can’t go up to Chibok again,” he said.
The path that Kalli and his unit took out of Maiduguri to Chibok in May is now a lonely one. When I traveled along the same road on a market day, only a few cars, trucks and minivan taxis hurtled past torched vehicles and the burned-out shells of schools and homes. Boys rode bikes with bows and arrows tucked under their arms. Commuters between the two towns were stopped at a series of checkpoints, some manned by the military and others by the Civilian J.T.F. The vigilantes were more disorganized but savvier. They casually waved machetes at drivers and demanded that they turn on their windshield wipers. Militants had been hiding weapons under car hoods, which prevented the wipers from working.
I spoke with Kalli shortly after I left Maiduguri. He was in low spirits. His daughter with the measles had died, and he had taken a break from his Civilian J.T.F. duties. I asked him when he would rejoin his colleagues. “I don’t know,” he said. “I need rest.”
In July, a bomb blast in a Maiduguri market killed at least 20 people. This fall, Boko Haram occupied numerous northeastern towns, including Bama, only 45 miles from Maiduguri, and declared a caliphate. The government recently claimed to have struck a cease-fire with Boko Haram that would lead to the release of the remaining Chibok schoolgirls. But in October, the militants abducted 60 women and girls from Adamawa State and later at least 30 boys and girls from Borno State, casting doubt on the existence of a truce.
Yet when I called Kalli recently, he spoke of the future as bright. He said the military was holding on to Maiduguri and had pushed Boko Haram out of other places. He was no longer doing much fieldwork. He was now an “executive at the state level” for the Civilian J.T.F., coordinating the sectors and managing their finances. He was also running for Senate. Kalli remained relentlessly upbeat. “We are 100 percent sure we will kill these insurgents,” he told me. He seemed to believe it.
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Kalli was trying to stay calm, but he couldn’t keep the anxiety and paranoia at bay. Recently, the stress had become so intense that he was hospitalized for eight days. Why was the military not protecting his people? He had grown tired of asking the question. Kalli, a wiry, energetic man of 50 with an affable manner, worked as a government auditor. He was also a unit commander in the Civilian Joint Task Force, a thousands-strong vigilante battalion that was formed in June 2013 to combat Boko Haram. The Civilian J.T.F., as it is known, is made up of volunteers — professionals, civil servants, students and traders — and arms itself with machetes, locally sourced guns and homemade weapons. Kalli led a unit of 8,000.
Just after the girls were kidnapped, Kalli and his volunteers, whom he affectionately calls his “boys” — they call him “Elder” — arranged to meet local soldiers in Alagarno, a village near the expansive Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram had set up camps and the girls were thought to be held. But the military’s promised aircraft never arrived, he said. Kalli was angry but not altogether surprised. It wasn’t unusual for the military to fail to keep its promises. The government’s ineffectiveness in fighting Boko Haram was why he joined the Civilian J.T.F. in the first place.
Since the insurgency began in 2009, the military’s response has been both slow and inadequate. Residents report seeing soldiers running away during confrontations with Boko Haram. Soldiers say they do not have enough equipment — they often appear to lack protective gear — and do not get paid on time, if at all. Recently, a military tribunal sentenced 12 soldiers to death for attempted murder and mutiny; they had shot at their commanding officer after a convoy of their fellow soldiers was ambushed by Boko Haram. The governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, angered federal government officials this year when he remarked that Boko Haram outmatched troops in the northeast in both weaponry and motivation. John Campbell, a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former United States ambassador to Nigeria, makes a similar point: “We are talking about a body that is relatively weak,” he says, one that “has been starved of training and resources for a very long time.”
In the absence of an effective military response, the job of combating Boko Haram has fallen to the Civilian J.T.F. “We are responsible for fighting them,” Kalli said. Widely credited with pushing Boko Haram out of Maiduguri a year ago, the Civilian J.T.F. dispenses a summary justice. Much of Kalli’s time was devoted to tracking down and turning over to government authorities the men and boys suspected of having joined Boko Haram.
One Sunday in May, hours before I met up with him at a hotel in Maiduguri that is popular with the military and considered secure, his contact in Yola — the capital of neighboring Adamawa State, where Boko Haram has also waged attacks — called to say someone suspected of being a Boko Haram member was returning to his home in Maiduguri. Kalli guessed that the young man was coming to pick up supplies, perhaps weapons he had stashed somewhere. He gathered his boys and dispatched them to the suspect’s house in one of the unit’s blue pickup trucks.
A few hours later, while Kalli and I sat talking in the hotel, his phone rang. As he listened, he became agitated, twitching with excitement. “We got one,” he said, hanging up. His boys had captured the suspect. Kalli told me he had to go and rushed out of the hotel.
Two days later, I visited Kalli at one of his two homes, a modest bungalow. The power was out, and his third and youngest wife lay on the floor with their three children, fanning them as they napped. I joined Kalli on the couch as he pulled up the cellphone video he shot of the Yola suspect. It showed a young man in black athletic shorts and a red T-shirt, surrounded by men shouting questions at him. The suspect, Mohammed Umar, who could not have been much older than 20, looked dazed. “He confessed that he was a member of Boko Haram and that they have been hiding AK-47s in one house,” Kalli said gleefully. “We asked him to take us to the house. At the first house, we went in and dug but didn’t find anything. He took us to three houses. At the third house, we found two AK-47 magazines.”
When it was over, Kalli and his men, who’d been joined by another Civilian J.T.F. commander, handed Umar over to the authorities. “He ran away from Maiduguri when we started chasing Boko Haram last year,” Kalli explained. “Most of them fled. Even now, many of them are living in Lagos, many of them are living in Abuja, many of them are living in Kano.” During his first operation in June 2013, Kalli and his boys captured 10 suspects with AK-47s. All were turned over to the military and detained. More recently, in April, he and his boys apprehended nearly 40 people suspected of being Boko Haram members in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, 500 miles away. With each mission, Kalli and his unit have become more efficient at rooting out sympathizers. This time, he boasted, the entire operation — from finding Umar to searching the houses to handing him over to Nigerian security forces — took less than 35 minutes.
Kalli grew up in Maiduguri, among 18 brothers and sisters. His father was a cow trader and farmer, and his mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was a housewife. Kalli’s grandfather helped raise him and pushed him to excel at school. As a teenager, Kalli decided he wanted to be a military officer and joined his secondary school’s cadet program, a feeder for the best military academy. But his mother worried that he was choosing a risky career, and he ended up studying accounting at a technical college in Maiduguri. He became an auditor, rising through the ranks of the Borno State government, married and soon was prosperous enough to take two more wives and have 20 children.
Then Boko Haram began its onslaught against his hometown. Once an ancient center of Islamic teaching and trade, Maiduguri is now a city of sandbagged bunkers and security checkpoints. The attacks were sporadic but chilling. In June 2011, Boko Haram bombed a beer garden; last December, it orchestrated bombings near the airport and on a military air base. Boko Haram attacked civilians seemingly at random. Kalli’s brother was assassinated in his own home in 2011. “It really hurt me,” he recalled. “But we were handicapped, we couldn’t do anything. We were even afraid to report it to the military or authorities, because if you report it, a few days later Boko Haram will just come and kill you.” This was not the Nigeria he knew.
Men of Kalli’s generation were among the last to benefit from the country’s post-independence, oil-driven economic expansion. In the 1960s and ’70s, a high-school graduate could easily find a good job. The Nigerian naira was on par with the British pound. Nigeria was so wealthy, in fact, that it almost didn’t matter that billions of dollars were lost to graft. But deep social and economic rifts existed just below the surface. Pieced together in 1914 and controlled by the British until its independence in 1960, Nigeria was loosely divided along religious lines, with a mostly Muslim, ethnically diverse north and an equally diverse, predominantly Christian south. Under British rule, the north was governed via local emirs, which did not interfere with the region’s Muslim identity, while the south was more directly controlled by the British. The south eventually developed an economy centered on oil; the north remained largely agrarian. Because Christian missionaries were concentrated in the south, southerners also had access to Western education. Today, these regional differences persist: Literacy rates are significantly higher in the south than in the north, while poverty is more entrenched in the north than in the south.
After independence, a succession of military governments held the two regions together, suppressing ethnic and religious differences and quelling dissent. Civilian rule returned in 1999, renewing hopes of a more equitable society. Instead, says Max Siollun, a Nigerian writer and historian, “1999 came and went, soldiers left and were replaced by civilians, but nothing changed. The government was still corrupt, poverty was still rife and economic opportunities and jobs were still scarce.” Radical Islamic groups, Siollun says, filled this moral vacuum, as they often had in Nigeria.
Boko Haram got its start in Maiduguri. In 2001, a young Muslim cleric named Mohammed Yusuf began preaching about the government’s failures, blaming Western education for corrupting Nigerian leaders and advocating an Islamic society based on Shariah law. Yusuf’s message resonated with many in the north, especially its disaffected young men. Over the next two years, the group, then known as the Yusufiyya movement, tried to create independent settlements in Borno and in neighboring Yobe State. Most of the efforts began peacefully, though some cells were accused of killing clerics and police officers. Local news media began to use a term for the group, Boko Haram, which translates to “Western education is forbidden” in the regional language, Hausa. The insurgents’ official Arabic name, however, is jama’atu ahlis sunna lidda’awati wal-jihad, which means People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.
In 2009, after the police opened fire on several Boko Haram members at a funeral procession in Maiduguri, shooting 17, the group bombed and set fire to government buildings. The police and the military battled the insurgents for days; more than 800 people were killed, most in extrajudicial killings by the military, and thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes. Yusuf was arrested and died in police custody. In response, Boko Haram staged an uprising. Under a newly appointed leader, Abubakar Shekau, the group burned down schools and police stations; blew up cellphone towers, markets, churches and mosques; and killed scores of students and teachers throughout central and northern Nigeria. Boko Haram has since massacred thousands of Nigerians and abducted hundreds more. In February, the group savagely murdered almost 60 schoolboys; some were burned alive. This year, Boko Haram set off three explosions in the country’s capital, underscoring that not even the federal government was safe from attack. In April, the group took the schoolgirls from Chibok. It still holds at least 200 of them captive.
The Nigerian government’s response to Boko Haram has been fraught from the beginning. President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian southerner, has behaved as if the insurgency is a creation of northern Muslim leaders and thus their problem to solve. It took him more than three weeks to speak publicly about the abduction of the schoolgirls. His wife, Patience, provoked public outrage when she questioned whether the kidnapping had occurred, claiming it was all a ploy by her husband’s opponents to embarrass him. (She later expressed concern over the missing schoolgirls.) Government critics charge that the military has been slow to respond to the threat posed by Boko Haram because officials are benefiting from the war in the north, siphoning money from the country’s $6 billion security budget.
Residents in the northeast have complained frequently of the army’s indifference. But their grievances coalesced around the response to the kidnapping of the girls. Local officials in Chibok say the army was alerted to the possibility of an attack up to four hours before the girls were abducted, but military reinforcements never arrived. Since then, the military has been criticized for not doing enough to look for the girls. It claimed that it had broken up a Boko Haram cell that participated in the kidnapping and that it was on the verge of rescuing the girls, but they never materialized. The United States and other foreign powers have offered assistance, but finding the girls remains a formidable task. “It’s a big, big challenge,” says Stephen Schwartz, the director of Nigeria policy and operations at the State Department. “If it were up to the United States, we would have difficulty trying to rescue that number of girls over that big an area. It’s a really high-stakes kind of effort. I give the Nigerians a lot of credit for having the forbearance to not try anything premature or reckless.” (The military declined repeated requests for comment.)
Meanwhile, Boko Haram continues to fund and arm itself through bank robberies, extortion, ransom demands, sieges on Nigerian armed forces and, some analysts say, help from affiliates of Al Qaeda. In part, Boko Haram can operate with impunity because much of the northeast remains inaccessible, with bad roads and poor phone reception. Large areas along Nigeria’s borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger are vulnerable to Boko Haram. “The northern land mass is just huge, and some parts of it are not very hospitable, so the government hasn’t always penetrated into every nook and cranny,” Siollun says. “Those border areas have always been bandit country; it facilitated the emergence of groups like Boko Haram.”
Despite Boko Haram’s increasing strength, the Nigerian government, says Campbell, the former ambassador, has not pursued a comprehensive anti-insurgency strategy. “The government has done very little to address the pervasive sense of alienation among people in the north,” Campbell says. “If you’re going to address the drivers of the insurgency, that takes time. My sense is implementation is very, very slow.” Fatima Akilu, a director in Nigeria’s Office of the National Security Adviser, told me that a deradicalization program is being created to promote sports, literature and the arts to secular and Islamic schools, and that the government is working on an economic-development plan for the northeast. Akilu says officials also hope to devise “safe passage” for militants who wish to leave the group. She assured me that the Civilian J.T.F. was not a reaction to the military’s failures but rather a natural response on the part of northeasterners to a common threat — a kind of citizens’ brigade. “It was a spontaneous movement that began without any involvement from the state at all,” she says. “These were youths who said, ‘We no longer want you in our communities,’ and they pushed them out. It is an initiative we support.”
From the time Kalli wakes up, around 4:30 in the morning, until he goes to bed, sometimes as late as 2:30 a.m., he receives calls alerting him to Boko Haram sightings, impending or developing attacks and recent abductions and killings. When he hears of a village under siege, he rounds up as many of his boys as he can and heads out to the fight — without protective gear and at times without proper weapons. “Sometimes your gun won’t even work,” he lamented. It was a miracle that only 15 of his men had been killed so far. “God is with us,” he said. When he began this work, his children, whom he calls “my soldiers,” and his wives urged him to reconsider. “I don’t have enough time to get rest or sleep,” he said. “I am always engaged.” Kalli, a Muslim, says he is ready to die for his religion and his country. “These insurgents came to destroy the image of Islam,” he told me. “They are cult members. Islam doesn’t allow anybody to kill anybody, either Muslim or Christian. I want to protect the integrity of this country.” He is still employed by the auditors’ office, but was given an extended leave for this new public service.
When I first met Kalli at the hotel in Maiduguri, he was with three men who had been seized by Boko Haram. The group has turned to forcible recruitment as its violent tactics erode support among northerners. “They began to recruit by force, because they have moved so far from their core ideology,” Akilu says. “When Shekau descended into this indiscriminate slaughter, murdering people for no reason, a lot of people didn’t understand what was going on and did not subscribe to the philosophy of the current leadership.” Sometimes Boko Haram compels the boys and young men it captures to spy or fight for the group; sometimes it kills those it captures, a warning to anyone who would collaborate with government forces. The men with Kalli managed to escape. (This is not unheard of; Boko Haram does not always guard its captives carefully. Right after their abduction, some 50 of the Chibok schoolgirls also managed to get away. One of them, a 14-year-old named Rejoice Yaga, told me that the militants seemed confused and kept asking one another if they should take the girls or leave them.)
Kalli had already debriefed the men, but he wanted me to hear their stories firsthand. The first man I spoke to, Ali Bukar, a tall 40-year-old whose face bears the distinctive scars of his Kanuri ethnic group, was abducted in May while farming outside his home in Konduga, a village in Borno State about 20 miles from Maiduguri. “I had heard people talk about Boko Haram, but I had never seen them until the day they came and captured me,” he said. His wife and children were inside the house, unaware that just a few yards away two gunmen were tying him up with rope. The militants placed Bukar between them on their motorcycle and drove off. He thought he was doomed. “I asked them what kind of offense I committed, but they refused to talk to me.”
It took less than an hour to reach the site where Boko Haram had set up camp. Several men, some in T-shirts, others in traditional dress, milled about. They threw him, still tied up, to one side. Over the next three days, the men debated whether to kill him, occasionally feeding him beans and discussing plans to attack Maiduguri. But his rope was loose, and one day after nightfall with his hands still tied behind his back, he escaped. He ran for nearly 12 hours through the bush to reach his village. When we met, his arms were still severely bruised, marked by puffy, raw lesions; he could barely raise them. “I will never go back to that village,” he said of his hometown, shaking his head slowly. He has since moved some relatives with him to Maiduguri.
The second man Kalli introduced me to, Hamza Alhaji, was more fortunate. A prematurely graying 30-year-old who made his living collecting firewood in the forest outside Maiduguri, he was ambushed by Boko Haram militants while driving back to the city last spring and then unexpectedly abandoned when they retreated into the bush.
As I spoke with Bukar and Alhaji, Kalli kept interrupting, eager to answer the questions himself; he knew their stories so well. For Kalli, the men were proof that Boko Haram must be stopped at all costs. How could anyone be safe when grown men were seized in the middle of the afternoon?
Unlike Alhaji and Bukar, the third man with Kalli that day — Modu Jalomi, a 35-year-old who lives in Yajiwa, a town 45 miles outside Maiduguri — was used to seeing Boko Haram members near his home. “I have seen them before,” he said. “I know some of their members.” The militants occasionally passed through Yajiwa to buy food. At first, residents welcomed Boko Haram; as recently as last year, young men were voluntarily joining the militants. “It was their own wish, because of religion,” Jalomi said. He could count 20 young men, most of them teenagers, who left. He pitied them now, he said, because the situation had changed. “When people saw that what Boko Haram is doing is not the right thing, they started to run away,” Jalomi said.
As Jalomi lay in bed next to his wife one night, four men came into the house with AK-47s. One was his neighbor. “They didn’t even hide their faces,” Jalomi recalled. They took him on a motorcycle to the same area near Alagarno where they had taken Bukar and accused him of feeding information about them to the Civilian J.T.F. and the military. Jalomi was tied to a mango tree for 11 hours before he managed to break free. The militants shot at him as he fled. He now lives in Maiduguri and hasn’t returned to his village since. “They have no support now,” he said of Boko Haram.
In a residential area of Maiduguri, Kalli rented a small office from which he directed his unit. When I visited, bags and boxes of donated items for victims of Boko Haram took up half the room. “When we started this, everybody was chasing the insurgents,” Kalli said, recalling the chaos of the early days of fighting Boko Haram. “Later on, we decided to organize and divide into 10 sectors.” Splitting up the city this way allowed him and his fellow commanders to more effectively monitor different neighborhoods. The Civilian J.T.F. has always relied on residents for tips about insurgents who may be hiding among them. Most readily complied, but as the Civilian J.T.F. gains strength, residents are beginning to fear that the vigilantes are using their power not to fight Boko Haram but to intimidate personal enemies. Men and boys have reported being forced to join the group under threat of being beaten. The Civilian J.T.F., some say, could one day prove to be as dangerous as the insurgents.
The Civilian J.T.F. works closely with Nigeria’s Joint Task Force — the military, the police and other security forces — which has been accused of indiscriminate killings in the counterinsurgency. After a March attack by Boko Haram on Giwa Barracks, a military garrison, troops killed hundreds of people, most of whom were unarmed suspects held there. In Maiduguri, thousands of boys and men have been detained on little to no evidence. Some are taken to Giwa Barracks, from which reports of torture and extrajudicial killings regularly emerge. Others simply disappear; sometimes their bodies turn up at the city’s morgues. In response, residents barricade streets with logs and tires to keep outsiders away. There are entire sections of the city that government officials are afraid to enter for fear of reprisal.
In August, Amnesty International released footage showing what appear to be Nigerian soldiers and Civilian J.T.F. members near Maiduguri, cutting the throats of suspected Boko Haram members and then pushing them into an open grave. Amnesty International also says the vigilantes have made arbitrary arrests and engaged in torture and extrajudicial killings of suspects, both independently and with the military. “From witnesses and victims and families of victims that we have talked to, there is an undeniable degree of frustration and concern and fear against the vigilante groups,” Netsanet Belay, the Africa director of research and advocacy at Amnesty International, told me. “We are seeing the Civilian Joint Task Force increasingly engaged in serious, mass human-rights violations.” Schwartz, the State Department’s Nigeria director, says the United States has pressed and continues to press the Nigerian military on human rights — “Giwa Barracks was a big issue of contention.” The problem with vigilante groups like the Civilian J.T.F., he adds, is that they are essentially unaccountable. “They’re not trained as a law-enforcement group, they’re not underpinned by a law of the land,” he says. “We don’t sanction or condone lawless actions of vigilante groups. I’ve seen a number of these videos, and it’s disturbing.”
Government officials in Borno State express few misgivings about the Civilian J.T.F. One official in the governor’s office, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told me that the Civilian J.T.F. was doing commendable work identifying and arresting Boko Haram members, and that any abuses committed were most likely the fault of the military on joint exercises. The state’s governor, Shettima, describes the emergence of the Civilian J.T.F. as “almost a divine intervention,” though he acknowledges that “one may not rule out some infractions from some overzealous members.” The government, in conjunction with the military, he says, is working to rein in excesses through a training program, the Borno Youth Empowerment Scheme, which began in 2013 and provides a modest monthly stipend. The plan is to train at least 5,000 Civilian J.T.F. members by the end of this year; so far, 3,000 men have begun the program.
Jacob Zenn, an analyst of African affairs at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, argues that to survive, the Civilian J.T.F. has had to evolve from stick-wielding vigilantes to a more sophisticated group. “It’s a catch-22, because if they remain lightly armed, they are at high risk of being massacred by heavily armed Boko Haram insurgents,” Zenn says. “But if they are armed, they essentially become like soldiers.” Once they assume their militarized roles, they may become what soldiers are in the region: both protection and threat.
In his office, Kalli insisted that anyone who fears the Civilian J.T.F. must have a relationship with Boko Haram. “Any good Samaritans will have to support the Civilian J.T.F., because we have done a lot to bring peace to this city,” he said. If his neighbors refuse to understand that he is trying to help them, he will make them understand. Last year, he turned in his 18-year-old nephew, whom he believed to be a member of Boko Haram. He later watched the military execute him. Kalli expressed no remorse. “I saw him with AK-47s, so that proves he’s a Boko Haram member,” he said. When the insurgency began in 2009, his nephew attended Boko Haram’s sermons, and that year he ran away from Maiduguri. His family and neighbors suspected he had joined the group. “I was the first person to see him when he came back to town,” Kalli said. “He was part of my family, part of my blood. But I apprehended him and handed him over to security.” He told his brother and sister-in-law that their son confessed to killing more than 30 people and even threatened to kill him. “I asked him, ‘Is this the way we brought you up?’ ” Kalli recalled. “You know, the first thing before you start this job, you will take an oath. The oath is that you will not hide anybody, whether it’s your friend or relative.” Couldn’t his nephew have been brainwashed? I asked. He was, after all, little more than a child. Kalli’s face contorted into an expression somewhere between anger and disbelief, and his voice took on a hard edge. “Whether he understood or he didn’t understand, his mind was polluted,” he replied. “We have no regret for anybody if you are a Boko Haram member, because we have suffered a lot at the hands of Boko Haram. We have lost so many people.”
Several young men marched into Kalli’s office, greeting him with reverence before sitting down to wait for their training stipends. Among them was Mohammed Musa, an electrical-engineering student at the University of Maiduguri who signed up with the Civilian J.T.F. last year. For many young men, joining the Civilian J.T.F. is a way of retaking power after so much has been lost — relatives, friends, a viable future. His parents are happy that he volunteers, but he recognizes that much of Maiduguri is wary of the civilian police. “Many people fear us,” he said with frustration. “They say, ‘See this Civilian J.T.F., they’re doing bad things.’ They act as if we’re useless or up to no good. They should be praying for us every day.”
Kalli’s son Lawan, a small-boned and polite 17-year-old in his last year of high school, entered his father’s office and slid into a chair. He described how he inspects cars at checkpoints and carries a knife for protection. One charge leveled against the Civilian J.T.F. is that it recruits children. Human Rights Watch reports indicate that some vigilantes manning checkpoints in Maiduguri appear to be younger than 18. The watchdog group says witnesses have seen children working at checkpoints in Borno and Yobe States. “If you are not 18, you are not part of us — that is the truth,” Kalli said. His son was different, he said; he wasn’t allowed to use a gun. “We are not using any children. If we see any under-age ones on the streets, we arrest them and call their parents.” I asked him about worries that the vigilantes could be committing abuses. He again became defensive. “We don’t kill anybody. We hand them to the authorities. We have to protect ourselves, but we normally catch them alive.”
One afternoon, Kalli picked me up in one of his trucks. A new crop of volunteers was jammed into the back. They wore T-shirts and sunglasses, with handkerchiefs and guns slung around their necks. They were talking and laughing loudly and watched with amusement as I climbed into the vehicle.
“I was sitting in my office preparing paperwork for my boys who went for training when I received a call from one of my chairmen,” Kalli said as he drove. “He told me that he’d been told that some members of Boko Haram we were looking for were in town and that he’d seen them at Ecobank. When we rushed there, they had already finished their transaction and left. I drove my boys to the car park and mounted a checkpoint. I left some of them there so that they can maybe trap them.”
He put on the truck’s siren and swerved through narrow spaces between lanes. As we sped through Civilian J.T.F. checkpoints, the young men at the barriers saluted him. “We are suspecting that they might enter the market to buy food items,” he said of the Boko Haram members he was tracking. “So we have already put our members on alert. They sleep in the bush, come in to get money and food items and then go back. But we have our people watching them. If we see them, we will grab them.”
I asked him about the guns his crew was carrying. They looked like relics from the 19th century, short-barreled rifle-muskets with wooden grips. “I personally told my boys to carry guns,” he said. Residents donated money to help buy the weapons, he said; at first they had only cutlasses and sticks to fight militants armed with antiaircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades. “I bought these local guns you have been seeing and distributed them, because my area is the worst area.” His zone, he pointed out, covers “up to Sambisa” and the outskirts of Maiduguri. “Anything can come through us,” he said. The siren blared louder.
As we drove, Kalli returned to talking about the military: “They are not responding the way they should; that is the biggest problem we are facing. It is the fault of senior officers. If I were a soldier, I would not go in, because I wouldn’t have enough equipment to fight the insurgents! I withdrew my men from Sambisa because I knew the authorities didn’t want to finish this job.”
We zigzagged through traffic to pick up medicine for Kalli’s youngest daughter, who was gravely ill with the measles. His phone rang; the caller was reporting yet another attack on a village, demanding to know why Kalli and his men weren’t there. When he hung up, he sighed, and his body slackened. “You know, I’m tired of this thing,” he said. “We gave the security forces everything — information about the camps, where they are, and they’re not doing anything.” I asked him if he has given up on finding the girls. “We can’t go up to Chibok again,” he said.
The path that Kalli and his unit took out of Maiduguri to Chibok in May is now a lonely one. When I traveled along the same road on a market day, only a few cars, trucks and minivan taxis hurtled past torched vehicles and the burned-out shells of schools and homes. Boys rode bikes with bows and arrows tucked under their arms. Commuters between the two towns were stopped at a series of checkpoints, some manned by the military and others by the Civilian J.T.F. The vigilantes were more disorganized but savvier. They casually waved machetes at drivers and demanded that they turn on their windshield wipers. Militants had been hiding weapons under car hoods, which prevented the wipers from working.
I spoke with Kalli shortly after I left Maiduguri. He was in low spirits. His daughter with the measles had died, and he had taken a break from his Civilian J.T.F. duties. I asked him when he would rejoin his colleagues. “I don’t know,” he said. “I need rest.”
In July, a bomb blast in a Maiduguri market killed at least 20 people. This fall, Boko Haram occupied numerous northeastern towns, including Bama, only 45 miles from Maiduguri, and declared a caliphate. The government recently claimed to have struck a cease-fire with Boko Haram that would lead to the release of the remaining Chibok schoolgirls. But in October, the militants abducted 60 women and girls from Adamawa State and later at least 30 boys and girls from Borno State, casting doubt on the existence of a truce.
Yet when I called Kalli recently, he spoke of the future as bright. He said the military was holding on to Maiduguri and had pushed Boko Haram out of other places. He was no longer doing much fieldwork. He was now an “executive at the state level” for the Civilian J.T.F., coordinating the sectors and managing their finances. He was also running for Senate. Kalli remained relentlessly upbeat. “We are 100 percent sure we will kill these insurgents,” he told me. He seemed to believe it.
New York Times
More than 2,000 prisoners have escaped over the past five years in Nigeria
More than 2,000 prisoners have escaped over the past five years in Nigeria, officials say, mainly as a result of attacks on jails by the Islamist militant Boko Haram group.
They say that dozens of prison staff have been killed during the raids.
Last month hundreds of prisoners escaped when jihadists overran Mubi town. This week they blew a hole in a jail in Kogi State to free dozens more.
Almost 500 prisoners escaped in the city of Maiduguri in 2009.
A total of 2,251 prisoners have got away and most of them are still at large, officials say.
Figures released by the Nigerian Prisons Service show that as of 30 June there were nearly 57,000 male and female prisoners in 239 jails.
The BBC's Will Ross in Lagos says that the jihadists have recently attacked a French cement plant in northern Nigeria and seized a large supply of dynamite - so more jail breaks may be on the way.
Boko Haram has caused havoc in Africa's most populous country through a wave of bombings, assassinations and abductions.
It is fighting to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state.
Boko Haram regards the Nigerian state as being run by non-believers, even when the country had a Muslim president.
Our correspondent says rampant insecurity is increasingly worrying for Nigerians who wonder how the militants will ever be stopped.
There are many reports of soldiers fleeing rather than defending towns and villages as the insurgents continue to capture territory where they impose their own strict version of Islamic law.
BBC
They say that dozens of prison staff have been killed during the raids.
Last month hundreds of prisoners escaped when jihadists overran Mubi town. This week they blew a hole in a jail in Kogi State to free dozens more.
Almost 500 prisoners escaped in the city of Maiduguri in 2009.
A total of 2,251 prisoners have got away and most of them are still at large, officials say.
Figures released by the Nigerian Prisons Service show that as of 30 June there were nearly 57,000 male and female prisoners in 239 jails.
The BBC's Will Ross in Lagos says that the jihadists have recently attacked a French cement plant in northern Nigeria and seized a large supply of dynamite - so more jail breaks may be on the way.
Boko Haram has caused havoc in Africa's most populous country through a wave of bombings, assassinations and abductions.
It is fighting to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state.
Boko Haram regards the Nigerian state as being run by non-believers, even when the country had a Muslim president.
Our correspondent says rampant insecurity is increasingly worrying for Nigerians who wonder how the militants will ever be stopped.
There are many reports of soldiers fleeing rather than defending towns and villages as the insurgents continue to capture territory where they impose their own strict version of Islamic law.
BBC
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare gives authentic rendition of Lagos, Nigeria
Call of Duty gets a lot of stick - some of it deserved - for being "stupid", but here's a neat little touch I found in Advanced Warfare's singleplayer campaign that's worth a closer look.
Real estate in Lagos can be...chaotic, and these warnings are to remind folks that even if a "real estate agent" turns up carrying property papers, there's no telling if they're actually genuine or not.
Seems like a pretty minor thing to get hung up on, but I guess I like it because, while developers taking trips to actual locations for scouting is nothing new, it's rare you see them work anything other than architecture into their games. Slotting some cultural commentary - however out of place it might be by 2055, the year the game takes place - gives AW's Lagos a little more sense of being than if they'd just copied the streets and facades.
Kotaku
Related stories: Nigeria's growing video game industry
Nigeria's own Comic-Con celebrates 3 years
The United Kingdom returning £6.8million stolen loot of former Nigerian governor James Ibori
The United Kingdom government is to return an additional 6.8 million pounds of the confiscated loot of former Delta Governor, James Ibori, to Nigeria.Rupert Broad, U.K. Metropolitan Police Senior Investigator, disclosed this in London on Tuesday at a meeting on “Supporting Policing in Nigeria: What Role for Police in the Nigerian Diaspora” held in the House of Commons.
While speaking on UK and Nigeria’s anti-corruption partnership, Mr. Broad said “out of the eight million pounds confiscated from Ibori, 1.2 million pounds had so far been retuned to Nigeria, while the rest was waiting for redistribution as to when it would be sent back to Nigeria.”
He also said that an additional 80 million pounds had been temporarily confiscated from Ibori and his associates, including Mr Patrice Gohil, one of his lawyers.
“Approximately, 80 million pounds is temporarily frozen and a confiscation hearing has been fixed for April 2015, where the judge will determine how much was stolen, after which it would be returned to Nigeria.”
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that the British Southcrown Court in April 2012 sentenced Ibori to 13 years jail term for fraud and money laundering.
Broad, who attributed the success of the Ibori case to partnership with the nation’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission ( EFCC), said “the case signified Nigeria’s commitment to the fight corruption.
“In the light of the Ibori case, Nigeria has done a fantastic job in tackling corruption.
“Corruption does not go away easily, addressing it requires continuous process and the UK
Metropolitan Police will continue to collaborate with Nigerian authorities on cross border international investigation.”
Similarly, Nsikan Etuk, the Director of the UK Nigeria Police Forum, said that the diaspora was a powerful tool for the reformation of the nation’s police force.
Mr. Etuk, who spoke on “Supporting Policing in Nigeria”, expressed the commitment of the Forum in
collaborating with government in tackling challenges impeding efficiency in policing in the country.
He said that the Forum, whose membership included serving and retired police personnel, was established following challenges facing the Nigerian community in the UK.
In the same vein, Kunle Bamgbose, the Nigerian Deputy High Commissioner to the UK, said the nation’s police officers were among the brightest in Africa, adding that they were only impeded by operational challenges.
He said “inadequate equipment such as communication gadgets, the lack of efficient forensic laboratories and other logistic problems are some of the challenges facing the police force.”
Mr. Bamgbose, however, said “it is difficult to impose UK policing culture in Nigeria because the environments are different.”
According to him, partnership in training and capacity building of officers will be an ideal area of collaboration.
The meeting, which had participants from the Nigerian community, was chaired by Meg Hillier, the Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Nigeria.
Daily Post
Related stories: Ibori's sister convicted in london for money laundering
Video - Britain to banish children of James Ibori and other corrupt leaders
Video - How ex-governor of Delta state James Ibori started as petty thief in London
Monday, November 3, 2014
Stephen Keshi reinstated as Nigeria Super Eagles coach
The 52-year-old had paid the price for poor results in qualification for next year's Africa Cup of Nations but has now been given a chance to make amends.
Nigeria face Congo and South Africa in November, needing two wins to stand a chance of making it to Morocco.
NFF president Amaju Pinnick and head of the NFF Technical Committee Felix Anyansi-Agwu confirmed in a statement that Keshi will oversee the team's final two ties.
Keshi led the team to Nations Cup glory in 2013 and also steered the Super Eagles to the last 16 at this summer's World Cup in Brazil.
And he will be determined to avoid failing to qualify to defend the African title won in South Africa.
As well as the backing of President Jonathan, Keshi also has the support of Amodu, who requested for Keshi to be allowed to finish the qualification campaign.
And Keshi has swiftly named his squad for the match against Congo on 15 November and South Africa in Uyo, southeast Nigeria, four days later.
Villarreal striker Ikechukwu Uche, whose last appearance for Nigeria was in the final of the 2013 Nations Cup final, is handed a return.
But there is no place in the squad for Stoke City's Victor Moses and in-form striker Obafemi Martins has also been overlooked.
The African champions need to not only win both matches but also to beat Congo by a margin of two goals to stand any chance of automatic qualification.
Meanwhile, Nigeria are still waiting to learn if they have avoided a lengthy ban from Fifa after a regional high court overturned its recent decision to void last month's football elections.
Fifa had given Nigeria until Friday to reverse last week's ruling by the Jos High Court that annulled the 30 September election of Amaju Pinnick as Nigeria Football Federation president.
Nigeria squad:
Goalkeepers: Vincent Enyeama (Lille, France); Austin Ejide (Hapoel Be'er Sheva, Israel); Chigozie Agbim (Gombe United)
Defenders: Elderson Echiejile (Monaco, France); Juwon Oshaniwa (Ashdod FC, Israel); Efe Ambrose (Celtic, Scotland); Solomon Kwambe (Sunshine Stars); Godfrey Oboabona (Rizespor, Turkey); Kenneth Omeruo (Middlesbrough, England); Azubuike Egwuekwe (Warri Wolves)
Midfielders: John Mikel Obi (Chelsea, England); Ogenyi Onazi (SS Lazio, Italy); Hope Akpan (Reading, England); Raheem Lawal (Eskisehirspor, Turkey); Sone Aluko (Hull City, England); Tony Edjomari (Nasarawa United)
Forwards: Ahmed Musa (CSKA Moscow, Russia); Emmanuel Emenike (Fenerbahce, Turkey); Gbolahan Salami (Warri Wolves); Osaguona Ighodaro (Enugu Rangers); Ikechukwu Uche (Villarreal CF, Spain); Aaron Samuel (Guangzhou R&F, China); Sunday Emmanuel (SV Scholz Grodig, Austria); Babatunde Michael (Volyn Lutsk, Ukraine): Emem Eduok (Dolphins FC,)
BBC
Suicide bomber kills 23 in Yobe, Nigeria
A suicide bomber killed at least 23 people in a procession of Shi'ite Muslims marking the ritual of Ashoura in northeast Nigeria's Yobe state on Monday, witnesses said.
The attacker joined the line of Shi'ites before setting off his device as they marched through a market in the town of Potiskum, in a territory at the heart of an insurgency by Sunni Muslim Boko Haram rebels, resident Yusuf Abdullahi told Reuters.
"I heard a very heavy explosion as if it happened in my room. It took place just 200 meters from my house," he said. Another person carrying an explosive that did not go off was also arrested, he added.
Mohammed Gana, whose brother was killed in the attack, said he counted 23 bodies at the scene.
Boko Haram's five-year-old campaign for an Islamic state, which has killed thousands, is seen as the main security threat to Africa's biggest economy and leading oil producer.
Ashoura marks the death in battle more than 1,300 years ago of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein.
Reuters
The attacker joined the line of Shi'ites before setting off his device as they marched through a market in the town of Potiskum, in a territory at the heart of an insurgency by Sunni Muslim Boko Haram rebels, resident Yusuf Abdullahi told Reuters.
"I heard a very heavy explosion as if it happened in my room. It took place just 200 meters from my house," he said. Another person carrying an explosive that did not go off was also arrested, he added.
Mohammed Gana, whose brother was killed in the attack, said he counted 23 bodies at the scene.
Boko Haram's five-year-old campaign for an Islamic state, which has killed thousands, is seen as the main security threat to Africa's biggest economy and leading oil producer.
Ashoura marks the death in battle more than 1,300 years ago of the Prophet Mohammad's grandson Imam Hussein.
Reuters
Friday, October 31, 2014
American school bar third grade student who visited Nigeria
A Connecticut school superintendent is defending her decision to bar a third-grader from returning to school after visiting West Africa because of concern the girl may have contracted Ebola.
Milford School Superintendent Elizabeth Feser says in a statement Wednesday that her actions were a good-faith response to a public health issue and in the best interest of all students.
Her comments follow a federal lawsuit filed by the father of Ikeoluw Opayemi. He says the decision violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because it discriminates against his daughter for a "perceived impairment."
The lawsuit says there is no Ebola in Nigeria, the country the family visited, and the decision to keep his daughter home until Nov. 3 is irrational. He wants the school to allow his daughter to return immediately.
AP
Related stories: Nigeria dropped from Ebola screening list in U.S. and Canada
College in Texas apoligizes for rejecting Nigerian applicants due to Ebola scar
Milford School Superintendent Elizabeth Feser says in a statement Wednesday that her actions were a good-faith response to a public health issue and in the best interest of all students.
Her comments follow a federal lawsuit filed by the father of Ikeoluw Opayemi. He says the decision violates the Americans with Disabilities Act because it discriminates against his daughter for a "perceived impairment."
The lawsuit says there is no Ebola in Nigeria, the country the family visited, and the decision to keep his daughter home until Nov. 3 is irrational. He wants the school to allow his daughter to return immediately.
AP
Related stories: Nigeria dropped from Ebola screening list in U.S. and Canada
College in Texas apoligizes for rejecting Nigerian applicants due to Ebola scar
Thursday, October 30, 2014
President Goodluck Jonathan officially throws his hat in 2015 Presidential elections
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has confirmed he will run again in February's elections, his office has said.
Until now he had refused to confirm his candidacy for re-election as president.
The announcement comes as he faces mounting criticism over his handling of the Boko Haram insurgency and its abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls.
The militants are reported to have seized control of the north-eastern town of Mubi.
The government announced a ceasefire agreement with Boko Haram earlier this month that was supposed to lead to the release of the schoolgirls. Thousands of people have fled from the rebels' north-eastern stronghold throughout the course of the conflict.
Local residents told the BBC the militants had raised their flag over Mubi and blocked the main access roads.
Earlier there were reports of heavy gunfire and military fighter jets overhead. Mubi is a commercial hub and the second largest town in Adamawa state.
Residents of the town began to flee following reports that the militants were approaching - soldiers were also reported to have fled.
"There is virtually not a single resident left in Mubi. Everybody has left to save their lives," local resident Habu Saidu told the AFP news agency as he made his way through the bush.
"People in thousands left the town on foot because all roads have been blocked by soldiers and it is not possible to leave by road."
Mubi has in the past witnessed violence attributed to militant Islamist group.
The Nigerian government says it has been talking to Boko Haram in neighbouring Chad with both parties agreeing on a ceasefire.
But even after the announcement was made over a week ago, the clashes continued - raising questions about the validity of the truce.
Rampant corruption
Being the incumbent from a well-financed party, President Jonathan is expected to be the main contender during next February's elections.
The BBC's Tomi Oladipo in Lagos says that the president is not only being accused of not doing enough to win the release of the girls - he is also blamed for failing to curb rampant corruption in government and state institutions.
In addition there have been several high-profile defections from the ruling party, including most recently the speaker of the House of Representatives.
The ceasefire agreement with Boko Haram is expected to boost Mr Jonathan's chances if it results in the release of the schoolgirls.
The opposition All Progressives Congress will not select its candidate until early December. The former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari is considered the favourite to lead the opposition challenge for the top job in Africa's largest economy.
BBC
Until now he had refused to confirm his candidacy for re-election as president.
The announcement comes as he faces mounting criticism over his handling of the Boko Haram insurgency and its abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls.
The militants are reported to have seized control of the north-eastern town of Mubi.
The government announced a ceasefire agreement with Boko Haram earlier this month that was supposed to lead to the release of the schoolgirls. Thousands of people have fled from the rebels' north-eastern stronghold throughout the course of the conflict.
Local residents told the BBC the militants had raised their flag over Mubi and blocked the main access roads.
Earlier there were reports of heavy gunfire and military fighter jets overhead. Mubi is a commercial hub and the second largest town in Adamawa state.
Residents of the town began to flee following reports that the militants were approaching - soldiers were also reported to have fled.
"There is virtually not a single resident left in Mubi. Everybody has left to save their lives," local resident Habu Saidu told the AFP news agency as he made his way through the bush.
"People in thousands left the town on foot because all roads have been blocked by soldiers and it is not possible to leave by road."
Mubi has in the past witnessed violence attributed to militant Islamist group.
The Nigerian government says it has been talking to Boko Haram in neighbouring Chad with both parties agreeing on a ceasefire.
But even after the announcement was made over a week ago, the clashes continued - raising questions about the validity of the truce.
Rampant corruption
Being the incumbent from a well-financed party, President Jonathan is expected to be the main contender during next February's elections.
The BBC's Tomi Oladipo in Lagos says that the president is not only being accused of not doing enough to win the release of the girls - he is also blamed for failing to curb rampant corruption in government and state institutions.
In addition there have been several high-profile defections from the ruling party, including most recently the speaker of the House of Representatives.
The ceasefire agreement with Boko Haram is expected to boost Mr Jonathan's chances if it results in the release of the schoolgirls.
The opposition All Progressives Congress will not select its candidate until early December. The former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari is considered the favourite to lead the opposition challenge for the top job in Africa's largest economy.
BBC
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Video - FIFA celebrates Nwankwo Kanu's magical hatrick 15 years ago with 15minutes left to play
Throughout his career, Nwankwo Kanu has made his living off the back of having an exquisite touch few men of his size possess, and an instinctive finishing ability that saw him shine on the game's biggest stages.
While a veteran of three FIFA World Cups™, were you only given 15 minutes of his career to see, you could do far worse than the climax to Arsenal's 3-2 victory over Chelsea. Played 15 years ago today, the 6ft 6in Nigerian struck a memorable hat-trick that provided a perfect collage of the finer points of his game.
Two down to Gianluca Vialli's side, who had not conceded at Stamford Bridge all season – largely thanks to World Cup-winning duo Marcel Desailly and Frank Leboeuf in the centre of defence, things looked bleak for the Gunners. However, the former Ajax and Inter Milan striker inspired an unlikely turnaround, with his winning goal becoming the stuff of North London legend.
“I have very good memories of that game,” the Olympic gold medal winner told FIFA.com. “It felt great to score against such a formidable team as Chelsea and it just shows the game is not over until it is over.
“I was not particularly out to get the better of Marcel, Frank or [goalkeeper Ed] de Goey that day, I just wanted to play my game and bring out the best of the tricks in my bag to outwit my opponent and score for my team.”
After a pair of headers from Tore Andre Flo and Dan Petrescu had put the hosts ahead either side of half-time, and cruising with 75 minutes on the clock, Kanu took the sting out of Marc Overmars' mis-hit shot to expertly toe-poke Arsenal back into the game.
Seven minutes later they were level, with the same duo combining. Overmars skipped into space beyond Leboeuf, before firing low across the box. He found his West African team-mate, where Kanu opened his body to cushion the ball into space, thumping the ball emphatically beyond the Dutch stopper. The momentum had violently swung, but it took until stoppage time for the Arsenal frontman to complete his treble, but it was worth the wait.
Having charged down Albert Ferrer's clearance on the left flank, Kanu was presented with the unexpected and imposing frame of De Goey, charging along the byline and out of his area. To his credit, the former Super Eagles star was coolness personified. “I worked the goalkeeper into a position where I could sell a dummy to him, which of course he bought,” he recalled.“I lifted up my head and picked out the far top corner of the net, which I quickly curled the ball into pretty much from where I stood.”
The former African Player of the Year does himself something of a disservice, as the goal was extraordinary. Standing no more than two yards from the touchline and just inside the penalty area, placing the ball high over Desailly and Leboeuf who were stationed on the goal-line, it was an exceptional finish to cap an exceptional 15 minutes from him.
"I expected him to cross," Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger admitted after the game. "If he hadn't scored it could have upset you because he really should have passed. However, great players can prove you wrong. It is one of the best goals I've seen."
It was a stark change in fortunes for Kanu, who had missed a penalty against Fiorentina in the UEFA Champions League in midweek, but starting in place of Dennis Bergkamp – a man Kanu fondly called “'the eye', because of his fantastic foresight” – he repaid the fans in perfect style.
Kanu now spends his time helping run the Kanu Heart Foundation, which has helped carry out open heart surgery on 485 children from Nigeria and around Africa to date. “ Winning the double with Arsenal and being part of 'the Invincibles' [who went a season unbeatenin 2003/04] are good memories but starting the foundation tops them all,” he said with earnest. “But with 300 kids still on the waiting list, we have to do all we can to save the lives of these children.”
FIFA
Related stories: Super Eagle legend Nwankwo Kanu undergoes corrective heart surgery
Q&A with Nigerian football legend Kanu Nwankwo
Nigeria Football Federation given deadline to avoid ban
Nigeria have been given until Friday to overturn a recent court ruling that voided its football elections or Fifa will ban them until May 2015.
In a letter sent to the Nigerian Football Federation on Tuesday, Fifa said their directive must be met by midday, 31 October.
Fifa wants the reinstatement of the NFF board that was elected on 30 September.
If Nigeria fail to comply, they will be expelled from qualification for next year's Africa Cup of Nations.
The Super Eagles are the reigning champions but are now facing the very real prospect of missing the chance to defend their title at the 17 January to 8 February finals.
Already this year, Nigeria have been banned for government interference in the NFF and Fifa warned the country in September and again in October that another incident would result in a lengthy ban.
Fifa's action follows last week's ruling by the Jos High Court annulled last month's election of Amaju Pinnick as Nigeria Football Federation president.
Justice Ambrose Allagoa ruled that the elective congress of the NFF should not be recognised as the Jos High Court had put in place 11 days earlier an order that the elections could not be held.
This injunction was brought by two members of the previous NFF executive led by Chris Giwa, which was stripped of its authority after elections that took it to power on 26 August were deemed invalid by Fifa. The court order was ignored by the NFF, which went ahead with their congress and the Pinnick-led executive was put in place.
Justice Allagoa has ruled, however, that the original injunction remains in place and therefore the 30 September congress should not be recognised. Fifa's letter said: "As stated in our previous letters, Fifa stressed that should the electoral process and the instalment of the newly elected NFF board be affected by any interference, the case would be brought to the attention of the appropriate Fifa bodies for a suspension of the NFF until the next Fifa Congress due to take place on 28 and 29 May 2015.
"We thus hope that by Friday midday, we will receive the requested evidence in order to avoid the adverse consequences of a suspension."
BBC
Related story: Nigerian football faces another possible FIFA ban
In a letter sent to the Nigerian Football Federation on Tuesday, Fifa said their directive must be met by midday, 31 October.
Fifa wants the reinstatement of the NFF board that was elected on 30 September.
If Nigeria fail to comply, they will be expelled from qualification for next year's Africa Cup of Nations.
The Super Eagles are the reigning champions but are now facing the very real prospect of missing the chance to defend their title at the 17 January to 8 February finals.
Already this year, Nigeria have been banned for government interference in the NFF and Fifa warned the country in September and again in October that another incident would result in a lengthy ban.
Fifa's action follows last week's ruling by the Jos High Court annulled last month's election of Amaju Pinnick as Nigeria Football Federation president.
Justice Ambrose Allagoa ruled that the elective congress of the NFF should not be recognised as the Jos High Court had put in place 11 days earlier an order that the elections could not be held.
This injunction was brought by two members of the previous NFF executive led by Chris Giwa, which was stripped of its authority after elections that took it to power on 26 August were deemed invalid by Fifa. The court order was ignored by the NFF, which went ahead with their congress and the Pinnick-led executive was put in place.
Justice Allagoa has ruled, however, that the original injunction remains in place and therefore the 30 September congress should not be recognised. Fifa's letter said: "As stated in our previous letters, Fifa stressed that should the electoral process and the instalment of the newly elected NFF board be affected by any interference, the case would be brought to the attention of the appropriate Fifa bodies for a suspension of the NFF until the next Fifa Congress due to take place on 28 and 29 May 2015.
"We thus hope that by Friday midday, we will receive the requested evidence in order to avoid the adverse consequences of a suspension."
BBC
Related story: Nigerian football faces another possible FIFA ban
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Nigeria sues Coca-Cola over two half-empty cans of Sprite
The Federal Government of Nigeria is suing Coca-Cola and Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC), over alleged failure to comply with Consumer Protection Council (CPC) orders over two half-empty cans of Sprite.
The lawsuits follow a consumer complaint, which ended in investigation into the half-filled cans of Sprite bought at a supermarket in Abuja.
The case was brought to the Federal High Court in Abuja against Coca-Cola Nigeria and its chief executive as well as the Nigerian Bottling Company and its managing director for criminal breach of the Consumer Protection Act.
Both firms stand accused of “deliberately failing, refusing and/or neglecting to comply” with orders over the inspection of their manufacturing processes.
Individuals responsible could face up to five years in prison.
CPC added that during its investigation half-filled cans continued to evaporate. CPC concluded that the Sprite situation in Nigeria poses a threat to public health.
RT
The lawsuits follow a consumer complaint, which ended in investigation into the half-filled cans of Sprite bought at a supermarket in Abuja.
The case was brought to the Federal High Court in Abuja against Coca-Cola Nigeria and its chief executive as well as the Nigerian Bottling Company and its managing director for criminal breach of the Consumer Protection Act.
Both firms stand accused of “deliberately failing, refusing and/or neglecting to comply” with orders over the inspection of their manufacturing processes.
Individuals responsible could face up to five years in prison.
CPC added that during its investigation half-filled cans continued to evaporate. CPC concluded that the Sprite situation in Nigeria poses a threat to public health.
RT
Monday, October 27, 2014
Nigerian football faces another possible FIFA ban
FIFA, the world football governing body, will on Monday decide whether or not to suspend Nigeria from football competitions. On Saturday in Windhoek, Namibia, the president of the Confederation of African Football, Issa Hayatou, told Nigeria’s Sports Minister, Tammy Danagogo, that the world was fed up with Nigeria’s actions in the area of football administration.
“I had to plead passionately with FIFA President, Mr. Sepp Blatter not to take action on Nigeria on Friday, because Nigeria was in the final of the African Women Championship and a ban on your country would have been bad for the competition and our sponsors,” he said.
“We all heard the news of the court ruling on Thursday, and the football world is angry with Nigeria. That is the truth.”
“The FIFA letter that came to your Federation before the elections of September 30 was very clear about an automatic suspension should there be any interference with the political process, and after the elections went ahead, we all thought you had settled your issues,” he added
At the meeting that had Nigeria’s Sports Minister, Tamuno Danagogo; Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Namibia, Biodun Olorunfemi; Nigeria’s Deputy President of the CAF Appeal Board, Amanze Uchegbulam; CAF General Coordinator, Paul Bassey; and CAF Media Committee Member, Aisha Falode in attendance, Mr. Hayattou said there was no going back on the suspension of Nigeria this week if football matters were not withdrawn from civil courts.
“I appealed to FIFA to give until Monday for Nigeria to put its act together. After that, there is absolutely nothing I can do,” “It is all very disappointing because we have over 50 National Associations in Africa, but a big country like Nigeria is the one always giving us the biggest headache.
“Nigeria signed to be part of the football world by joining FIFA, and opted to abide by the FIFA –approved Statutes that you have. How many times do we have to tell your country that football matters are not taken to civil courts? If Nigeria no longer wants to be part of the football world, then so be it.”
His French words were translated to the rest of the Nigeria delegation by the multi-lingual Paul Bassey. Messrs. Blatter and Hayatou were among several world football leaders who congratulated Amaju Pinnick following his victory at the September 30 elections.
Following his ouster by the court, Mr. Pinnick, who was, inexplicably, stopped by security operatives at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, on his way to Namibiaon Friday night with the Sports Minister, monitored the meeting on phone. On Thursday, the Federal High Court, Jos gave a ruling setting aside the FIFA–ordered elections of September 30 into the NFF Executive Committee, stoking the fire of anger at the world body’s Zurich headquarters.
The NFF Executive Committee, led by Mr. Pinnick, has filed for a stay-of-execution of the order at the same court, which the court said it will be hear on Wednesday. Ms. Falode, who spoke from Windhoek on Sunday, said it was obvious the Government of Nigeria has to now intervene to avoid the hammer falling on Nigeria football.
“The future of millions of Nigerian youth is being put at risk by some persons who feel they have nothing to lose in the case of a FIFA ban. It is now for the Government to wade in. If we get suspended from international football now, FIFA will not revisit the matter until their 65th Congress on May 29, 2015. That would be too bad for our country’s football,” Ms. Falode said.
Premium Times
Related stories: FIFA suspends Nigeria from all international football
FIFA to lift ban on Nigeria participating in international football
“I had to plead passionately with FIFA President, Mr. Sepp Blatter not to take action on Nigeria on Friday, because Nigeria was in the final of the African Women Championship and a ban on your country would have been bad for the competition and our sponsors,” he said.
“We all heard the news of the court ruling on Thursday, and the football world is angry with Nigeria. That is the truth.”
“The FIFA letter that came to your Federation before the elections of September 30 was very clear about an automatic suspension should there be any interference with the political process, and after the elections went ahead, we all thought you had settled your issues,” he added
At the meeting that had Nigeria’s Sports Minister, Tamuno Danagogo; Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Namibia, Biodun Olorunfemi; Nigeria’s Deputy President of the CAF Appeal Board, Amanze Uchegbulam; CAF General Coordinator, Paul Bassey; and CAF Media Committee Member, Aisha Falode in attendance, Mr. Hayattou said there was no going back on the suspension of Nigeria this week if football matters were not withdrawn from civil courts.
“I appealed to FIFA to give until Monday for Nigeria to put its act together. After that, there is absolutely nothing I can do,” “It is all very disappointing because we have over 50 National Associations in Africa, but a big country like Nigeria is the one always giving us the biggest headache.
“Nigeria signed to be part of the football world by joining FIFA, and opted to abide by the FIFA –approved Statutes that you have. How many times do we have to tell your country that football matters are not taken to civil courts? If Nigeria no longer wants to be part of the football world, then so be it.”
His French words were translated to the rest of the Nigeria delegation by the multi-lingual Paul Bassey. Messrs. Blatter and Hayatou were among several world football leaders who congratulated Amaju Pinnick following his victory at the September 30 elections.
Following his ouster by the court, Mr. Pinnick, who was, inexplicably, stopped by security operatives at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, on his way to Namibiaon Friday night with the Sports Minister, monitored the meeting on phone. On Thursday, the Federal High Court, Jos gave a ruling setting aside the FIFA–ordered elections of September 30 into the NFF Executive Committee, stoking the fire of anger at the world body’s Zurich headquarters.
The NFF Executive Committee, led by Mr. Pinnick, has filed for a stay-of-execution of the order at the same court, which the court said it will be hear on Wednesday. Ms. Falode, who spoke from Windhoek on Sunday, said it was obvious the Government of Nigeria has to now intervene to avoid the hammer falling on Nigeria football.
“The future of millions of Nigerian youth is being put at risk by some persons who feel they have nothing to lose in the case of a FIFA ban. It is now for the Government to wade in. If we get suspended from international football now, FIFA will not revisit the matter until their 65th Congress on May 29, 2015. That would be too bad for our country’s football,” Ms. Falode said.
Premium Times
Related stories: FIFA suspends Nigeria from all international football
FIFA to lift ban on Nigeria participating in international football
Boko Haram sends kidnapped schoolgirls to fight
Nigeria's militant Islamist group Boko Haram has forced abducted women and girls to go to the front line to help fight the military, a new report says.
The group has taken more than 500 women and girls hostage since it began its insurgency in 2009, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report adds.
Suspected militants seized about 30 children on Thursday, despite government claims of a truce.
Boko Haram has declared a caliphate in areas it controls in the north-east.
The group had intensified abductions since May 2013, when Nigeria's government imposed a state of emergency in the three states where Boko Haram was most active - Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, HRW said.
'Shaking with horror'
The New-York based group estimates that more than 4,000 civilians have been killed in more than 192 attacks since May 2013 in the north-eastern and in the capital, Abuja.
At least 2,053 civilians were killed by Boko Haram in the first half of 2014, it says.
BBC
The group has taken more than 500 women and girls hostage since it began its insurgency in 2009, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report adds.
Suspected militants seized about 30 children on Thursday, despite government claims of a truce.
Boko Haram has declared a caliphate in areas it controls in the north-east.
The group had intensified abductions since May 2013, when Nigeria's government imposed a state of emergency in the three states where Boko Haram was most active - Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, HRW said.
'Shaking with horror'
The New-York based group estimates that more than 4,000 civilians have been killed in more than 192 attacks since May 2013 in the north-eastern and in the capital, Abuja.
At least 2,053 civilians were killed by Boko Haram in the first half of 2014, it says.
BBC
Friday, October 24, 2014
Nigerian Dominic Adesanya arrested for jumping White House Fence
A man jumped the White House fence on Wednesday evening and was attacked by Secret Service dogs before being arrested, a Secret Service spokesman said.
“Dogs got him,” spokesman Edwin Donovan said, referring to the intruder. He identified the intruder as Dominic Adesanya, 23, of Bel Air, Maryland, and said he was unarmed at the time of his arrest, reported the Associated Press (AP).
Video showed Secret Service agents surrounding the man on the north lawn of the White House, which was put on lockdown for about 90 minutes. The man punched one of the dogs that attacked him, as seen in the video.
Two Secret Service dogs “were taken to a veterinarian for injuries sustained during the incident,” Donovan said.
The incident came roughly a month after an intruder armed with a knife scaled the White House fence and made it inside the executive mansion, raising questions about security levels at the heavily guarded complex and spurring the resignation of then Secret Service Director, Julia Pierson.
The man climbed the fence around 7:15 p.m. (2315 GMT) and was apprehended shortly thereafter. The lockdown was lifted shortly before 9 p.m.
“The individual was immediately taken into custody on the north lawn of the White House by Secret Service Uniformed Division K-9 teams and Uniformed Division Officers,” Donovan said. K-9 refers to the team using specially trained dogs.
The man was then transported to a hospital for evaluation, the spokesman said.
The latest White House security breach happened the same day a gunman attacked Canada’s parliament in Ottawa.
This Day
“Dogs got him,” spokesman Edwin Donovan said, referring to the intruder. He identified the intruder as Dominic Adesanya, 23, of Bel Air, Maryland, and said he was unarmed at the time of his arrest, reported the Associated Press (AP).
Video showed Secret Service agents surrounding the man on the north lawn of the White House, which was put on lockdown for about 90 minutes. The man punched one of the dogs that attacked him, as seen in the video.
Two Secret Service dogs “were taken to a veterinarian for injuries sustained during the incident,” Donovan said.
The incident came roughly a month after an intruder armed with a knife scaled the White House fence and made it inside the executive mansion, raising questions about security levels at the heavily guarded complex and spurring the resignation of then Secret Service Director, Julia Pierson.
The man climbed the fence around 7:15 p.m. (2315 GMT) and was apprehended shortly thereafter. The lockdown was lifted shortly before 9 p.m.
“The individual was immediately taken into custody on the north lawn of the White House by Secret Service Uniformed Division K-9 teams and Uniformed Division Officers,” Donovan said. K-9 refers to the team using specially trained dogs.
The man was then transported to a hospital for evaluation, the spokesman said.
The latest White House security breach happened the same day a gunman attacked Canada’s parliament in Ottawa.
This Day
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Boko Haram kidnap more women after Nigerian government announce ceasefire
Dozens of women and girls from two villages in Nigeria's north-eastern Adamawa state have been abducted by suspected militants, residents say.
The abductions have not been confirmed by the authorities, but residents say they took place a day after the military announced it had agreed a ceasefire with the Boko Haram group.
The government hopes the Islamist group will free more than 200 girls seized in April as part of negotiations.
Boko Haram has not confirmed the truce.
Following Friday's ceasefire announcement, the government said further talks with Boko Haram were due to be held this week in neighbouring Chad.
In a separate incident, at least five people were killed in a bomb blast at a bus station in a town in the northern state of Bauchi.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hostage swaps
News of the new abductions came as MPs approved a $1bn (£623m) loan - requested by the president in July - to upgrade military equipment and train more units fighting the north-eastern insurgency.
Security already costs the country close to $6bn, roughly a quarter of the federal budget.
The abduction of the schoolgirls from their boarding school in Borno state sparked a global campaign to pressure the government to secure their release.
Borno is the group's stronghold. It has been under a state of emergency, along with neighbouring Adamawa and Yobe states, for more than a year.
The villages that were attacked on Saturday - Waga Mangoro and Garta - are close to Madagali and Michika towns, which have been under the control of the Islamist militant group for several weeks.
According to people in the area, a large group of insurgents attacked the villages, rounding up women and young girls.
Communication with the affected area is difficult, which is why it takes time for news of attacks to filter out.
Other raids by suspected Boko Haram fighters were reported by residents in Adamawa and Borno over the weekend.
Since the state of emergency was declared in May 2013, Boko Haram has taken many women and children hostage and has agreed to some prisoner swaps.
The name Boko Haram translates as "Western education is forbidden", and the militants have carried out raids on schools and colleges, seeing them as a symbol of Western culture.
BBC
Related story: Nigerian military and Boko Haram agree to ceasefire and release of kidnapped schoolgirls
The abductions have not been confirmed by the authorities, but residents say they took place a day after the military announced it had agreed a ceasefire with the Boko Haram group.
The government hopes the Islamist group will free more than 200 girls seized in April as part of negotiations.
Boko Haram has not confirmed the truce.
Following Friday's ceasefire announcement, the government said further talks with Boko Haram were due to be held this week in neighbouring Chad.
In a separate incident, at least five people were killed in a bomb blast at a bus station in a town in the northern state of Bauchi.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Hostage swaps
News of the new abductions came as MPs approved a $1bn (£623m) loan - requested by the president in July - to upgrade military equipment and train more units fighting the north-eastern insurgency.
Security already costs the country close to $6bn, roughly a quarter of the federal budget.
The abduction of the schoolgirls from their boarding school in Borno state sparked a global campaign to pressure the government to secure their release.
Borno is the group's stronghold. It has been under a state of emergency, along with neighbouring Adamawa and Yobe states, for more than a year.
The villages that were attacked on Saturday - Waga Mangoro and Garta - are close to Madagali and Michika towns, which have been under the control of the Islamist militant group for several weeks.
According to people in the area, a large group of insurgents attacked the villages, rounding up women and young girls.
Communication with the affected area is difficult, which is why it takes time for news of attacks to filter out.
Other raids by suspected Boko Haram fighters were reported by residents in Adamawa and Borno over the weekend.
Since the state of emergency was declared in May 2013, Boko Haram has taken many women and children hostage and has agreed to some prisoner swaps.
The name Boko Haram translates as "Western education is forbidden", and the militants have carried out raids on schools and colleges, seeing them as a symbol of Western culture.
BBC
Related story: Nigerian military and Boko Haram agree to ceasefire and release of kidnapped schoolgirls
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Social media technology helped contain ebola in Nigeria
According to the minister, the Android-based mobile app reduced reporting times of infections by 75 percent, adding that test results were scanned to tablets and uploaded to emergency databases and field teams got text message alerts on their phones informing them of the results.
Johnson said the combination of the internet and mobile cellular phones has opened up tremendous opportunities for countries like Nigeria.
“The steep increase in mobile use is driven by a number of factors, particularly, the additional ways in which mobile phones are being used in Nigeria. Beyond conducting voice conversations, mobile phones are often the preferred channel for receiving data and for conducting transactions in Nigeria – making phones an indispensable tool used as-cameras, wallets, shops, music players, movie screens, and information or service centres of Nigerians,” Johnson said.
“Nigeria’s policy focus is in step with the reality of the mobile internet revolution spreading across the globe- thus, the Ministry of Communication Technology is looking to create a viable environment for the proliferation of lower priced devices, increased investment in network infrastructure, and increased availability of spectrum for mobile broadband, in the knowledge that these will further drive growth in the nation’s ICT sector.”
Human IPO
Related stories: Nigeria officially declared Ebola free
Nigeria dropped from Ebola screening list in U.S. and Canada
Johnson said the combination of the internet and mobile cellular phones has opened up tremendous opportunities for countries like Nigeria.
“The steep increase in mobile use is driven by a number of factors, particularly, the additional ways in which mobile phones are being used in Nigeria. Beyond conducting voice conversations, mobile phones are often the preferred channel for receiving data and for conducting transactions in Nigeria – making phones an indispensable tool used as-cameras, wallets, shops, music players, movie screens, and information or service centres of Nigerians,” Johnson said.
“Nigeria’s policy focus is in step with the reality of the mobile internet revolution spreading across the globe- thus, the Ministry of Communication Technology is looking to create a viable environment for the proliferation of lower priced devices, increased investment in network infrastructure, and increased availability of spectrum for mobile broadband, in the knowledge that these will further drive growth in the nation’s ICT sector.”
Human IPO
Related stories: Nigeria officially declared Ebola free
Nigeria dropped from Ebola screening list in U.S. and Canada
Monday, October 20, 2014
Nigeria officially declared Ebola free
Nigeria is expected to be declared officially free of Ebola on Monday, after six weeks with no new cases.
Africa's most populous country won praise for its swift response after an infected Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July.
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday.
The current outbreak has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, most in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone
An estimated 70% of those infected have died in those countries.
Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers are meeting in Luxembourg to discuss how to strengthen their response to the threat posed by Ebola.
European countries have committed more than 500m euros (£400m; $600m) but the UK is pressing to double that amount.
The money is being sought to help reinforce over-stretched healthcare systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and to mitigate the damage Ebola is doing to their economies.
Earlier, the Spanish government said a nurse who became the first person to contract Ebola outside West Africa had tested negative for the virus.
The result suggests Teresa Romero, 44, is no longer infected although a second test is required before she can be declared free of Ebola.
Ms Romero contracted the virus when treating two infected patients in a Madrid hospital.
In another development, US health officials said most of the people quarantined after coming into contact with Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan had been given the all-clear. The 21-day monitoring period applied to about 50 people.
Two nurses at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas became infected with Ebola after treating Mr Duncan, who was from Liberia. He died on 8 October.
Nigeria praised
The WHO can declare an Ebola outbreak over if two incubation periods of 21 days pass with no new cases. The last reported case in Nigeria was discovered on 5 September, and the country is now on the verge of a clean bill of health.
The BBC's Will Ross in Lagos says that although the nation is heaving a collective sigh of relief, experts warn that Ebola will probably return to Nigeria.
The outbreak there began when Patrick Sawyer, an American-Liberian citizen, was diagnosed with the illness in July.
Nigeria declared a national public health emergency and Sawyer later died of the disease, followed by seven Nigerians.
These included Dr Ameyo Stella Adadevoh, who diagnosed Sawyer and is credited with helping to contain the outbreak at its source.
John Vertefeuille, from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that Nigeria had taken the right steps to contain the outbreak.
"Nigeria acted quickly and early and on a large scale" he told AFP news agency. "They acted aggressively, especially in terms of contact-tracing", he added.
BBC
Africa's most populous country won praise for its swift response after an infected Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July.
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday.
The current outbreak has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, most in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone
An estimated 70% of those infected have died in those countries.
Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers are meeting in Luxembourg to discuss how to strengthen their response to the threat posed by Ebola.
European countries have committed more than 500m euros (£400m; $600m) but the UK is pressing to double that amount.
The money is being sought to help reinforce over-stretched healthcare systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and to mitigate the damage Ebola is doing to their economies.
Earlier, the Spanish government said a nurse who became the first person to contract Ebola outside West Africa had tested negative for the virus.
The result suggests Teresa Romero, 44, is no longer infected although a second test is required before she can be declared free of Ebola.
Ms Romero contracted the virus when treating two infected patients in a Madrid hospital.
In another development, US health officials said most of the people quarantined after coming into contact with Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan had been given the all-clear. The 21-day monitoring period applied to about 50 people.
Two nurses at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas became infected with Ebola after treating Mr Duncan, who was from Liberia. He died on 8 October.
Nigeria praised
The WHO can declare an Ebola outbreak over if two incubation periods of 21 days pass with no new cases. The last reported case in Nigeria was discovered on 5 September, and the country is now on the verge of a clean bill of health.
The BBC's Will Ross in Lagos says that although the nation is heaving a collective sigh of relief, experts warn that Ebola will probably return to Nigeria.
The outbreak there began when Patrick Sawyer, an American-Liberian citizen, was diagnosed with the illness in July.
Nigeria declared a national public health emergency and Sawyer later died of the disease, followed by seven Nigerians.
These included Dr Ameyo Stella Adadevoh, who diagnosed Sawyer and is credited with helping to contain the outbreak at its source.
John Vertefeuille, from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that Nigeria had taken the right steps to contain the outbreak.
"Nigeria acted quickly and early and on a large scale" he told AFP news agency. "They acted aggressively, especially in terms of contact-tracing", he added.
BBC
Friday, October 17, 2014
Nigerian military and Boko Haram agree to ceasefire and release of kidnapped schoolgirls
Nigeria's military says it has agreed a ceasefire with Islamist militants Boko Haram - and that the schoolgirls the group has abducted will be released.
Nigeria's chief of defence staff, Alex Badeh, announced the truce. Boko Haram has not made a public statement.
The group has been fighting an insurgency since 2009, with some 2,000 civilians reportedly killed this year.
Boko Haram sparked global outrage six months ago by abducting more than 200 schoolgirls.
The girls were seized in the north-eastern town of Chibok in Borno state, and their continued captivity has led to criticism of the Nigerian government's efforts to secure their release.
Members of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign said in a tweet on Friday: "We are monitoring the news with huge expectations." 'Cautiously optimistic'
Air Chief Marshal Badeh revealed the truce at the close of a three-day security meeting between Nigeria and Cameroon. He said Nigerian soldiers would comply with the agreement.
Nigerian presidential aide Hassan Tukur told BBC Focus on Africa that the agreement was sealed after a month of negotiations, mediated by Chad.
As part of the talks, a government delegation twice met representatives of the Islamist group.
Mr Tukur said Boko Haram had announced a unilateral ceasefire on Thursday and the government had responded.
"They've assured us they have the girls and they will release them," he said.
"I am cautiously optimistic."
He said arrangements for their release would be finalised at another meeting next week in Chad's capital, Ndjamena.
The negotiations are said to have the blessing of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, reports the BBC's Chris Ewokor in Abuja.
Speaking to the BBC, Nigerian government spokesman Mike Omeri said Boko Haram would not be given territory under the ceasefire agreement - and that the government would not reveal what concessions it would make.
"We are inching closer to release of all groups in captivity, including the Chibok girls," he said.
BBC
Related story: Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau apparently alive - releases new video
Nigeria's chief of defence staff, Alex Badeh, announced the truce. Boko Haram has not made a public statement.
The group has been fighting an insurgency since 2009, with some 2,000 civilians reportedly killed this year.
Boko Haram sparked global outrage six months ago by abducting more than 200 schoolgirls.
The girls were seized in the north-eastern town of Chibok in Borno state, and their continued captivity has led to criticism of the Nigerian government's efforts to secure their release.
Members of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign said in a tweet on Friday: "We are monitoring the news with huge expectations." 'Cautiously optimistic'
Air Chief Marshal Badeh revealed the truce at the close of a three-day security meeting between Nigeria and Cameroon. He said Nigerian soldiers would comply with the agreement.
Nigerian presidential aide Hassan Tukur told BBC Focus on Africa that the agreement was sealed after a month of negotiations, mediated by Chad.
As part of the talks, a government delegation twice met representatives of the Islamist group.
Mr Tukur said Boko Haram had announced a unilateral ceasefire on Thursday and the government had responded.
"They've assured us they have the girls and they will release them," he said.
"I am cautiously optimistic."
He said arrangements for their release would be finalised at another meeting next week in Chad's capital, Ndjamena.
The negotiations are said to have the blessing of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, reports the BBC's Chris Ewokor in Abuja.
Speaking to the BBC, Nigerian government spokesman Mike Omeri said Boko Haram would not be given territory under the ceasefire agreement - and that the government would not reveal what concessions it would make.
"We are inching closer to release of all groups in captivity, including the Chibok girls," he said.
BBC
Related story: Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau apparently alive - releases new video
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Vomiting airline passenger dies enroute from Nigeria to New York
A plane from Nigeria landed at JFK Airport Thursday with a male passenger aboard who had died during the flight after a fit of vomiting — and CDC officials conducted a “cursory” exam before announcing there was no Ebola and turning the corpse over to Port Authority cops to remove, Rep. Peter King said on Thursday.
The congressman was so alarmed by the incident — and by what he and employees see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK — that he fired off a letter to the federal Department of Homeland Security demanding more training and tougher protocols for handling possible cases there.
The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos, Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law enforcement source said.
During the flight, the man had been vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some time before the plane landed, he passed away. Flight crew contacted the CDC, federal customs officials and Port Authority police, who all boarded the plane at around 6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers remained on board, the source said.
“The door [to the terminal] was left open, which a lot of the first responders found alarming,” said the source.
“My understanding was that the passenger was vomiting in the seat,” King (R-LI) said.
“The CDC went on the plane, examined the dead body and said the person did not have Ebola,” King said.
“It was what I was told a cursory examination. The Port Authority cops and personnel from Customs and Border Protection were there, and they were told there was no danger because the person did not have Ebola,” King said.
“But their concern was, how could you tell so quickly? And what adds to the concern is how wrong the CDC has been over the past few weeks.”
Between 70 and 100 passengers a day arrive at JFK from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three West African countries that are the epicenter of the outbreak, King said.
“These individuals transit the airport with the rest of the traveling population, including using the restrooms,” King wrote to Jeh Johnson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, in a letter Thursday.
“Only after they arrive at the Customs and Border Patrol primary screening location that they are separated and sent to secondary inspection for a medical check and to complete the questionnaire,” he wrote Johnson.
King’s letter demands that Homeland Security immediately beef up protocols for what happens to potentially infected passengers in flight and at the terminal itself, prior to their reaching the screening location.
The letter also demands that training and safety equipment improve for the Port Authority police and Customs and Border Patrol officials who can come into contact with high-risk passengers.
“I believe there should be a suspension of direct flights and connecting flights from these three countries,” King said. “And maybe anyone with a visa from those countries, and who has been living in those countries, should be barred” from entering the US, he added.
No other information was immediately available about the deceased Nigerian passenger.
Nigeria is 1,000 miles east of the three West African countries suffering from an Ebola outbreak, but has had 19 confirmed cases of the deadly virus. The country has had no new cases over the past month; the World Health Organization has said that if there are still no new cases of Ebola by Monday, they will officially declare the country “Ebola-free.”
NY Post
The congressman was so alarmed by the incident — and by what he and employees see as troubling Ebola vulnerabilities at JFK — that he fired off a letter to the federal Department of Homeland Security demanding more training and tougher protocols for handling possible cases there.
The unnamed, 63-year-old passenger had boarded an Arik Air plane out of Lagos, Nigeria, on Wednesday night, a federal law enforcement source said.
During the flight, the man had been vomiting in his seat, the source said. Some time before the plane landed, he passed away. Flight crew contacted the CDC, federal customs officials and Port Authority police, who all boarded the plane at around 6 a.m. as about 145 worried passengers remained on board, the source said.
“The door [to the terminal] was left open, which a lot of the first responders found alarming,” said the source.
“My understanding was that the passenger was vomiting in the seat,” King (R-LI) said.
“The CDC went on the plane, examined the dead body and said the person did not have Ebola,” King said.
“It was what I was told a cursory examination. The Port Authority cops and personnel from Customs and Border Protection were there, and they were told there was no danger because the person did not have Ebola,” King said.
“But their concern was, how could you tell so quickly? And what adds to the concern is how wrong the CDC has been over the past few weeks.”
Between 70 and 100 passengers a day arrive at JFK from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three West African countries that are the epicenter of the outbreak, King said.
“These individuals transit the airport with the rest of the traveling population, including using the restrooms,” King wrote to Jeh Johnson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, in a letter Thursday.
“Only after they arrive at the Customs and Border Patrol primary screening location that they are separated and sent to secondary inspection for a medical check and to complete the questionnaire,” he wrote Johnson.
King’s letter demands that Homeland Security immediately beef up protocols for what happens to potentially infected passengers in flight and at the terminal itself, prior to their reaching the screening location.
The letter also demands that training and safety equipment improve for the Port Authority police and Customs and Border Patrol officials who can come into contact with high-risk passengers.
“I believe there should be a suspension of direct flights and connecting flights from these three countries,” King said. “And maybe anyone with a visa from those countries, and who has been living in those countries, should be barred” from entering the US, he added.
No other information was immediately available about the deceased Nigerian passenger.
Nigeria is 1,000 miles east of the three West African countries suffering from an Ebola outbreak, but has had 19 confirmed cases of the deadly virus. The country has had no new cases over the past month; the World Health Organization has said that if there are still no new cases of Ebola by Monday, they will officially declare the country “Ebola-free.”
NY Post
Stephen Keshi no longer Nigeria Super Eagles coach
Nigeria have confirmed the departure of the head coach, Stephen Keshi, despite their 3-1 win over Sudan in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier on Wednesday night.Shaibu Amodu is set to be installed as caretaker for the remaining two Group A games against Congo and South Africa. Amodu has had three previous spells in charge of Nigeria, from 1994-95, 1998-99 and 2008-10.
Nigeria have four points from four games in Group A and are four points behind South Africa.
Keshi had been out of contract after the World Cup but was then tasked with navigating the Super Eagles’ route to next year’s tournament in Morocco. However, he said that their qualification campaign was being “sabotaged” after they were defeated by Congo, drew in South Africa and lost in Sudan in their opening three games.
The Guardian
Related stories: Stephen Keshi is ranked 24th best coach in the world
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
College in Texas apoligizes for rejecting Nigerian applicants due to Ebola scare
A Texas college apologized on Tuesday for what it's calling "incorrect information" after multiple international applicants received a rejection letter saying that "Navarro College is not accepting international students from countries with confirmed Ebola cases."
Navarro, a two-year public college in Corsicana, is about 60 miles from Dallas, where two health-care workers have been diagnosed with Ebola; the most recent case was confirmed early Wednesday morning. Thomas Eric Duncan, an Ebola-stricken Liberian man who was treated at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, died last week from the illness.
The letter recipients are from Nigeria, a country that hasn't had a new Ebola case in more than 21 days. The World Health Organization is prepared to declare the Ebola outbreak over in Africa's largest country as soon as Monday.
Nigeria managed to contain the Ebola outbreak to just 20 cases, all connected to a Liberian-American air traveler who brought the virus into the country in late July.
Idris Bello, a Nigerian-American who now lives in Texas, posted Navarro College's rejection letter to Twitter earlier this week. In an e-mail, Bello told The Post that he received a copy of the letter from Kamor Abidogun, a friend of his in Houston who works as a mechanical engineer.
Washington Post
Related story: Nigeria dropped from Ebola screening list in U.S. and Canada
Navarro, a two-year public college in Corsicana, is about 60 miles from Dallas, where two health-care workers have been diagnosed with Ebola; the most recent case was confirmed early Wednesday morning. Thomas Eric Duncan, an Ebola-stricken Liberian man who was treated at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, died last week from the illness.
The letter recipients are from Nigeria, a country that hasn't had a new Ebola case in more than 21 days. The World Health Organization is prepared to declare the Ebola outbreak over in Africa's largest country as soon as Monday.
Nigeria managed to contain the Ebola outbreak to just 20 cases, all connected to a Liberian-American air traveler who brought the virus into the country in late July.
Idris Bello, a Nigerian-American who now lives in Texas, posted Navarro College's rejection letter to Twitter earlier this week. In an e-mail, Bello told The Post that he received a copy of the letter from Kamor Abidogun, a friend of his in Houston who works as a mechanical engineer.
Washington Post
Related story: Nigeria dropped from Ebola screening list in U.S. and Canada
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