Word: nigeria
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...Nigeria has been wracked by periodic episodes of violence for decades. The country's 150 million people are divided about equally between Christians and Muslims and further splintered into about 250 tribes. Jos, some 300 miles north of Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, sits smack-dab in the center of Nigeria's tumultuous "middle belt," a so-called cultural fault line that divides the country's Muslim north from the Christian south. The "middle belt" is a melting pot where the major ethnic groups of Nigeria - Hausa-Fulani Muslims and Yoruba and Igbo Christians - usually coexist peacefully but sometimes collide...
...That poor distribution of wealth has also sparked conflict in Nigeria's oil-rich southern Delta region, where militants lobbying for a greater share of oil revenue regularly blow up pipelines and kidnap foreign oil workers. Andrew Kakabadse, professor of international management development at the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management, says oil companies have at various times pitted ethnic factions against one another for economic gain. (See pictures of Lagos...
...Kakabadse blames a lethal combination of outside oil interests, long-standing local conflicts and poverty for the sectarian strife. "In Nigeria the Christian-Muslim thing is the tip of the iceberg," he says. "What's underneath the water is a much more complex sociopolitical situation, which cannot be explained just in terms of the religious divide. You have a recipe ripe for conflict, and it just so happens to be Christian-Muslim...
...rebirths can be fragile. And after a few years of optimism in West Africa, instability has suddenly returned. The past two years have seen coups in Guinea and Mauritania and the tit-for-tat assassinations of the President and army chief in Guinea-Bissau. More recently, the regional superpower, Nigeria, endured three months of political uncertainty when President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua underwent medical treatment in Saudi Arabia but refused to hand over power to his deputy for three months. (The transfer was eventually forced by parliament.) And on Friday, two people were reported to have died in Ivory Coast...
...transfers from top African officials to the U.S. via loopholes in a section of the Patriot Act designed to crack down on illegal terrorism financing. The 330-page report scrutinized moves by top political, economic and business leaders from the notoriously corrupt nations of Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Nigeria to determine if they either violated or sought to side-step laws prohibiting money laundering. The report not only found evidence that several powerful officials (known as "politically exposed persons," or PEPs) exploited legal loopholes in moving suspicious funds to the U.S.; it also discovered that American bankers, lawyers...