Nigeria’s elephant in the room

Aug 7, 2022 by

by David Landrum, The Critic:

While the UK braces itself for what the governor of the Bank of England recently described as “economic apocalypse”, spare a thought for Nigeria.

The country is home to 20 per cent of Africa’s entire population, and it now accounts for about 14 per cent of the world’s poor. Plagued by crime and corruption, almost half of the population of around 215 million now live below the official poverty threshold of US$1.90 (792 Naira) daily. Nigeria may be oil-rich, but it is undeniably a failing state.

With the population set to double by 2050, its collapse would have vast repercussions for the whole continent and for Europe. Organised crime, political corruption, ethnic and tribal grievances all play a part in Nigeria’s problems, yet above all else it is Islamist extremism that is the core driver for chaos. A well-funded and strategic jihadist campaign to paralyse security, and the rule of law, looks set fracture Nigeria into a lawless nightmare. Imagine Libya, only on a much larger scale.

A recent report from the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA) reveals that the number of Christians killed was 9.6 times higher than the number of Muslims killed in jihadism-related violence between October 2019 and September 2020. In the following year (October 2020–September 2021) Christians were 7.8 times more likely to be killed than Muslims. Christians were also 59 times more likely to be abducted than Muslims by extremists between 2019 and 2020. Alongside these grim statistics, the report also confirms that violence against moderate Muslims is overwhelmingly from jihadist groups.

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