| Submit your comments on this article | |||
| Africa Subsaharan | |||
| Riots break out in north as Jonathan wins by landslide | |||
| 2011-04-19 | |||
Jonathan, the first president from the oil producing Niger Delta, was declared the winner with around 57 percent of votes. He defeated Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the north, who got around 31 percent. Observers have called the poll the fairest in decades in Africa's most populous nation. But Buhari's supporters accuse the ruling party of rigging and rejected the results. The results show how polarised the country is, with Buhari sweeping the north and Jonathan winning the largely Christian south. Jonathan had nearly 23 million votes to just over 12 million for Buhari. The Nigerian Red "In Kaduna we have seen dead bodies lying by the road," Red Cross official Umar Mairiga told Reuters. "Two thousand people have been displaced at one military camp alone." Authorities in the northern state of Kaduna imposed a 24-hour curfew after protesters set fire to the residence of Vice President Namadi Sambo in the town of Zaria and forced their way into the central prison, releasing inmates. Plumes of smoke rose into the air in parts of Kaduna as protesters set fire to barricades of tyres. Security forces fired in the air and used teargas to disperse groups of youths shouting "We want Buhari, we want Buhari". Police said the violence was political rather than ethnic or religious. Twelve years after the end of military rule, the army said it stood fully behind the government and democratic rule. Jonathan appealed to all politicians to end violence. "No one's political ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian," he said in a statement. Buhari was yet to make any public statement on the violence despite appeals by foreign embassies that he call for calm.
"What is being exhibited to the world is not collated from polling units but from the state headquarters where a lot of manipulations, we believe, had taken place," the party said. Saturday's vote was deemed by many Nigerians, and foreign observers, to have been a vast improvement on the past. "Election day showed a generally peaceful and orderly process," said chief European Union election observer Alojz Peterle. EU observers said 2007 elections were not credible. The independent Swift Count monitor group said the official results were right in line with what they would have expected based on their samples from a random selection of nearly 1,500 of the 120,000 polling stations across Nigeria. The outright win for Jonathan could ease worries over potential disruptions to crude exports from Africa's biggest oil and gas industry -- far away from the disturbances in the north. It could also lift local financial markets which had been unnerved by the prospect of a potential run-off and the All-Share Index closed up 2.3 percent to its highest in nearly a month. The troubles in the north, on the fringes of the Sahara desert, are far from the oil-producing regions and heaving industrial centres of the south.
| |||
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #6 Wikipedia: In 1960 Nigeria became independent of the United Kingdom.[5] As with many other new African states, the borders of the country did not reflect earlier ethnic boundaries. Thus the northern desert region of the country contained semi-autonomous feudal Muslim states, while the southern population was predominantly Christian and Animist. Ethnic boundaries is wrong, and hinges on the idea that since people of a given racial group all look pretty similar, stacking them together in a single country is the most natural thing in the world. Tell it to Europe, home of the Hundred Years War, WWI and WWII. Imagine if we had liberated the Japanese empire in the Far East at the end of WWII and reconstituted its entire territory as a single country. "Civil war" would have broken out almost immediately. The European powers weren't doing anything worse than other countries before them, in getting the heck out of dodge before all hell broke loose in their former empires, but their empires were all on the scale of Alexander and Genghis. I think the reluctance to acknowledge the creation of new nations is partly the result of the 1 nation 1 vote rule at the UN. Existing nations don't really want their vote diluted. But the long term solution to strife in much of the developing world is partition and the creation of new countries that reflect the national divisions of antiquity that never went away despite the European administration of large foreign territories as single entities. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2011-04-19 16:13 |
| #5 Think the French interfere on behalf of Muzzies like they did in Ivory Coast? Or like virtually everyone did in the Biafran War? |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-04-19 12:01 |
| #4 Think the French interfere on behalf of Muzzies like they did in Ivory Coast? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2011-04-19 11:56 |
| #3 Normal reaction for the ROP. Riot, Loot, Rape, Kill. Anyone really expect anything different? |
| Posted by: tipover 2011-04-19 11:19 |
| #2 You can look up the historical record of the last time it was tried at wikipedia by searching for the entry on the biafran war. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-04-19 10:06 |
| #1 Almost as if the south could cast the north loose and go on its own... We did it. why not them? |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2011-04-19 09:17 |