Word: civilization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When that happens, Nigeria will have come full circle to the democratic system it inherited when it won independence from Britain in 1960. Since then, the country has had a shaky coalition regime, a short-lived parliamentary republic, three coups, a bloody civil war and the assassination of a head of state. Nigeria has simultaneously been afflicted by social and economic strains that have grown along with its wealth, which comes from its copious reserves of easily refinable "sweet" light crude oil. Largely because thousands of peasants have deserted their farms to seek bloated wages in booming Lagos, the country...
...capital Lagos, the minareted city of Kano in the Muslim north and steamy Enugu in the old Biafra area of the Christian and animist south, the name of Nigeria's first popularly elected chief executive was announced. He is Alhaji Shehu Shagari, 54, a slight, soft-spoken veteran civil servant who wears the robes and beaded hat of the northern Hausa tribe and has been an outspoken Muslim nationalist. If all goes as planned, Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo, leader of the ruling Supreme Military Council, will turn power over to a government headed by Shagari...
Meanwhile, a succession of military regimes has failed to resolve the tensions between the Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa tribes that flared into a civil war in 1967 when Biafra, the Ibo homeland, tried to break away. The strongman in power then, General Yakuba Gowon, healed some of the scars by declaring an amnesty at the end of the war, in 1970, but he was toppled in 1975 by other soldiers who objected to his costly schemes, such as the building of a $20 million sports stadium in Lagos...
...years most politicians evaded the race issue, and successive governments behaved as though time and good intentions would somehow make it go away. Says a ranking civil servant: "I think the difference between the U.S. and here is that in America the Government has been willing to do something more than pass laws. Here, once Parliament had passed the Race Relations Act, it then treated it as a bed to sleep...
...thrillers and even fantasies that have been coming forth in salvos of histories, novels, movies and television shows. Furthermore, say experts who keep an eye on such trends, although it has not yet given birth to a Gone With the Wind, World War II is at last supplanting the Civil War as the country's favorite conflict for probing, pondering and-to be honest-enjoying...