Word: nigerias
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President Clinton spent the final summer weekend of his presidency on a strange sojourn in raw, unfinished Abuja trying to shake other misperceptions about Nigeria. Abuja, like Brasilia and - come to think of it - Washington, D.C., was nothing until the Nigerian government decided a generation ago to move their capital 300 miles inland. The Gwari tribe was forced off its land as the government began constructing its new capital here in the middle of the country. They chose the sparsely-populated region because it isn't dominated by any of the three major tribes, the Hausa, the Yoruba...
...zani" wrapped skirt daughter Chelsea received, and modeled, in the village's crowded market square. The village named him "Danmasani Ushhafa" - meaning the most knowledgeable man in the village (a title not bestowed on Vice President Dan Quayle during his 1991 visit to the same place). "I came to Nigeria to express the support of the people of the United States," Clinton told the crowd, penned in by bamboo fences sunk into fresh concrete. "We want to help you build your economy, educate your children and build a better life in all the villages of the country...
Things are terrible right now across most of Africa, but slightly better in Nigeria, where a fledgling democracy is 15 months old. In the northern part of a country twice the size of California, local Muslim officials, having succeeded in driving local Christians away, are adopting stern Islamic Shariah law to segregate schools, cane drinkers and cut off the hands of thieves...
...there are deep economic problems and ethnic fissures. Nigeria is one of the globe's most diverse states, a point Clinton made repeatedly during his visit. "You have struggled for democracy together. You have forged national institutions together," he told the legislators. "All your greatest achievements have come when you have worked together." Its boundaries, drawn by European colonial rulers, encircle some 260 tribes, many of which have been waging war with each other for generations. When the Igbo tribe in the southeast sought independence in 1967 as the state of Biafra, the resulting war, the most deadly...
...those with long memories, it is about time Nigeria showed some promise. It did in the 1970s - Jimmy Carter was the first president to visit - but a collapse in oil prices and a string of corrupt military dictators, massacres, famines and bloody civil strife held it back. Now that the dictatorship is gone, new plagues - crime, unemployment, AIDS - are hurting the fledgling democracy. But next to the rest of the continent, Nigeria gleams today. Major wars are tearing at Angola, both Congos, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan, while conflicts simmer in Burundi, Chad, Djibouti, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Uganda...