Word: nigerias
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Usually, Bar Beach on Nigeria's Victoria Island is dotted with sun umbrellas and gaily painted food stalls. Last week it became the scene of a kind of festival of death. Thousands of Nigerians, chanting "Traitors, traitors," jammed the beach, trampling the candy-striped awnings underfoot. A similar throng gathered not far away at Kirikiri Prison, just outside Lagos, the capital. Both high-spirited crowds were assembled to witness the public executions of some 30 soldiers, including four lieutenant colonels and six majors, and a lone civilian. A special military board had convicted them of planning the abortive coup...
...July. Bisalla and many of the others were apparently implicated in the plot by Lieut. Colonel B.S. Dimka, the man who led the Feb. 13 overthrow attempt. Dimka managed to stay at large for three weeks, despite a nationwide manhunt, but he was captured at a roadblock in eastern Nigeria earlier this month...
...implicated Yakubu Gowon, the former head of state who was exiled after the coup that brought Murtala to power last July. Gowon, according to the government's charge, instructed Dimka to get together with Defense Minister Bisalla and attempt to overthrow the government. Their reasons for acting, said Nigeria's new defense chief, Brigadier Musa Yarduah, was the government's plan to cut the size of the army by almost half, a move that would transfer the 100,000 soldiers affected to other jobs, but which might leave a number of them out of work...
...which foreign students have to deal while they are here lies in the ways they make friends here and at home. "Here, you meet someone in class, you talk for ten minutes, then you see them the next day and they pass right by you," Ngozi Okonjo '76, from Nigeria, says. "At home, you see someone and you stop to talk." It is a difference, foreign students say, that takes a while to notice. Once they do, however, they find it hard to ignore...
That is an ambitious program indeed for a country as difficult to govern as Nigeria. Despite an oil boom that has made it the world's seventh largest oil exporter, Nigeria's economy has lately been lagging. Unemployment is high, and the effort to cut the armed forces will throw some 100,000 former soldiers on the job market just when jobs are becoming harder to get. Dealing with that problem-and catching Murtala's murderers, who remained at large last week -may well be the biggest immediate challenges to the Obasanjo regime...