Word: pageant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With Darego selected, the organizers followed the contest’s tradition of holding the next year’s finals in the winner’s home country. On some level it was a noble decision to pretend that Nigeria was capable of hosting a beauty pageant just like any other stable country. But there was also a very selfish aspect to this choice. The organizers were so determined to improve the pageant’s reputation that they were willing to endanger the safety of the contestants and the Nigerian people...
This beauty pageant was a chance for the government to show its progress from a year ago when 2,000 people were killed in religiously motivated fighting in the capital. In the past three years, more than 10,000 deaths have been attributed to the transition to democracy. These are obvious and fundamental problems in Nigerian society, but the government has attempted to gloss over them...
...threatened to boycott the contest because of the death-by-stoning sentence passed on Amina Lawal, who had a child outside of wedlock, the federal government did whatever fancy dance it could to appease their concerns without offending the local, Islamic government. It was determined to pull off this pageant, so instead of abrogating the rule of Sharia, the government found it more expedient to make an ad hoc decree. The woman would not be stoned, it assured the beauty contestants, and this was convincing enough that all of them decided to attend. Again, never mind that Lawal?...
...this game of make-believe that created the whole Miss World mess. The pageant’s organizers and the Nigerian government were both involved in a great fantasy that the pageant would work fine in Nigeria, ignoring a lot of facts and a lot of common sense. Nigeria’s large Muslim population would not act its part in this charade. It was not ready to accept an international beauty pageant, which one Islamic leader poetically described as a “parade of nudity.” When the riots began last week, the fantasy finally collapsed...
Only after days of rioting and the removal of the contest did the pageant organizers and the Nigerian government finally learn their lesson. While smiling and pretending everything is fine might be a good way to win a beauty contest, it is no way to deal with real people and real politics...