Word: yar
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...West Africa, instability has suddenly returned. The past two years have seen coups in Guinea and Mauritania and the tit-for-tat assassinations of the President and army chief in Guinea-Bissau. More recently, the regional superpower, Nigeria, endured three months of political uncertainty when President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua underwent medical treatment in Saudi Arabia but refused to hand over power to his deputy for three months. (The transfer was eventually forced by parliament.) And on Friday, two people were reported to have died in Ivory Coast during protests against President Laurent Gbagbo's decision to dissolve the government...
...Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was elected deputy governor of Bayelsa province in the south - only to become governor when his boss was arrested for embezzlement. This week Jonathan, elected Vice President of Nigeria in 2007, has become acting president after the country's parliament decided his boss, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, was too sick to rule...
...process in the oil-rich southern Delta region. Talks to end the decade-old conflict with Delta rebels - they say they are fighting for a fairer share of the revenues from their land, and are also angry about the pollution caused by oil spills - was a central thrust of Yar'Adua's early presidency. Six months ago, Yar'Adua persuaded the rebels to agree to a ceasefire and mass disarmament in return for an amnesty, a small monthly stipend, a 10% cut of all oil revenues and promises of large-scale development. (See pictures of the two sides of Nigeria...
...while Jonathan's southern origin may please the rebels, it is likely to annoy the northern Muslim political elite, which has dominated Nigeria's politics for decades. In the strange way of Abuja, the capital, this presidency was meant to be for a northerner. But with Yar'Adua sick and a southern Christian back in power, Nigeria's sectarian divide - which frequently results in large scale Christian-Muslim pogroms - could worsen. "I have no confidence in his leadership," Dr. Baba Ahmed, secretary general of the Supreme Council for Shariah in Nigeria, told TIME. "Jonathan is a frontline member...
...then there's corruption. Jonathan may have got the Bayelsa governorship through his boss' alleged misdeeds, but he is hardly free of the biggest impediment to progress in Nigeria: corruption. The election that saw Yar'Adua and Jonathan win office was described by the E.U. Election Observation Mission to Nigeria as "not credible" due to "lack of transparency and evidence of fraud," adding it had "no confidence in the results." Jonathan's 2007 declaration of $2.4 million in assets during the campaign also raised questions about how an academic and public servant could earn so much. Jonathan's wife Patience...