THE mantle of power is so heavy in Nigeria that presidential candidates must be begged to run for office, or at least give that appearance. There was no serious doubt that the current president, Muhammadu Buhari (pictured), would run in 2015; that was his fourth attempt to win through the ballot box, having first tasted power with a 19-month stint as a military dictator in the 1980s. Yet even he had to maintain the fiction ahead of that vote, with allies saying that they had begged him to stand. Now, little more than a year away from the next presidential election in 2019, the theatrics are starting again.
In September 2017 the communications minister, Adebayo Shittu, was appointed to chair a “dynamic support group” to campaign for Mr Buhari’s re-election. The name seems over-energetic for a candidate who was nicknamed “Baba Go Slow” during his lethargic first few years in office. “He has not made up his mind but...some of us can assist him in making up his mind,” Mr Shittu...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2E4u8GG
PANGOLINS are a smuggler’s dream. For defence, and when asleep, they roll themselves up into spheres, scales on the outside, to thwart any predator. That makes them easy to handle and pack. And handled and packed they have been, in enormous numbers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a worldwide wildlife-preservation organisation, reckons that more than 1m pangolins were traded illegally from their African and Asian homelands over the decade to 2014. That may be a conservative estimate. A paper published last year in Conservation Letters calculates the number of pangolins hunted in central Africa alone as between 400,000 and 2.7m a year. Based on statistics such as these it seems likely that pangolins, of which there are eight species, four African and four Asian, are the most trafficked type of animal in the world.
Some are consumed locally. That is not necessarily illegal, for laws vary from place to place. International trade, though, is a different matter....Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/2nq07HB
