IT WAS a crisis that ended as suddenly as it began. On the morning of March 21st gunmen from Boko Haram, a jihadist cult, swept back into Dapchi, a remote town in north-east Nigeria, and dropped off most of the 110 schoolgirls they had snatched a month earlier. The return was a rare victory for Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president. It is also a sharp contrast to the kidnapping of 276 girls from Chibok, another remote town, in 2014. Many of them remain in captivity.
The abduction of the “Chibok girls” by Boko Haram drew international attention and came to define the administration of Mr Buhari’s predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan: incompetent, detached and corrupt, unable even to provide security to threatened schools. That played no small part in Mr Jonathan’s defeat at the ballot box in 2015, the first by an incumbent president since the end of military rule in 1999.
A year ahead of presidential elections scheduled for February, the...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa https://ift.tt/2IF1Stv
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