One Nation Under Gods: Negeria's Sectarian Crisis

Learn more: http://pulitzercenter.org/projects/nigeria-lagos-religion-sectarian-crisis-ch...

Even for a country that has spent the majority of its 50-year existence careening from one crisis to next, the past few months in Nigeria have been without precedent. A campaign of Christmas Day church bombings by the shady Islamist sect Boko Haram heralded the expansion of an insurgency that now threatens to engulf the entire Muslim north. Meanwhile, tens of thousands took to the streets nationwide to protest the removal of fuel subsidies, exposing a dangerous rift between Nigeria's increasingly impoverished people and a disconnected ruling class.

Despite understandable shock and outrage both at home and abroad, warning signs of an impending meltdown were abundant long before the current crisis. Benedicte Kurzen looks back at one such ominous harbinger: the 2011 general elections, which laid bare the deep economic, social and geographical divisions that separate Nigerians and are expressed most dramatically through sectarian violence. Over the course of three days in April, as large parts of the country succumbed to a familiar cycle of despair, rage, hatred and revenge, over 800 people lost their lives in what President Goodluck Jonathan would later call the worst single outbreak of violence since Nigeria's independence-era civil war.

This report is part of Pulitzer Center-sponsored project "Divided Under God: Nigeria's Sectarian Crisis" (http://bit.ly/xYgvNn) by Joe Bavier and Bénédicte Kurzen. The project uncovers the real causes of the country's sectarian strife and separate the truth from a fiction that only serves to deepen divisions. Reporting during the 2011 general elections -- a period of heightened sectarian tensions -- their journey will take them from the epicenter of the violence in the Middle Belt region to northern Muslim strongholds and the southern seat of growing Christian economic and political influence: Africa's mega-city, Lagos.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Pulitzer Center
• Nigeria
• Boko Haram
• Boko Haram Church Bombing
• Political Crisis
• Nigeria Religious Conflict
• Muslim
• Christian
• Goodluck Jonathan
• Sectarian Violence
• Power Sharing
• Africa
• Joe Bavier
• Benedicte Kurzen
• Nigeria Instability
• Nigeria Islamic Insurgency
• Nigeria Election Violence

License:

Standard YouTube License