All schools and government offices in Nigeria’s capital are to close during a three-day international conference this week, according to a presidential order that follows two bomb attacks in three weeks that killed nearly 100 people in Abuja.
A statement on Friday night said the measure “is to ease the flow of traffic” during the World Economic Forum on Africa, running from today to Wednesday, to which hundreds of international personalities, business and African leaders are invited.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) is to be the guest of honor.
Nigeria’s government has said it is deploying 6,000 police and troops to help secure the event.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has assured delegates they will be safe.
Further indicating Nigeria’s security threats, the US embassy warned US citizens in an e-mail on Friday that extremists were planning “an unspecified attack” on a Sheraton hotel in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.
The hotel chain has two locally owned franchises in the southwestern city of about 20 million people.
A duty manager at the US$350-a-night Sheraton in the suburb, Ikeja, near the international airport, said he was unaware of any threat.
He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to reporters.
Explosions on April 14 and Tuesday last week in Abuja, in the center of the country, are blamed on the extremist Boko Haram terrorist network that has targeted schools and slaughtered hundreds of students in recent months.
Militants of Boko Haram — the nickname means “Western education is sinful” — are believed to be detaining about 276 teenage girls abducted from a northeastern school on April 15.
In response to national outrage and protests at the failure to rescue the girls, Jonathan on Friday said a that presidential committee headed by a retired general will mobilize people in the area of the mass abduction and other citizens “for a rescue strategy and operation” and to “articulate a framework for a multi-stakeholder action for the rescue of the missing girls.”
Unverified reports last week that the militants were demanding ransoms for their release coincided with stories that some of the girls and young women — they are aged 15 to 18 — have been forced to “marry” their kidnappers and some have been carried across borders into Chad and Cameroon.
The attacks and the prolonged captivity of the girls have gravely undermined confidence in Jonathan and his government as Nigeria prepares for elections in February next year.
Nigeria is fighting a five-year-old uprising by extremists whose stronghold is in the remote northeast, but who are threatening attacks across Africa’s biggest oil producer.
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