US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the Nigerian capital for a day of talks yesterday, pressing the government of Africa’s most populous nation to curb widespread corruption and enact democratic reforms.
Clinton met with Nigerian officials to urge the nation, known as one of the most corrupt countries in Africa, to do more to tackle graft. She was also scheduled to hold a roundtable discussion with religious leaders to discuss recent violence, sparked by the killing of the head of an Islamist sect, that left more than 700 people dead in the mainly Muslim north.
Clinton’s top Africa advisor said that ties with Nigeria were crucial to the US relationship with the continent due to the country’s vast size and its major oil industry, much of which feeds the US market.
“Nigeria is undoubtedly the most important country in sub-Saharan Africa,” Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for Africa, told reporters on Clinton’s plane to Abuja from the Democratic Republic of Congo late on Tuesday.
Carson said that the US had a “very good relationship” with Nigeria over recent years and hailed the country’s increasingly active regional profile, including efforts to stabilize Sierra Leone and Liberia.
“Despite our close relationship, Nigeria faces a number of major challenges,” Carson said.
He pointed to attacks on oil facilities in the Niger Delta — which cost the developing country hundreds of thousands of barrels in crude oil a day — and a flare-up in religious strife in a nation with sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest Muslim population.
Nigerian security forces late last month crushed an uprising by a self-styled Taliban fundamentalist group in several northern states, leaving more than 800 people dead, the majority of them sect members.
The Obama administration has made outreach to the Islamic world a signature US policy, hoping to assuage some of the bitterness among many Muslims over former president George W. Bush’s policies, especially on Iraq.
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
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