Nigeria Army Chief Gives December Deadline To Wipe Out Extremist Group

Nigerian Chief of Army Staff Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai ordered the military to wipe out all elements of Boko Haram from the country by December. In a statement Sunday, Buratai called on the country's soldiers to end the insurgency that has been ongoing for the last seven years.

The Nigerian has ramped up its military offensive against the group, pushing Boko Haram out of territories it has held for years in the northern region of the country. Buratai urged the troops to remain focused and patriotic to their duties and to President Muhammadu Buhari.

The militant group, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (also called ISIS) in 2015, has been active in Nigeria since 2009, and in 2015, spread its activities across the country’s borders into Cameroon, Chad and Niger. The extremist group, which aims to establish an ISIS-style government in Nigeria, has killed thousands of people since launching a brutal insurgency in the country.

Read Buratai's statement here

SOURCE: IBTIMES

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Chief says: "Pakistan, Russia to sell warplanes to Nigeria, air force"

Nigeria is expecting the arrival of warplanes and helicopters it ordered from Pakistan and Russia, its latest effort to counter terrorist and militant activities, Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar said on Sunday.

Nigeria is battling jihadist group Boko Haram, which has waged a seven-year insurgency in the northern part of the country aimed at creating an Islamic state. Thousands have been killed and more than 2 million displaced.

It also faces threats in its crude-producing heartland in the southern Niger Delta, where militants have been blowing up oil pipelines. The subsequent loss of crude oil output has hurt government revenues.

The air force chief said it was assisting the army and navy in countering activities of terrorists and militants.

Nigeria's foreign minister said in May the government hoped the United States would sell it aircraft to fight Boko Haram militants, because its human rights record had improved enough for a blockade on arms deals to be lifted.

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SOURCE: REUTERS

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The Guardian view on aid for Nigeria: return corrupt cash to the poor

A preventable, human-manufactured disaster appears to be unfolding in north-east Nigeria. While the spotlight of media attention is facing elsewhere, the spectre of starvation stalks an area staked out by jihadists as their caliphate. One small state in Nigeria has more displaced people than the entire refugee influx that arrived in Europe last year. The brutal armed conflict has sent a million children out of school. Health services have been decimated and cholera and polio, once eradicated, have returned. The violence of Boko Haram, the jihadist group that still controls parts of the region, is characterised by child killing, abductions and sexual abuse – an oppressive, murderous atmosphere hardly conducive to stable government in a part of Africa them size of Belgium. .

Farmers are unable to harvest their crops and aid agencies say they are unable to reach isolated communities.

Now Save the Children is warning that there is a “real and immediate” threat to the lives of 400,000 children who are malnourished and starving. The charity rightly says the crisis is being crowded out of the humanitarian agenda by the more highly visible disasters affecting Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Nigeria cannot excuse itself as a failed state. It is Africa’s second-biggest economy. However, more imaginative ways of helping the country are also needed. Save the Children suggests turning ill-gotten gains into crisis-denying cash. Since September illicit Nigerian cash laundered through Britain and seized by British police can be returned to Africa to help with development projects.

The sums are not small: recently a former Nigerian state governor pleaded guilty to a £50m fraud. In 2001, it emerged that a former Nigerian dictator laundered $1.3bn through London banks. Nigeria ranks 136 out of 167 in Transparency International’s corruption index. Its current president asked Britain to return assets held by dishonest Nigerians, shrugging off David Cameron’s suggestion that his nation was “fantastically corrupt”.

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SOURCE : THEGUARDIAN

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