On February 19, 2020, Senator Ibrahim Gaidam, the former governor of Yobe State, introduced legislation to create the National Agency for Deradicalization, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration of Repentant Insurgents. Gaidam represents Yobe state, which borders Borno and has been affected by the insurgency. The bill’s purpose is to rehabilitate Boko Haram defectors and prevent violent extremism in Nigeria.

Within the space of a few months, fifty-five-year-old evangelist Olufunmilayo Adebayo, popularly known as Mummy G.O., has gone from the relative obscurity of downscale Iyana-Ipaja, Lagos, to the most discussed subject in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism. The target of a blizzard of savage internet memes and unrelenting mockery, the founder and leader of the self-styled Rapture Proclaimer Evangelical Church of God (RAPEC) has been getting all the attention in a context where the leading—and mostly male—clerical figures dominate the news as a matter of course.

Last week’s gruesome murder of Deborah Yakubu, a home economics sophomore at the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, comes at a time of escalating social and economic tension in Nigeria, and will most certainly raise the political stakes as the country enters electioneering season in preparation for next year’s presidential election.

While at prayer on April 13, 2007, the prominent Salafi scholar, Shaikh Jaafar Mahmud Adam, was assassinated at his mosque in Kano. At the time, the murder made a deep impression on mainstream Muslims, many of whom revered Adam. The murder took place in the final days before the 2007 presidential elections, and many observers, including those at the U.S. embassy, thought that the murder was somehow related. But it now seems more likely that Adam was assassinated by a vengeful former member of the Nigerian Taliban. His murder was an early manifestation of the deadly battles among Boko Haram’s competing factions that continue up to the present.

Ten people who passed away this year who shaped world affairs for better or worse.