The latest military coup d’état would seem to be the least of Burkina Faso’s problems.

Presidential candidate faces a dilemma as religious factor threatens to undo campaign. 

Horrendous killing of college sophomore highlights the country’s ethnoreligious fault line, but interdenominational rivalry in the south is of no less moment. All in all, reactions to the murder of Ms. Deborah Yakubu, a 200-level home economics student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, have exposed Nigeria’s deepest political fractures and lingering questions over citizenship, national identity, and secularity. On May 12, following disagreement over a WhatsApp voice note deemed to have been blasphemous against Islam and Prophet Muhammad, a mob comprising some of the twenty-two-year-old’s schoolmates brutally clubbed and stoned her to death, after which they proceeded to incinerate her body.

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.

The unexpected pardon last week of two leading politicians convicted earlier on charges of corruption has brought renewed focus on Nigeria’s flailing anticorruption drive. Following a meeting of the country’s Council of State, Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame, governors respectively of the central and northeastern states of Plateau and Taraba from 1997 to 2007 were pardoned along with 157 other convicts.