Authorities in Nigeria squander an opportunity to make a statement about human dignity and genuine social inclusion.

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.

Nigerians are increasingly frustrated at the growing disconnect between the political class and ordinary people.

Abubakar Shekau, a Boko Haram faction leader, kidnapper-in-chief of the Chibok school girls, notorious for his grisly videos and brutal implementation of punishments of seventh century, Middle Eastern origin, this week issued an audio recording on the coronavirus, after a long period of radio silence. 

When conventional tools of resistance have failed or been compromised, humor has been a weapon of last resort for the African subaltern.  

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.