Nigerians mark Easter amid mourning, increasing fear

With little to celebrate, Nigerians marked Easter Sunday with heightened security against a spreading Islamic uprising, mourning the deaths of at least 75 bomb blast victims and fearful of the fate of 85 abducted schoolgirls. The homegrown terrorist network Boko Haram on Saturday claimed responsibility for last week’s rush-hour explosion at a busy bus station in the capital, Abuja, and threatened more attacks. “We are the bombers ... yes we are the bombers; if you really want to know who did it, let me tell you now, it was Shekau that did it,” leader Abubakar Shekau boasts in a new video. He taunts Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, saying: “Look at us, we are right within your city (Abuja) and you don’t even know how to find us. Let me tell you now, I am here very close to you, I dare you to get me, if you can.” Nigeria’s military twice have claimed that Shekau was dead, only to have him resurface in a video. The United States has placed a US$7 million (N$77 million) ransom on his head. At church services around the country, Nigerians mourned victims of four attacks in three days last week. At the Vatican, Pope Francis prayed for a halt to the “brutal terrorist attacks” in parts of Nigeria. “Government should be more sincere in handling the security and insurgency problems,” Okeoghene Eboibi, a 45-year-old polytechnic lecturer in southern Delta state told AP. He was referring to politicisation of the five-year-old Islamic uprising that has the two main political parties accusing each other of backing the terrorist network as the country gears up for elections in February 2015. The attacks also undermine government and military claims that an 11-month-old state of emergency in three northeast states covering one-sixth of the country has been contained the extremists. Eboibi prayed that “God give us the grace to live together peacefully.” But Chidozie Iyoke, a 35-year-old unemployed labourer whose leg was injured in the bombing, said it might be better if people went back to their places of origin. Africa’s most populous nation of some 170 million people is divided almost equally between Muslims living mostly in the north and Christians whose homes are predominantly in the south. President Jonathan vowed there will be no breaking apart of Nigeria, which in January celebrated the 100th anniversary of the amalgamation of north and south, under British colonisers. “As a nation, we are having tribulation, but surely we have hope. Surely we shall overcome this tribulation,” the Christian leader told guests visiting him on Easter Sunday. “Boko Haram will not disintegrate this country! ... Even those who think this country will be divided into north, south or east and west, we will not.” Nigeria has stayed together despite a civil war in the late 1960s to create a separate nation in the east called Biafra. A million people died, mostly of famine in the defeated east. Jonathan noted that after the bombing, Nigerians of all religions and classes came together to evacuate the wounded before security forces arrived, and citizens responded to a call for donations by giving more blood than was needed.