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A boy holds a sign to protest against, what a teacher, local councilor and parents said, the kidnapping of hundreds school pupils by gunmen after the Friday prayer, in Kaduna, Nigeria March 8, 2024.
Hundreds of children kidnapped by extremists in Nigeria
Over 300 children have been abducted at gunpoint in northern Nigeria in recent days. On Thursday, gunmen kidnapped at least 287 children from a school in Kaduna state, and another 15 pupils were taken on Saturday. Militants are suspected of kidnapping around 200 women and children from Borno state as well. No group has claimed responsibility, but the region is plagued by Islamic extremism.
Nigeria’s army is mounting an operation to locate and retrieve the victims, but locals fear their loved ones may never return. A decade after Boko Haram attacked and kidnapped 276 schoolgirls sitting their physics exams in Chibok, 100 remain missing, and over 1,400 children have been abducted since then.
Why schoolchildren? Boko Haram, the most menacing terrorist group in the region, targets Western-style schools, which they see as contrary to their radical Islamist beliefs, and often holds survivors for years, ending their education. Female survivors recount being repeatedly raped by militants they were forced to marry, and many fell pregnant. Copycat terrorists now also target schools to extract ransoms from families.
What we’re watching: President Bola Tinubu has sworn to rescue the children, and Nigeria’s army is the best in the region — but the local governor said there weren’t enough boots on the ground. Similar violence from Islamist extremists has driven coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which Nigeria and the regional bloc ECOWAS have struggled to contain.Google Bard seen on Google blog post with Google logo on mobile, in Brussels, Belgium.
What We're Watching: Bard bot, Nigerian election heats up, Tibetan kids pulled away
Google's Bard vs. ChatGPT
Google has soft-launched Bard, the tech giant's answer to OpenAI's uber-popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot. Why should you care? Well, Google says that Bard will "outsmart" ChatGPT, a service that has taken the world by storm since it became a thing in late 2022 and is now backed by Microsoft. But how? Bard will be up to date on current events — giving it a leg up over ChatGPT, which is stuck in 2021. Also, Bard will run on something called Language Model for Dialogue Applications or LaMDA, which is so advanced that last year Google fired an engineer who declared that LaMDA was "sentient" because it could mimic human emotions. This is where it gets tricky, since theoretically this type of AI could be used to make deepfake videos virtually indistinguishable from real ones. And that, in turn, might someday unleash political mayhem befitting a "Black Mirror" episode. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So far, access to Bard is by invite only, and Google likely has guardrails in place to ensure its new AI platform doesn't become too smart for its own good.
Nigeria nears decision day
Some people simply refuse to take no for an answer. Atiku Abubakar, known widely by his first name, is now making his sixth run for president of Nigeria in an election set for February 25. Atiku did serve as vice president under Olusegun Obasanjo from 1999 to 2007, but the now 76-year-old candidate is making a determined run to finally win the top job. He should be careful what he wishes for. Nigeria’s next president will wrestle with a COVID-damaged economy that’s still recovering from two recessions in five years and the ongoing security challenges posed by terrorist group Boko Haram in the country’s north, secessionists in the southeast, and well-armed criminal gangs in multiple regions. His campaign presents him as a “unifier,” not an easy sell in a country polarized along regional and religious lines. Still, he might actually win this time. His main opponents are the favorite, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who represents the currently unpopular ruling party of outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari, and a compelling outsider, Peter Obi, who doesn’t have a well-organized party behind him with local officials to help get out the vote.
China is separating Tibetan children from families
Over 1 million ethnic Tibetan children are being forcibly separated from their families and placed in residential schools in China’s bid to assimilate them into the majority Han culture, according to UN experts. The youngsters only visit home for one or two weeks a year, and because they have not practised their native tongue, many struggle to communicate with their parents. This is the latest example of the Tibetan way of life coming increasingly under threat as part of the systematic “ideological education” policies targeting Chinese minorities under Xi Jinping. Chinese officials insist they are determined to promote ethnic culture, but Tibetan monks and nuns are also dispatched to “transformation through education” facilities, where they endure reported sexual abuse and torture — much like Uighurs suffer in reeducation camps in the northwestern Xinjiang region. The “Land of Snows” has long endured repression since China, but resistance there to the ruling Communist Party — which last erupted into a failed uprising in 2008 — is likely to be further blunted by increased state surveillance, including phone hacking, spying on villages, and even DNA collection.What We're Watching: AMLO's bittersweet victory, Boko Haram's leader is (maybe) dead, El Salvador's move towards crypto
Did AMLO win in Mexico's midterms? The governing Morena party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost its two-thirds lower-house majority in Sunday's midterms, dealing a blow to the leftwing nationalist leader's bid to radically transform Mexico. Although Morena and its allies are projected to hang on to a simple majority in the lower house, winning as many as 292 of the 500 seats up for grabs, that two-thirds margin was crucial for López Obrador's ability to change the constitution, something he's threatened to do in order to carry out what he calls a "Fourth Revolution" that remakes Mexico's economy in the interests of the poor and working class. Still, López Obrador remains in a commanding position: Morena and its allies look to have picked up more than half a dozen state governorships, and they still control both houses of Congress. Most importantly, despite failing to tackle crime, corruption, or poverty since his election in 2018, the left-populist López Obrador remains immensely popular in a country where traditional conservative politicians are reviled. Chastened as he may be by the result, as he heads into the final three years of his six-year term, López Obrador isn't likely to give much ground to his rivals. Read our full write-up of the election and its implications here.
Is Boko Haram's leader dead? Abubakar Shekau, head of the Nigerian-based Boko Haram terror group, is reportedly dead, with rival militant groups saying that Shekau strapped ammunition to his body and killed himself. (Neither Boko Haram nor the Nigerian government has confirmed the report.) Since Shekau took over the group seven years ago, he has overseen a steady stream of bloody attacks, most notably in 2014 when Boko Haram militants kidnapped hundreds of school girls in Borno state, many of whom remain missing. Since then, more than 30,000 Nigerians have been killed and millions displaced. In more recent years, Boko Haram has been locked in a bloody battle for dominance with the Islamic State's West African offshoot — ISWAP. Analysts say that while Shekau's death might lower the temperature between the two rival groups, it's unlikely to change the cadence of violent attacks — though some speculate that ISWAP may try and recruit Boko Haram fighters. Whether Skekau is dead or not, Islamist violence will continue to gain momentum in West African countries like Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, that have been gripped by violent insurgencies in recent years.
El Salvador to adopt crypto: Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's very online millennial president, said this week that his country would be the first to accept cryptocurrency as legal currency. If Bukele does send legislation to Congress in the near term it's likely to pass, given that his New Ideas party won a decisive legislative victory in February, giving Bukele a supermajority. Enthusiastic Bitcoin Bros say that there's little to lose; given that some 70 percent of El Salvadorians don't have a bank account, this shake-up would allow poor people to have increased access to personal finances. However, other analysts say that there needs to be global cryptocurrency regulation in place before national governments start accepting crypto as legal tender. Still, massive issues persist regarding how to regulate the extremely volatile and environmentally-damaging currency that is oft-used by those wanting to bypass government tracking and regulation. Indeed, if El Salvador pulls this off, it's likely that other states will follow suit.
Nigeria's struggles
The reports are horrifying. Bullets flying overhead as school-age kids scream out in fear. Chaos. Shrapnel. Hundreds go missing.
This was the scene last week when militants stormed a high-school in Katsina, northern Nigeria, to abduct hundreds of students, 400 of whom remain missing. It's a horror story reminiscent of the 2014 kidnapping of schoolgirls that prompted the viral #BringBackOurGirls campaign championed by former US first lady Michelle Obama.
The attack, which has now been claimed by the militant group Boko Haram, comes just weeks after the brutal slaying of Nigerian farmers in Borno state by militants on motorcycles. (At least thirty of the victims were beheaded.)
Nigerians have grown increasingly furious at the government for not doing more to keep them safe. But what are the conditions that have allowed groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State cells to gain a foothold in Africa's most populous country and largest economy?
A new era. When Nigeria held presidential elections in 2015, it was the first time the country of over 200 million people had experienced a peaceful transition of power. Muhammadu Buhari — a former general who led a military junta that ruled Nigeria in the early 1980s — was elected as a civilian, vowing to root out government corruption and extrajudicial killings, and prioritize Nigeria's democratic awakening.
Buhari also pledged to combat Boko Haram, which was founded in 2002 aiming to establish Nigeria as an Islamic state, and had successfully seized swaths of territory under former president Goodluck Jonathan.
But Buhari's promises proved to be mostly empty. For instance, the government's brutal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (long accused of torture and extrajudicial killings) that Buhari had pledged to overhaul, continued to terrorize Nigerians, giving rise to mass protests this past fall.
Meanwhile, poverty has surged while corruption and grifting from those at the top have continued unabated. Unemployment among young Nigerians now hovers around 30 percent, a telling sign in a country where more than half of the population — over 100 million people — is under the age of 30.
Economic woes. After promising to deliver annual economic growth of 10 percent, Buhari has also squandered Nigeria's economic opportunities over the past five years. In failing to diversify the country's economy, his government has left Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, vulnerable to the shocks of global oil markets.
Indeed, armed groups' attacks on oil facilities have further undermined the petroleum-rich nation's oil output. And disruptions to oil and gas supply chains have only gotten worse in the COVID era.
Nigeria's internal strife is further complicated by deep-rooted divisions along ethnic and religious lines. Around half the country's population identifies as Christian, while the other 50 percent, mostly in the country's northern provinces, identify as Muslims. While groups like Boko Haram subscribe to a warped interpretation of Islam that justifies murder of Christians, in practice, both Christians and Muslims have been targeted in recent years.
To be sure, religious and ethnic divisions don't explain everything about Nigeria's internal struggles. Clashes between herders and farming communities, which have erupted across Nigeria's Middle Belt in recent years, are mostly between Muslim ethnic groups, leading to hundreds of deaths and the displacement of thousands. Still, a 2019 survey found that while 73 percent of Nigerian Muslims approve of President Buhari, who is Muslim, only 26 percent of the country's Christians feel the same way.
Spillover effects: While Boko Haram's activities have mostly been concentrated in northeastern Nigeria, the group has at times expanded its reach throughout the central states, targeting hubs like Abuja, the capital.
Meanwhile, because of porous state borders within sub-Saharan Africa, insurgent violence in Nigeria has spilled over into neighboring countries too, stoking up local tensions in places like Chad, Cameroon, and Niger that lack the institutional strength to counter violent insurgencies.
No end in sight. While the Nigerian military — with assistance from neighboring countries — had some success in 2015 in pushing out Boko Haram from areas in the country's northeast, the problem persists: the militant group still retains control over some territory that it uses as a launching pad for waging deadly attacks that Buhari's government appears unable to control.