The journey to Kuriga in southern Kaduna, North-west Nigeria, did not start with the kidnap of 287 students last week. In the early 1990s a neighbouring town, Zangon Kataf, was the boiling point. About a decade later, the beast of sectarian violence, which had reared its head in Kaduna, surfaced several hundreds of miles away in two major places that have become the epicentres of insurgency: Borno and Yobe States, both in the North-east. Even though misery travelled southwards aided by Mohammed Yusuf, the itinerant extremist Muslim preacher in Yobe whose activities heightened the rise of extremism in the early…

Exactly one month to this day in 2014, Nigeria became the subject of international interest when 276 students of Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram. The brazenness and the novelty of the Chibok incident turned many Nigerians into conspiracy theorists. In those days, the All Progressives Congress/Congress for Progressive Change was the so-called opposition, and they really dug a spear into former President Goodluck Jonathan’s side. Bola Tinubu was the leader of the APC. Then Borno governor, Kashim Shettima, could not devise enough ways to stitch up the Jonathan administration…