Source: Complete Sports

Mali became the first nation from Africa to qualify for the FIFA U-20 World Cup on Wednesday when they beat Egypt 1-0 at the Dobsonville Stadium in Johannesburg.
A goal in the 65th minute from Konate Amara was enough to secure a second consecutive win to open the Eaglets’ tournament after they beat the hosts 4-2 in their first contest. Six points in Group A is enough to guarantee the Malians a place in the semi-final as Egypt and South Africa, who are both on three points, will play in the final round of group matches on Saturday. Mali will close out the group on the same day against pointless Lesotho.
Group B continues the action from the CAF African Youth Championship tomorrow when Nigeria face Cameroon and Gambia take on Ghana. The Nigerians and Cameroonians are both on three points after one round and looking to take control of the group. The top two in each table advance to the last four, thereby booking their ticket to Colombia 2011, which runs from 29 July to 20 August.

Source: Reuters Africa

ABUJA, April 21 (Reuters) – Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan vowed on Thursday that the country’s final round of elections would go ahead next week despite rioting which has killed at least 100 people across the mostly-Muslim north.

Angry youths launched violent protests in northern cities this week after Jonathan, a Christian from the south, was declared the victor of a weekend election, defeating former military ruler and northern Muslim Muhammadu Buhari.

Churches, mosques and homes were set ablaze in the worst unrest for years as Buhari supporters rejected the outcome.

“These acts of mayhem are sad reminders of the events which plunged our country into 30 months of an unfortunate civil war,” Jonathan said, referring to killings which led to a conflict in which one million people were killed in the 1960s.

In the worst of the violence on Monday, hundreds suffered gunshot and machete wounds, some of them children, and thousands were displaced. The unrest has since been largely brought under control by curfews and a heavy military presence, but two people were killed and a mosque burned in Kano on Wednesday.

“These disturbances are more than mere political protests. Clearly, they aim to frustrate the remaining elections. This is not acceptable,” Jonathan said. “Enough is enough.”

He said he had authorised the security forces to use “justifiable force” to stop the violence and vowed that those responsible would be brought to justice.

Some of the rioters in the northern cities of Kano and Kaduna chanted Buhari’s name as they went on the rampage. Buhari has distanced himself from the violence and called it a spontaneous outpouring of anger against the ruling party.

The government says it was “unprovoked and premeditated”.

HIGH STAKES

The rioting has raised questions over whether Africa’s most populous nation will be able to hold governorship and state assembly polls in its 36 states on April 26, the third and final stage of its election cycle after last Saturday’s presidential race and parliamentary polls the previous week.

Jonathan was steadfast.

“I assure you all that calm is being restored in troubled parts of the country and that the elections scheduled for next Tuesday will go on as planned,” he said.

State governors are powerful figures in the African oil producer, controlling budgets larger than those of some African countries and wielding influence over policy.

The elections had already been expected to be the most volatile of the three polls but the violence this week has raised the stakes even further.

Homes of ruling party members, electoral commission offices and police stations have been targeted, as have members of the National Youth Corps, who are helping run the elections.

Buhari, who said on Wednesday the rigging of results had been enough to deprive him of victory, has failed to issue a clear call to youths perpetrating violence in his name to stop.

He told foreign journalists at his residence in Abuja on Wednesday that he would be out campaigning later this week for his Congress for Progressive Change party ahead of next Tuesday’s state governorship votes. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: af.reuters.com/

Florent Malouda converted a Didier Drogba pass after three minutes while Salomon Kalou finished a solo run with a wonderful strike.
Malouda scored his second with a near-post header after the break.
Sebastian Larsson scored a penalty for Birmingham after David Luiz fouled Matt Derbyshire but Chelsea held on to move six points behind Manchester United.

Source: BBC News

Tens of thousands of people have fled their homes because of post-election violence in Nigeria, the Red Cross says.

Riots broke out in the north after Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, emerged as the winner of the presidential poll.

A civil rights group says the unrest has left more than 200 dead, while hundreds of arrests have been made.

The poll runner-up, General Muhammadu Buhari, has appealed for calm.

Nigeria is divided by rivalry between the predominantly Muslim north and the mainly Christian south – so much so that the presidency has often rotated between people who come from the two halves of the country, in an attempt to keep the peace.

Umar Marigar of the Red Cross told the BBC on Wednesday that the number of displaced had trebled in the last day – from 16,000 to 48,000, mainly in the north.

But he said that, in the southern state of Anambra, 8,400 people had sought refuge at the Onitsha military barracks because they feared reprisal attacks against northerners.

Both the winner of Nigeria’s election, Goodluck Jonathan, and his main rival, Muhammadu Buhari, have called for calm following the post-poll riots in the north. But the tensions cannot be plastered over.

Most of those behind the rioting have been unemployed young men – uneducated and deprived. Often they are only remembered by politicians at elections, when they are sometimes paid to do their bidding. They could send any conflict out of control, because it provides them with an opportunity to loot and attack the people they perceive as their enemies.

Irrespective of political party and region, 12 years of civilian rule have brought little change to the lives of Nigerians. But the north is far behind the south in terms of development, education and the availability of economic opportunities. Good governance, not political platitudes from the elite, is what many say is needed for the future.

He added: ”The violent protests turn from political into ethno-religious crisis. As such, people might like to engage in retaliatory attacks. This is what we are always afraid of.”

Shehu Sani, head of the Civil Rights Congress, told the AFP news agency: “In the whole region, from reports reaching Civil Rights Congress, the death toll is over 200.”

He added that more than 1,000 people had been arrested in the city of Kaduna alone.

The BBC’s Abdullahi Kaura Abubakar says it is calm now in Kaduna city, where streets have been left littered with burnt corpses and rioters burned churches, police stations and homes during two days of disturbances.

There are clashes in other parts of the state and more security forces have been deployed to those areas, he says.

‘Irregularities’

Gen Buhari told the Voice of America’s Hausa-language radio service that his Congress for Progressive Change party had noticed irregularities in the south and south-east of the country.

“I urge people to calm down and be law-abiding as we are pursuing these irregularities with [the electoral commission] with a view to ensure justice for them,” he said.

Mr Jonathan was declared winner of Saturday’s presidential poll, with the electoral commission saying he received about 57% of the vote with 22.5 million votes to General Buhari’s 12.2 million votes.

International observers have said the election was reasonably free and fair.

Mr Jonathan, a Christian from the oil-producing Niger Delta, was appointed to the presidency last year upon the death of incumbent Umaru Yar’Adua, a northern Muslim whom he had served as vice-president.

He staked his reputation on the election, repeatedly promising it would be free and fair.

Nigeria Police

Source: BusinessDay

Armed policemen have been stationed in areas inhabited by the Hausa in Asaba, to provide security for them. The areas include the popular Abraka and cattle markets, both on the Asaba-Onitsha highway. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the deployment is to forestall possible reprisal attacks following riots in some northern cities in protest against the result of the just-concluded presidential election.

The police spokesman in the state, Charles Muka, said the idea to specially protect the Hausa in the area stemmed from previous experiences where disturbances in the north provoked reprisals in parts of the south. “We are being proactive. We don’t want to wait for trouble before we act and that is why we have taken steps to protect the Hausa community here. “We have deployed officers and men to the areas where the Hausa live around Asaba, considering that Onitsha is quite close and anything can happen. “The squads are stationed in those places and they patrol at night. It is our job to protect every Nigerian at all times,’’ the assistant superintendent of police said.

Source: Sahara Reporters

While I would not hide my disappointment that fellow Nigerians did not vote for my candidate of choice, Mallam Ribadu, I congratulate the President for his victory and applaud his pronouncement to form an all-inclusive government.

If GEJ can indeed be true to his words, he can only build further on the foundations laid by the conduct of Jega’s INEC since this would start the process of reassuring Nigerians that political elections should, and would no longer be zero – sum games with a winner take all mentality.

At this stage of the elections and national development, President Jonathan must be seen as breaking the mould from the past as it appears that the majority of Nigerians have spoken and affirmed loudly that you do not need to belong to any of the three big ethnic groups in Nigeria before you can become President. His election would also appear to have broken the myth of an indivisible and monolithic Northern enclave and a subservient iconoclastic Southern bloc.

In many ramifications, the current elections have come to symbolize a lot of watersheds in the Nigerian context. These, are in the sense that Nigerians can now proudly say we have conducted an acceptable election, albeit with its minor flaws; we can also proudly say that the ethnic origins of a candidate for public elections are no longer the main considerations and that personal integrity is becoming more important to the Nigerian voters rather than parochial and primordial interests as it was in the past. Lastly, the Nigerian voters have used this elections (the first two so far) to demonstrate a level of sophistication that defies the instincts to run with the herd.

However, the positives that came out of these elections can only be sustained by the actions of the losers and the winners as well as their supporters.
Without doubt, it has been truly retrogressive and disappointing to note that the supporters of General M. Buhari have resorted to maiming, killing and burning members of the opposition parties, Christians and churches because their main man did not garner a national support base in the same vein he was supported in the Northern states of Nigeria. Even more disappointing is how long it took General Buhari to issue a lackluster statement not to condemn the violent reactions but to simply disown the protesters who were clearly his supporters.

As an aspiring statesman, General Buhari, would be expected to have accepted the outcome of the election for present time and seek legal redress if he believed this was necessary rather than allow the situation to degenerate to the point where the lives of Nigerians are being lost to his cause. This was truly disappointing and in my opinion, means that he risks losing whatever form of acceptance he had  been garnering among Southern Nigerians and members of the enlightened and educated class who wanted an end to the specter of corruption many feels that President Jonathan may be unable to tackle. The current state of unrest in Northern Nigeria fuelled by his supporters can only damage his hard earned reputation and mark him down as an ethnic irredentist.

On a worst case scenario, it could only reinforce the long held opinions of others that General Buhari was always a religious bigot, a tag he sought to dispel by adopting Pastor Tunde Bakare as his running mate. Well, he truly risks losing it all.

Conversely, I believe it is a much matured response from President Jonathan stating that he would seek to form an inclusive government for all Nigerians. Previously, I would have taken this pronouncement with a pinch of salt as he had not shown a penchant for decisive actions but a predilection for half-hearted measures such as when he dismissed Mr. Andoakaa from his cabinet even when it was glaring that a lot of Nigerians and his supporters were clamoring for more decisive action from him against other members of the cabinet that were perceived to have brought Nigeria to a Constitutional precipé.

It is sportsmanlike of President Jonathan to make this pronouncement even though he was clearly not under any pressure to do so nor was he truly obliged to do so. In order to take this spirit forward to the next stage, the President may wish to acknowledge that General Buhari has the trust of at least 10-12 million Nigerians and this should count for something. Ditto, both Mallam Shekarau and Ribadu had followings and respect from Nigerians and it would be a waste to ignore all these in the name of politics. Same applies to Mr. Pat Utomi, whom had clearly pulled out the race, but still garnered electoral votes for Nigerians.
General Buhari had shown in the past that he is patriotic enough to serve under another Nigerian ruler and I believe President GEJ can benefit from bringing him into the government to oversee a sensitive portfolio where integrity is of paramount importance. Similarly, Mallam Ribadu could be asked to serve a Nigerian government in an area that plays mostly to his strength and credentials. Likewise, Pat Utomi could offer a lot towards our economic revival. As for Mallam Shekarau, I do not believe it would be out of place to put him in charge of our educational system.

President GEJ, in seeking to break our yoke to the past can only hearken to the voice of reasoning by staying true to his words and letting all Nigerians know that the call to service should be just that; and not a call to consume the national cake or an open invitation to pilfer the Nigerian commonwealth.
The immediate days ahead of us would determine the direction of our future.
Once more, I congratulate the Nigerian masses for their choice, Prof. Jega’s INEC for the historic performance, the losing political gladiators for trying and President Jonathan for his election victory.

Long live Nigeria.

Source: Vanguard

London -Fifty-two Nigerians will be deported, today, by the UK government, a Nigerian official at the High Commission in London has said.

Mr Mohammed Isa, the Head of the Immigration Section in the Nigerian High Commission in the UK, speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, said that the would-be deportees would arrive at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in a chartered flight.

He said that they included those who had either completed their prison terms, failed-asylum seekers or those who overstayed their authorised permit.

Mohammed further also said that those to be deported would be accompanied by British law enforcement agents and two Nigerian officials.

“This is the first time a chartered flight conveying Nigerian deportees would be accompanied by Nigerian officials,” Isa said.

He added: “Though, it is also in line with the global best practices, it is our responsibility to ensure that the deportees are treated in the most humane and dignified manner.”

He pointed out that the mission had never recorded any `ugly incidents’ on the UK route since the exercise began following the conclusion in 2005, of a Memorandum of Understanding(MOU) on migration returns between the two countries.