₦airaland Forum

[quote author=ekt_bear link=topic=825308.msg9767622#msg9767622 date=1323905826]Yeah he is a Christian. We've been Christians since 1908 or so.

I'm not opposed to traditional religion or anything, but I'm just glad that all that sacrifice sh1t they did up to even 1900 is at this point heavily frowned upon.[/quote]Good.

I'm glad too actually.

The same human wisdom and common sense that rid christianity of some of their "barbaric" practices reformed many other religions too. Reformation is not exclusive to one religion and not created by one either. It's simply a very human process.

[quote author=ekt_bear link=topic=825308.msg9767094#msg9767094 date=1323897917]The way my father has described the traditional religion to me, it honestly sounded pretty barbaric. Too much focus on human sacrifice and ish.

This is why I'm not convinced that the coming of Western religion to Yorubaland and various other parts of Nigeria more generally was such a bad thing.[/quote]And Christianity is/was not barbaric with all the human sacrifices and killing for Jehovah we read in the bible? 

Even this practice of throwing living breathing human beings in the sea was perfected by the same Christians just 4 generations ago.

Most, If not all religions go through their own reformation phase, I can speak for the Ifa religion of my own forefathers. It's practiced all over the world across several continents by people of various shades and hue, It even has a healthy robust following in cyberspace with thousands converting annually. Yet we don't hear of any scandalous human killing or murder/sacrifice.

We humans, and our religious practices evolve continuously. African religious beliefs would have evolved wether Christianity came or not. The danger in your statement lies in the implicit assumption that we wouldn't have been able to do that without Christianity.

More importantly, it downplays the negative effects of Christian hegemony over our lives and our society.

I take it your dad is a Christian. Right?

naijababe:


@ kilode, can't say i blame you per romance section decision, plenty comedy dey dia, u may begin to run from naija babes sha because e be like say babes don teach a few of the posters some unforgettable lessons

Coming from the authentic naijababe, I'll take your words of caution to heart.

But kini emere fe fi Omo awo se?

^
Glad you looooooooved it. I'll post more when I get a minute.

BTW, even puff daddy can't make those small small Italian cars look cooler than that.

Did you see the durag? Did you listen to the rhymes?

Did you see that video girl with blonde hair? So hood, so cool

Better than politics

Epic!

Katsumoto:
What is your goal? Self-defense, discipline, become an assassin, fitness?

Wushu (Kung fu) is generally good for all round self-defense and discipline but as it is Chinese, it is more or less pacifist. Meaning, you are never the aggressor and even when pushed sometimes, you have to keep refusing to fight. But the philosophy is changing these days with many non-chinese Masters. So if you want Wushu without the pacifist (egbe) mentality, then you need a non-Chinese Master (I am generalising here). Wushu training can be either internal body (heart, well being, etc) or external (muscle development, etc)

If you are looking for fitness, kick boxing is a good one because it works your entire body plus its very rapid. but its a poor man's Wushu or Karate

Now for the best (Japanese Martial Arts)

Aikido - Very dangerous and can result in prison time (GBH) if you are the aggressor because it usually results in broken parts for your opponent (think Steven Segal). But it is very handy if you are outnumbered because your number of opponents reduces rather quickly.

Judo and Jujutsu - are good one-on-one arts that are less dangerous than Aikido and are grappling and throwing arts. Judo is particularly good when fighting people who are considerably larger than you because you use their weight as your strength. These two are good arts for women.

Karate - Mixture of Japanese and Wushu fighting styles. Thats why its very similar to Wushu but I believe that Wushu is superior in technique and styles.

Now, if you are still a very young man and still want to become an assassin, you can try ninjutsu (think ninja) which uses stealth and deception.

There are many sword fighting arts but I imagine, you are not interested in those. Particularly, as its difficult to obtain and transport a sword these days.

My favourite is Aikido of course; don't ask me why. but I will recommend Wushu or Karate

Kini gbogbo eleyii??

blacksta:
kastumoto

I want to learn Martial arts - which one do you recommend.

and yes before i forget

7th page of pillow filler - fluff

Bros just learn Gidigbo or Ijakadi (tested and trusted)

Abeg forget all the story posted by my Japo-Spaniard brotha.

He's "literally" pulling your legs

Things that are waaaaaaay better than politics

VIC O
[flash=390,490]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3y1WNX8XLc&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/flash]

^

One of my worthy Ancestors.

You shall not be forgotten.

Sankara + Lumumba + Omowale Malcom X 

We lost them too young. 

Hmm, So ACN is worthy of emulation after all

Orunmila did not expressly forbid the finer things of life.

As long as its in moderation.

Igba ko lo bi orere

[quote author=isale_gan2 link=topic=816612.msg9752838#msg9752838 date=1323745837]Yes nau. "Jew pass Jew" o. Remember the Falashas from Ethiopia?

Kilode,
If you have time, watch the first video.  Oyinbo chicks na headache o.  You think Black women got drama. 

BTW, I'm trying to post more in Politics section, since that's how I started here on NL anyway.  I wonder what/who derailed me from that.  Hmmm. 

Politics will never be the same again.  Hold on to your hat!  Ah!  And OAM4J is the mod too!  Oh, this will be loads of fun.  I see HBP and a resignation in the offing.  I kid I jest.       [/quote]Well, I'll like to formally inform you that I will be heading to the Romance Section

The politics section has become propaganda Central. It's time to invest e-time with the happy-go-lucky folks in the Romance section. I heard great things are happening there.

I'll submit my resignation papers to Oga OAM4Jarus in due course.

Politics Naija don tire person. The Flesh is wiling but the spirit is weak.

I'll also check Literature, Food and Celebrity section out. Life is short.

[quote author=Ejiné link=topic=824151.msg9756780#msg9756780 date=1323788795]So, let me get this straight: There's a Security Budget, a Land & Housing Budget, a Water Resources Budget, a Science & Tech Budget, a Health Budget, then there's an FCT Budget? What exactly is this FCT Budget for if not also providing the above stated services? Shouldn't the above stated monies cover for the FCT, or is there something I'm missing here?[/quote][quote author=Ejiné link=topic=824151.msg9756818#msg9756818 date=1323789095]And to be honest, this budget is sooo depressing. The recurrent expenditure is still almost twice the capital expenditure. For how long must we go on like this? [/quote]Exactly.

I will also like to piggy back on the previous Questions you asked about FCT allocations:

The same applies to the Niger Delta Budget.

Why do we have another $Bilions of dollars for the Niger Delta when they are already benefitting from the monies allocated to other sectors from Education to Security to Works?

I'm asking this with all sense of responsibility. The Niger Delta is a criminally neglected part of this country. They have carried the brunt of misrule, mismanagement and oppression by the "owners of Nigeria" but I fail to see how previous allocations to that Ministry has benefitted the region.

Will Niger deltans not share out of the rest of the budget too?

The sad thing is that this money will never get to the right places under this lopsided system. Never!

What we need is federalism. True federalism. This divide and chop method of budget and oil money sharing benefits no one but the few people with access to power and influence across all regions.

BTW, shebi we wanted to reduce recurrent expenditure? What happened nah?

Confab of Fear


•ACF confirms that for it, the fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of wisdom


THE Peace and Unity Conference organised by the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), an organisation of pre-eminent northerners has come and gone.

The meeting, attended by Vice-President Namadi Sambo, Senate President David Mark, and General Yakubu Gowon, chairman of the occasion and former military head of state, among others, would be remembered more for the ambivalence of its attendees than for its lofty mission of seeking ways of attaining peace and unity across the country.  

The meeting was convened to address the increasing wave of insecurity in the north, and to come up with panacea to it as well as prevent its spread to other parts of the country. But an agitating dimension was added when there occurred serious bomb explosion in Kaduna, the host state of the conference, a day after, killing some people.

We are aware that the greatest threat to the north today, and perhaps national stability, is the Boko Haram, an insurgent Islamic sect that has been wreaking havoc in parts of the northern region. The sect could have masterminded the Kaduna blast even though it has not, like it did in the past, come out publicly to claim responsibility. 

Curiously too, prominent attendees/speakers at the conference took turn to speak but appallingly refrained from alluding to nor mention the name, Boko Haram. Senate President David Mark realised the conspiracy of silence on Boko Haram when he wondered: “Are we afraid to openly condemn Boko Haram, either for political reasons or out of fear of possible attack by the sect?” 

The attendees of the conference acted in a cowardly manner, quite contrary to Gowon’s remark to them to be fearless and blunt in their contributions during the opening ceremony. This conduct by the northern leaders underscored insinuations in the public domain that northern leaders maintain a disgusting silence because prominent northern politicians and public officers are financiers of the sect. 

For instance, a former minister was said to have twice bailed Yusuf, Boko Haram’s late leader when he was arrested by the police. Also, the recently jailed spokesman of the group reportedly named a senator, Ali Ndume, who is currently standing trial, and Ali Modu Sheriff, former Borno State Governor as alleged backers of the sect.

The group, which appears to be growing in complexity reportedly admitted links with the terrorist al-Qaeda group that bombed the US on September 11, 2001. Its own activities too have been replete with bombing of churches, homes and high profile public buildings, including the Police and the United Nations (UN) headquarters, both in Abuja, among others. 

We have come to realise that the problem of insecurity in the north is beyond what an Arewa conference can effectively resolve. There is the belief that President Goodluck Jonathan is not  doing enough to reach out to the north, despite his much touted pan-Nigerian mandate.

The President is the leader  of the entire country and the north is part of the sovereign entity called Nigeria. He should be decisive on this issue. Not necessarily through the use of force, he must earnestly embrace the carrot approach so as to give the north a sense of belonging, in order to assuage their obvious feeling of angst against his person and his government.

On their part, northern leaders should assist the government to rein-in the restive youths by forcefully condemning their activities and using traditional and religious institutions to educate the sect on the danger its activities pose to the nation. 
We consider the two-day conference by Arewa as a waste of time since northern leaders have now publicly shown their fear for Boko Haram that is threatening the corporate existence of the country.

The northern elites are suspects in the avoidable destruction and killings being perpetrated by the sect. Indeed, Alhaji Ibrahim Gujungu, Chairman of the Arewa Youth Forum succinctly captured the Arewa conference as no more than another opportunity for elite re-union aimed at renewing political linkages. We concur.


http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/editorial/29507-confab-of-fear.html

Is that the Oyinbo version of Fuji House of Commotion ?

Oyinbo can do copy-cat sha

I guess the real Jews are telling us: "Jew pass Jew"

Madam NOI said:

And I think that when we take care of several of the constraints that is holding our economy back, for instance we have constraints on power which is holding our industry back. When we solve those problems, we are going to be in the low double digits and that will parachute Nigeria into the BRICS.

^
That is the Koko of the matter.

I'll just add that 100 Zillion megawatts of Electricity will not solve our Fundamental problems. We have to solve those alongside the obvious economic issues we have.

^

Sorry bro. We the shareholders of Nairaland are yet to receive orders from above. We need clearance to put this damning and embarrassing report on the front page of Nigeria's largest online forum.


Call it "security reasons"

[quote author=isale_gan2 link=topic=816612.msg9744641#msg9744641 date=1323642985]
I'm not mixed with Tapa sha.  But, they're good folk.  Our immediate neighbors ni egbe ile ebi baba mi ati ti iya mi na.[/quote]Very true. They are good folk.


Well, above all, Orunmila ni baba.

shaida:
Im a south african girl trying to make it in a relationship with an igbo man, can some1 help, i love him I need him to be fully mine

^^^
Authentic Omoge S[b]h[/b]aida

[quote author=isale_gan2 link=topic=816612.msg9744483#msg9744483 date=1323640524]
http://www.google.com.ng/#hl=en&cp=12&gs_id=1v&xhr=t&q=saida+yoruba&pq=saida&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=saida+yoruba&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=408f5793463436e9&biw=1366&bih=599

no help at all.[/quote]Shaida --> https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria?action=profile;u=665565

OAM4J:
check google.com.ng, it is Nigeria customized

Hahahahaha. good one.



[quote author=isale_gan2 link=topic=816612.msg9744448#msg9744448 date=1323640172]Who's calling my name?     Talk to the hand. [/quote]Talk to the hand ke? Ibinu awon Ele'yinbo yii sha

O da e ni binu ni. NB lo pa mi lerin. E sa foriji

Isale,

Tapa nile

Ibi a ti san wa nihun

Omi ti afi we Sango Eleyinju ogunna, ohun naa la fi we baba to bi n lomo

Ajobi a gbe gbogbo wa o

[quote author=isale_gan2 link=topic=816612.msg9744077#msg9744077 date=1323636058]        [/quote]

Katsumoto:

HAHAHAHA

See vexing  

[quote author=isale_gan2 link=topic=822573.msg9744241#msg9744241 date=1323637751]They're just laying the ground for an invasion, oh, I mean, a liberation (from Boko Haram, oh, I mean, Al-Qaida.)  Yeah.  That's it.

Watch out for a lot more coverage about Nigeria.  Then watch out for the drones. . .[/quote]Maybe. Unfortunately I don't see my leaders doing anything to prevent them for achieving that aim. no?

Actually, the utterances from my leaders so far, sounds like we are ready to throw them a welcome party at the border.

The car, finally halted by a wall, bounced back. Barra did not try to get out. To one side, a security guard stood frozen. Others — U.N. staff, security personnel — ran away, then turned back. Barra stayed at the wheel. "Was he having second thoughts? Was he praying?" asks U.S. Ambassador Terence McCulley in Abuja, reconstructing the scene based on surveillance-camera footage he has viewed. "Was he searching for the detonator?" After a full 16 seconds, the car exploded.

Hmm. na wa o

naijababe:


Putting on TB Joshua hat . . . . . . . . . Isale to come back with google type translation . . . . . . . . kats to ask Debo to revert to Lagos Yoruba.

ROFL

[size=16pt]Threat Level Rising: How African Terrorist Groups Inspired by al-Qaeda Are Gaining Strength[/size]

By Alex Perry / Maiduguri Monday, Dec. 19, 2011




The moment Nigeria's Islamists graduated from local to international threat can be dated almost precisely, to just before 11 a.m. on Aug. 26.

Mohammed Abul Barra, 27, a car mechanic and father of one from Maiduguri in Nigeria's northeast, had just turned into the diplomatic enclave in Nigeria's hot, dusty capital, Abuja. As he passed by embassies and empty lots, Barra presented an unremarkable sight: his car was a Honda Accord sedan, and Barra dressed and drove conventionally.

The first indication of anything unusual was when he swerved into the exit lane of a 100-m driveway leading to U.N. House, the international organization's four-story headquarters. He bounced over one speed bump, then another. Then he drove straight at a 3-m sliding steel security gate, hitting its right edge so that it popped off its rail and fell harmlessly to one side. Barra repeated the maneuver with a second gate a few meters on and, the way now clear, drove on at U.N. House with the same deliberate, unhurried speed. He crashed into the lobby.


The car, finally halted by a wall, bounced back. Barra did not try to get out. To one side, a security guard stood frozen. Others — U.N. staff, security personnel — ran away, then turned back. Barra stayed at the wheel. "Was he having second thoughts? Was he praying?" asks U.S. Ambassador Terence McCulley in Abuja, reconstructing the scene based on surveillance-camera footage he has viewed. "Was he searching for the detonator?" After a full 16 seconds, the car exploded.


Debris killed perhaps a dozen people. Most of the other 24 dead and 115 wounded, nearly all Nigerian, suffered massive internal injuries as a blast wave big enough to flatten a water tower 100 m away crushed their insides. An FBI forensic team later determined the bomb was colossal, and clever. Around 150 kg of plastic explosives had been placed inside a metal cone — a shaped charge — to focus its force. "This was very, very carefully planned," says Nigeria's national-security adviser, General Andrew Owoeye Azazi. "This was not just a local guy from Maiduguri."



The attack's ingenuity led many to conclude that Africa's nascent Islamic terrorism threat is metastasizing. The continent is home to three main Muslim militant movements. All are al-Qaeda "franchises," groups inspired by Osama bin Laden, even after his death, and his organization, even if they have no direct contact with it.

All are also based in the Sahara or the Sahel, the semidesert that runs beneath it. In the scrub of northern Nigeria, a series of groups known collectively as Boko Haram have killed thousands — soldiers, police, civilians — in the past half-decade, and up to 600 this year.

To their north, deep in the Sahara, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is led by Algerian Islamists who kidnap and sometimes kill Westerners in Algeria, Mali, Niger and Mauritania. In the latest such attack, on Nov. 25, suspected AQIM militants kidnapped a Swede, a Dutchman and a South African from a restaurant in Timbuktu, Mali — and killed a German who refused to go along — a day after another group abducted two French geologists in the east of the country. In Africa's eastern deserts in Somalia, al-Shabab fights the official government and its protectors: African Union soldiers from Uganda and Burundi and, since October, an invading Kenyan force, plus, since November, an invading Ethiopian one.

Like AQIM, al-Shabab has an international reach. Kenya blames it for several grenade attacks inside its borders. In July 2010, al-Shabab suicide bombers killed 76 people in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.


Terror on the Go


The Abuja attack suggests Boko Haram is linking to, and learning from, the two other groups. Nigeria's Azazi says before the attack he had intelligence of Boko Haram fighters traveling to al-Shabab strongholds in Somalia. A man who identifies himself as Boko Haram spokesman Abu Qaqa has also boasted to journalists of sending hundreds of fighters to train there. Boko Haram's links to AQIM are already well established. McCulley says the U.S. has seen reports of Nigerian militants traveling to northern Mali for training with AQIM since 2005. Certainly, the May kidnapping of a Briton and an Italian working for a construction company in northwestern Nigeria suggests AQIM's methods are spreading. In August, the pair appeared in a videotape sent to a news agency in which they identified their abductors as al-Qaeda.



Will Islamist insurgencies in Nigeria and Kenya — the economic powerhouses of West and East Africa — wreck Africa's nascent economic growth, just as the continent struggles to emerge from poverty and conflict? The Arab Spring seems to make al-Qaeda far less relevant, but does this coalescing threat make Africa a new battlefield in the fight against terrorism? The officer who heads Washington's Africa Command (Africom) thinks so. On Sept. 14, General Carter Ham told reporters in Washington: "If left unaddressed, you could have a network that ranges from East Africa through the center.

Those three organizations have very explicitly and publicly voiced intent to target Westerners and the U.S. specifically. To me, that is very, very worrying."
Maiduguri, Barra's hometown, is on the southern edge of the Sahara in Nigeria's northeast. Hot, poor, and with some of the world's worst levels of education and health, Maiduguri has been a fount of Islamic revolution since the early 19th century, when Muslim rebels overthrew the ruling Hausa dynasties, accusing them of un-Islamic corruption. That dynamic — antiauthoritarian, revivalist Islamic movements challenging an avaricious, secular elite — endures. Its latest manifestation is Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad, Arabic for People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad, better known as Boko Haram, meaning Western Education Is Sacrilege.


The movement has its religious foundation in the Izala sect, a group of Islamic preachers founded in the 1970s and led, by 2005, by a man called Mohammed Yusuf, who had studied in Saudi Arabia. Why bother with Western education, Yusuf would ask in sermons, when there were no jobs even for graduates? Hadn't Western influence given them Ali Modu Sheriff, a state governor who spent little on his people but built himself a palace of marble pillars and golden gates in Maiduguri? Yusuf set up a camp called Afghanistan to train volunteers for his revolution.



The Spark

The spark for a full-fledged insurgency came in late July 2009. After a clash between police and Boko Haram members resulted in three deaths, riots erupted across northeast Nigeria. On July 28, the army surrounded Yusuf's compound in Maiduguri, arrested him, then executed him. By July 29, 700 people were dead, including enough militants to stall Boko Haram's insurgency. But by 2010, Boko Haram was back. This Nov. 5, at least 67 people died in a Boko Haram attack on the city of Damaturu.


One mistake made by both sides in the wars that followed 9/11 was how they often overlooked the detail and peculiar dynamics of the places in which they fought. In Afghanistan, the U.S. initially all but equated al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and in Iraq many Americans saw little difference between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. For their part, many Muslims still regard 9/11 and the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, as evidence of a global anti-Islamic conspiracy.


Will Africa make the same mistakes?

Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan certainly seems susceptible. Rather than focusing on addressing Boko Haram's grievances regarding underdevelopment and corruption, Jonathan — a Christian from southern Nigeria — describes his country as an unfortunate bystander caught in the cross fire of an international war. Boko Haram are "just like other terrorist attacks in the world," he said on Nov. 10.


If you misread a problem, you can't fix it. If you mischaracterize a local Islamist rebellion as global terrorism, that's eventually what you'll face. "Left to stew, this trend of internationalization is inevitable," says a Western diplomat in Abuja. The Abuja bomb is proof that the causes of Nigeria's militancy have been left unaddressed for long enough that some fighters are now thinking bigger, and Jonathan's misperception is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.


National-security adviser Azazi says the attack was most likely carried out by a Boko Haram faction led by a man called Mamman Nur, whom he describes as having sophisticated bombmaking skills and links to Islamists in Mali, Algeria, Somalia and Yemen. "Look at what happened between the crackdown in 2009 and their return in 2010," says Azazi. "Suddenly they can do IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and wire cars. This is something that's been festering — and is suddenly exploding."


The Somalian Connection

If Nigeria's Islamist militants are in transition to becoming an international threat, Somalia's made the leap long ago. The 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 230 people, were carried out by an al-Qaeda franchise based in Somalia. In 2006-08, the U.S. says, dozens of American, British, Scandinavian and Australian ethnic Somalis arrived in Somalia and joined the country's latest iteration of Islamist militancy, al-Shabab. That group, and a network of Ugandan and Kenyan jihadists they built, according to both the U.S. and a report by a panel of U.N. Somalia experts, was behind the 2010 Kampala bombings.

All that experience of extremism hasn't always made those fighting it any wiser. Proof of that lies behind a cage door at the back of the pink offices of the National Somali Security Intelligence, next to the presidential palace in Mogadishu. The door opens into a staircase leading down to a basement. At the bottom, according to one source, is another metal door that opens into a central corridor, flanked by 14 jail cells. There is no light, no windows, and the floors and walls are filthy. The place stinks.


The 50 men held there are all terrorism suspects abducted from across East Africa by security services working with the U.S. Ahmed Abdullahi is an ethnic Somali with one leg who was snatched from Nairobi by Kenya's security services in September 2009. "They came to my place in Nairobi, kicked my door down, blindfolded me and took me to the airport and on to Mogadishu," he says. On arrival, he says, he was interrogated by Somalis and unidentified Western personnel for a few weeks. They then lost interest. Abdullahi's been held ever since. "No one gets out of here," says the 26-year-old. "They don't know what to do with me. They can't let me out and risk me talking about this place."


TIME learned of this secret underground prison in Mogadishu, and Abdullahi's account of East African rendition, through a freelance photographer from Mogadishu, Mohamed Dahir, who has been briefly jailed there, twice.

The second time, this March, Dahir was accused of belonging to al-Shabab. In the underground jail, he met Abdullahi, whom he recognized from Nairobi. Dahir also saw five white men — dressed in combat gear and carrying weapons — at the compound. That night, Dahir persuaded a guard to call his clan elders. They vouched for him, and he was released the next day. His captors apologized but warned: "Don't tell anyone what you saw here. We can get to you wherever you are." Dahir's account conforms to a pattern, documented in previous TIME reports and by human-rights groups, of forced rendition of hundreds of terrorism suspects from Kenya and Somalia to jails in Kampala and Addis Ababa.

Kenya is making other mistakes too in its own war on terrorism. On Oct. 16 it sent around 2,000 soldiers into Somalia in pursuit of al-Shabab. Kenya's attack was ostensibly in retaliation for the killing of a British tourist, the kidnapping of two more — a Briton and a French woman, who later died — and the abduction of two Spanish aid workers, all of which Kenya blamed on al-Shabab. U.S. diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks show that Kenya has, in fact, been planning such an incursion for years.

Its long-term Somali strategy — using southern Somalia's clans, the country's last real authority — to create an autonomous buffer state in the south has some merit, but al-Shabab has melted away and the advance has been slow. Kenya is also ignoring well-founded suspicions that the foreigners were snatched by professional kidnappers, and dismisses doubts over its military strategy, such as the wisdom of attacking al-Shabab's 2,500 fighters — fighters who saw off a much larger Ethiopian force in 2009 — with fewer than 2,000 men, or doing so in the rainy season, or during a famine, which war can only exacerbate.

E.J. Hogendoorn, Horn of Africa specialist for the International Crisis Group, says: "A lot of analysts, myself included, fear Kenya is going to get bogged down in a much more prolonged occupation — and that's going to cost them a lot in blood and treasure, and, of course, has the potential to create a backlash from Somalis."

An Elusive Target

There remains hope that Africa can fare better in its fight against terrorism. By joining the dots across Africa, U.S. General Ham may be speculating about the future, rather than describing present reality. "Ham overstated," says a Western diplomat in Abuja. "He's extrapolating. We see training. We do not see operational links."

The threat from AQIM is also not straight terrorism. The group has, it is true, been bolstered by an influx of hundreds of pro-Gaddafi Nigerian and Chadian fighters from Libya, carrying weapons and cash. But Gaddafi opposed Islamic fundamentalism. AQIM's declared focus on religion may be a veneer for its real mission: crime. Since it was founded in 2003, the group has earned tens of millions of dollars in ransom, but politically it remains focused on Algeria rather than the global jihad.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French al-Qaeda scholar, asks: "How much you do business to finance jihad, and how much you do jihad to justify your business?" For policemen, crime is a problem. For terrorist hunters, it's reassuring. It's hard to talk down a suicidal jihadist, but a businessman, of any sort, lives by his deals — of the kind, for instance, that persuaded southern Somali warlord Sheik Ahmed Mohammed Islam ("Madobe" to defect from al-Shabab earlier this year.


Crucially, some terrorist hunters have learned lessons from the decade that followed 9/11. The structure of Ham's command, Africom, shows insight. Africom employs aid specialists alongside soldiers, and stresses intelligence sharing, advisers and training over armed confrontation. Those are so far limited to one theatre — Somalia — and one type of strike: assassination, by drones, missiles or attack helicopters. Kenya's military spokesman Major Emmanuel Chirchir agrees with the need to "think bigger" in the fight against al-Shabab. Nigeria's Azazi even accords the enemy some respect. "I have had communication with a few of them," he says. "If we can't offer them jobs and good leadership, we cannot solve this problem."


— with reporting by Alan Boswell / Nairobi and Miamey, Mohamed Dahir / Mogadishu and Karen Leigh / Ouagadougou




Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2101780,00.html#ixzz1gEBlp400

^

Lol @ Ajas everywhere

I missed the live match

But will catch the recorded one soon. In a few.

They never dissapoint those two

I heard your Eternal crush, Jose "always struggling too hard to form bad guy" Mourinho, had a terrible day?

Brother, Brothas. Stop quarreling. Stop.

BTW, Thanks Isale! Very efficient and dependable sistah

^

That is a people obsessed with their own issues.

In a funny way, it works great for them. . At least so far.

Isale can you embed this for us please? I defer to your superior embedding skills


The link shows a side by side comparison between Time Magazines Editions. US editions Vs other continental editions

It's like the US media is on a perpetual mission to shield their citizens from learning about the world. The isolationism we talked about earlier.

See?
http://invisibletape.tumblr.com/post/13362436506/americans-are-not-stupid-were-just-uninformed