The soaring price of gold was driving a rush of unregulated wildcat mining there.

That frantic search for gold was also contaminating local villages with toxic lead dust.

That’s because in many cases. gold deposits are found in rocks together with lead.

More than 170 people were reported to have died at the time, mostly children.

Well, 18 months later, gold mining has only expanded in the area.

And that’s led to a crisis that Human Rights Watch says is the worst lead poisoning epidemic in modern history.

The group says 400 children have died in Northern Nigeria and thousands more are in need of urgent medical help.

Jane Cohen of Human Rights Watch says children are dying very quickly after they’re exposed to the lead.

There are no figures, but the fact that children are actually dying from lead poisoning indicates that the levels of lead dust in the affected areas must be extremely high.

Lead dust is usually associated with developmental and cognitive problems, especially in children.

So Cohen says the deaths are just the beginning of this disaster’s long-term impact.

Cohen says the Nigerian government has been slow to respond to the crisis.

And just cleaning up the area won’t solve the problem.

She says what’s needed is both direct medical intervention and a switch to safer mining practices.

The unions began the strike last week to protest against the government’s decision to end a fuel subsidy on January 1, which doubled the fuel prices there.

Now, President Goodluck Jonathan has agreed to restore part of the subsidy, cutting the prices by a third.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to the BBC’s Tomi Oladipo, who is in Lagos, Nigeria.

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Marco Werman:Trade Unions in Nigeria today suspended their nationwide strike. The Unions began the strike last week to protest a Government’s decision to end a fuel subsidy on January first. The move, more than doubled gas prices in Nigeria. Now President Goodluck Jonathan has agreed to restore part of the subsidy cutting prices by a third, not where they were before January first but enough to end the Government’s confrontation with the unions. The BBC’s Tomi Oladipo, Tomi this is an abrupt U turn by President Goodluck Jonathan. Did he cave to pressure?

Tomi Oladipo: Well I would say he caved to pressure not quite what the public wanted. Just before the new year the price of petrol in Nigeria was about 40 US cents to the litre and by the time the fuel subsidy was removed it more than doubled to 86 so a lot of people were sort of …there was sort of outrage a public outrage at this. Now it’s been pulled down to 60 US cents per litre but the public is not quite satisfied. They want it brought back to the original price so yes so the President he might say that he sort of backed down but for the public they don’t see that as a good move for them.

Werman: So the strikers, do they see this as a victory?

Oladipo:Well the labour unions are sort of caught in between because to be honest this wasn’t really a labour driven strike. yes the labour announced there was going to be a strike but even before just they did that a lot of people came out on social media and organised all these protests and we have tens of thousands of people in different cities protesting against the increase in the price of fuel. A lot of these people who did come out are not happy about it but the labour unions say that you know they first met in the middle ground and the people should settle for that now.

Werman: So what was the reaction to the President’s reaction like? Were the strikers at all jubilant?

Oladipo: Well the strikers said that was the best they could get and they called off the strike immediately .People were back to work on Tuesday but for a lot of the public feel that’s what they wanted . The salaries are not going up but the price of fuel has gone up from what it was two weeks ago. So a lot of people feel that they still need you know something needs to be done for them to be able to afford this increase in the price of fuel but for the labour unions they feel like they have done their job.

Werman: Tomi, President Jonathan had intended for the revenues created by the end of the subsidy to build infrastructure in Nigeria does that mean he will have to postpone development projects now for the country?

Oladipo: Well no .Right now the subsidy is sort of like a partial subsidy. It’s not the full subsidy that they had before so a lot of the profit they get from this will be used for infrastructural development. The thing is that the Nigerian people do not trust the Government to use this money properly because the government really in the past has not shown that it can use it properly. There still is a lot of corruption within the government and that is what people are complaining about. Yes the government will have some excess money to use but the public wouldn’t trust it to use it well.

Werman: The BBC’s Tomi Oladipo speaking with us from Lagos

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Since then the price of gas has more than doubled and national strikes have ensued.

One of the protest leaders to emerge has been musician Seun Kuti, son of Nigeria’s legendary musician Fela Kuti.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to him to get more details.

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A general strike is under way with public transport at a halt and shops and offices closed.

At least 14 protesters were injured in the northern city of Kano during clashes with the police, while in Lagos a demonstrator is reported to have been shot dead.

Many Nigerians saw the fuel subsidy as their only benefit from the country’s oil wealth, but the government has insisted it is economically unsustainable.

Gas prices have doubled from 40 cents per liter to 80 cents per liter since a government fuel subsidy ended on Jan 1.

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to the BBC’s Tommy Oladipo is in Lagos says tens of thousands of Nigerians took to the streets to protest the government’s decision to remove the subsidies leading to higher gas prices.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Thousands of people took to the streets today across Nigeria. They were protesting the end of a government subsidy on fuel. Since January 1 gas prices in Nigeria have doubled, but most of the population lives on less than $2 a day, even in this oil rich country. Some of the protests turned violent today with police clashing with demonstrators in the northern city of Kano. The BBC’s Tommy Oladipo says the city of Lagos saw some of the biggest demonstrations.

Tommy Oladipo: This is probably the largest protest in Lagos in a long time. Businesses around Lagos have shut down. The stock market has ground to a halt, banks have been closed. Nigeria is not used to this kind of thing, most Nigerians have been accused of being quite docile and complacent even when they’re not happy with things the government does. But today was quite a surprise really.

Mullins: And why is that the case that this one issue has galvanized people in a way that most other issues don’t?

Oladipo: I have spoken to a number of people at this protest and most of them are saying it seems like the fuel subsidy issue is a spark because of all the compounding of issues that have been around, particularly of corruption. They see the government officials earning to much and spending lavishly, that really is the main issue that people have here.

Mullins: Do Nigerians see the benefits of fuel exports given the fact that Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer?

Oladipo: Well, actually you know, Nigeria is also one of the world’s first countries really because corruption over the years has meant that all this oil money has not been used well, and a lot of infrastructure is not in place. There is very poor electricity supply. Roads are terrible. Healthcare is poor. Education is poor. And even the oil refineries are not working and that’s why Nigeria has to export its oil at crude oil and then import the refined product, which is where this whole complication comes in. So that’s really the root of all of this.

Mullins: So you’re saying that Nigerians don’t even reap the benefits of their country being such a large exporter.

Oladipo: For most people the fuel subsidy where they were able to buy fuel for cheap prices, most people saw that as the one benefit, the only benefit they got from being an oil producing country. So the fact that this price of fuel has gone up they now feel that they have nothing else to gain from the oil that the country has.

Mullins: When we think of fuel costs going up here in the United States the main thing that we think of is the cost of transportation getting from here to there. There’s a different knock-on effect though for the average Nigerian. Can you describe that for us?

Oladipo: It’s not just transportation that has gone up. It’s also the price of food that has spiraled up as well and landlords are now charging double for rent as well, so everything seems to have gone up and the cost of living in Nigeria has pretty much gone up overnight.

Mullins: And the food itself, why does the cost of fuel affect the cost of food?

Oladipo: Well, because a lot of the food has to be transported around the country and that’s why the open markets where people get food have become quite expensive now.

Mullins: One more thing, Tommy, how has the government responded?

Oladipo: The government doesn’t seem to want to budge at all. The government says it’s going to get about $8 billion saved from the removal of the subsidy and it says it has to put that into infrastructure development. Over the next couple of days we’ll wait and see what happens, but for now the government really is standing its ground.

Mullins: All right, the BBC’s Tommy Oladipo, in Lagos, Nigera. Thank you so much for the update.

Oladipo: You’re welcome.

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But the State Department warns there’s high risk of terrorist attack in Nigeria.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with John Campbell, former US ambassador to Nigeria, about the threat posed by the Islamic extremist movement, “Boko Haram”.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. Continental Airlines opens up a new route today, a direct daily flight from Houston to Lagos, Nigeria. The Houston area has a large Nigerian population, and of course, the oil industry has a lot of business over there. But the state department has a serious warning for Americans thinking of traveling to Nigeria. Large areas of the country are off limits to all but essential travel because of the threat from Boko Haram. Boko Haram is an Islamic extremist group that’s mounting daily attacks in the north of Nigeria. John Campbell was US ambassador to Nigeria from 2004 to 2007. He’s currently with the Council of Foreign Relations in Washington. John Campbell, who are Boko Haram?

John Campbell: Boko Haram is a movement, a tendency, a trend as opposed to being a tightly organized group. It has no charismatic leader. It does not seem to have a Polit Bureau, and it seems to be quite fragmented.

Werman: Now, is there any connection between Boko Haram and a larger, better known organization like al-Qaeda’s chapter in west Africa?

Campbell: I don’t think so or at least no significant connection between the two. Boko Haram is inward looking. Its focus is on the secular government in Abuja. It is millenarian, that is to say the desire to establish the kingdom of God on earth, primarily through the imposition of a rigorous form of Sharia. But I don’t think we should think of Boko Haram as in some sense of a franchisee of al-Qaeda.

Werman: How concerned is Nigeria’s federal government over the existence of Boko Haram and these attacks they’re carrying out?

Campbell: It’s deeply concerned.

Werman: What are they doing about it?

Campbell: Well, up to now the response has essentially been a very, very heavy handed security presence, lots and lots of military, lots and lots of police, lots of bad behavior by both, which in a sense has made the situation worse. One of the difficult things about Boko Haram is who do you talk to? Again, back to no Politbureau, no charismatic leader. A couple of weeks ago a former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, at the request of the current president tried to open a dialogue with a person who was identified as a leader of Boko Haram. Shortly after their first conversation the person he was talking to was murdered.

Werman: So really nobody to talk to, I mean it’s not just that no identifiable character, but it just seems very diffused. I see that the name Boko Haram means western education is forbidden, that’s the loose translation. Now there are 75 million Muslims in Nigeria, how many of them see eye to eye with this group?

Campbell: Oh, well, first of all, the label Boko Haram is applied by the government and by the press.

Werman: Oh, so what does the group call itself?

Campbell: They don’t call themselves Boko Haram at all. They call themselves roughly, the way of the Sunna and Jihad. Sunna here refers to law. The other thing is the government and the media tend to identify anything that happens in the north that is bad as part of Boko Haram. So that, for example, a bank is robbed, the reference would be made to Boko Haram. Well, the bank robbers may or may not have any contact with the Boko Haram even as loosely identified.

Werman: Let me ask you this, I mean we began talking about this new flight from Houston to Lagos. Is the violence so bad that you’re warning friends and relatives who are thinking of going to Nigeria not to go?

Campbell: No, no, certainly friends who want to go to Lagos I think can proceed to do so. There have been car bombings in Abuja and I certainly would not recommend travel in the North. But in the southwest and that’s where Lagos is, yes.

Werman: John Campbell, former US ambassador to Nigeria, thank you for your time.

Campbell: Thank you very much.

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This city is the capital of the north-central state that bears the same name.

The city was founded by the British in the early 20th century.

Both Muslims and Christians coexist there.

Though there have been serious religious tensions, especially after the implementation of Sharia law in 2001.

There are some serious environmental issues there as well.

Because drinking tap water is not safe in Nigeria, people consume a lot of bottled water and that creates *a lot* of trash.

Making bricks for the unusual buildings (Photo: Sam Olukoya/BBC)

In fact, they’re building homes a few miles outside the Nigerian city we’re looking for.

What’s its name?

The answer is Kaduna, in northern Nigeria.

And just outside of Kaduna, you’ll find the village of Yelwa.

That village is now the site of Nigeria’s first-ever house built from recycled plastic bottles.

It’s a one bedroom set-up with all the comforts of home.

It required 8,000 bottles, and built in the round style of traditional Northern Nigerian houses.

The BBC’s Sam Olukoya saw it for himself.

Nigeria house made of plastic bottles (Photo: Sam Olukoya/BBC)

As this resident can tell you, rush hour can be a nightmare there.

“As you can imagine traffic is chaotic, lots of congestion on the roads, it takes sometimes hours to traverse the city and get to destinations, and this is the reason why the government has decided to upgrade the transportation infrastructure to ease the congestion and chaos on the streets.”

That’s where that new railway comes in. To save money, engineers are buying hundreds of used subway cars from Toronto, Canada and refitting them to run above ground in Nigeria.

So which Nigerian city is getting its train cars from Ontario?

The answer is Lagos, Nigeria.

Danladi Verheijen director of the Nigerian company Eko Rail tell anchor Marco Werman about the international transportation project.

He earned the tag in 1966, after singing in one of the formative Afro-Beat albums – Orlando Julius Ekemode and his Modern Aces’ Super Afro Soul.

Later, in 1971, Haastrup got an unexpected break. Ginger Baker, the former drummer with Cream, invited him to join his band on tour.

That gave Haastrup a taste for the big time and soon he was back in Nigeria to form his own band, MonoMono.

The band’s debut album was called “Give The Beggar a Chance.” That album and two others from Haastrup’s “Afro-funk” catalog have been recently released on CD.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Joni Haastrup to get more details.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston.  A suicide car bomb today drove through two gates and set off a blast at the United Nations building in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. The blast killed more than a dozen people, wounding many others and shattering part of the five story building.  Hours later the BBC received a call from the radical Islamist group, Boko Haram, claiming responsibility for the attack. Martin Plaut is the Africa Editor for the BBC.  Martin, tell us what you know about this group, Boko Haram.

Martin Plaut: Well, they have been active since 2002.  They were founded by Mohammed Yusuf in the north east of Nigeria in a town called Maiduguri, and they really are a very strict Islamist group.  They don’t allow any kind of western influence.  Boko Haram means western education is forbidden.  They don’t allow western clothing or voting, or anything like that.  And they carried out a series of attacks on the police which lead to an uprising about seven years later. He was then captured and executed by the police and since then there’s been an increasingly violent conflict between Boko Haram and the Nigerian authorities.

Werman: So, I suspect that Boko Haram is well-known to Nigerians.  Is it a group that has a history of attacks like the car bomb today in Abuja?

Plaut: They have carried out a number of increasingly sophisticated attacks.  In June, they carried out an attack on the police headquarters in Abuja, in the Nigerian capital.  When they phoned the BBC they said actually they had been planning to attack the headquarters of the police in Maiduguri, but it proved a bit difficult, so they settled for the United Nations instead, which of course, is absolutely tragedy for the UN.

Werman: Nigeria is 50% Muslim, 50% Christian approximately.  Is Boko Haram having influence on radicalizing Muslims in Nigeria?

Plaut: Well, northern Muslims are pretty radical, I mean, but they didn’t really require Boko Haram to do it.  Muslim law has been applied across a number of states.  But they want to go very much further.  And I’m not really sure that most Muslims who are pretty traditional want to go down that route.  Of course, there have been a number of clashes between northern Muslims and southern Christians in the past, but on the whole, Nigerians get a long pretty well, much better than one might assume given just what a complex state it is.  And although there are these kinds of conflicts, I don’t think they represent the majority of Muslim opinion in Nigeria in any shape, way or form.  But one of the interesting things about Boko Haram is that there is an indication now that they have increasingly links across the Islamic world.  So a quote from Carter Ham, General Carter Ham, who’s the head of AFRICOM, that’s the United States African Command, when he visited Nigeria earlier this month he said he had indications of increasing ties between Boko Haram and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as well as the Somali movement, Al Shabab.  Now, I myself have heard of Nigerians fighting with Al Shabab, so it’s quite possible that Boko Haram is getting its expertise from this wider Islamist movement

Werman: Martin Plaut is the Africa Editor at the BBC.  Martin, thanks very much for your time.

Plaut: Most pleasure.

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In the pod this week, Carol Hills and I pick our top five language stories of the past month.

5.The first Punjabi language public school in the US. The Sacramento Valley Charter School is about to open. It will teach kindergarten through 6th grade in English and Punjabi. The school is aimed at the local Sikh population, which is largely overlooked in the United States (there are an estimated 200,000, compared to 278,000 in Canada and 389,000 in the UK. See here for more country populations). In Canada, by the way, NHL games are broadcast with Punjabi commentary.

4. Bad translations with bad results. Hardly a week goes by without a business article or blog post extolling the virtues of global niche marketing. And that often means marketing in local languages to local tastes. Of course you have to make sure you don’t mess up the translations. Many companies do — sometimes amusingly, sometimes tragically. This list, compiled by translation company Lingo 24, has examples of both.

3. Nigerian Pidgin radio is a hit. Lagos-based radio station Wazobia FM broadcasts exclusively in low-status Nigerian Pidgin. After four years on the air, it is exapanding to other Nigerian cities. Nigerian Pidgin isn’t an official language of multilingual Nigeria, but it’s one of the more popular street vernaculars. On the pod, we hear some of it as broadcast by Wazobia FM, and as taught in an online language lesson.

2. The rise and decline of French as an international language. A new book, When the World Spoke French, traces the growth of the French language. Author Marc Fumaroli is a member of that protector of the language, the Académie française. His book is a sort of intellectual love letter to French.

The spread of French was unintentional, according to Fumaroli. The language rose to prominence in the 17th century (along with France itself). After Louis XIV revoked a ban on persecuting Protestants, French Huguenots fled the country. These free-thinking refugees flooded the capitals of Europe with their ideas, and their mother tongue. And so French became one of the leading languages of the Enlightenment.

Fumaroli spends less time on the decline of French. And he is optimistic that what made French popular 400 years ago — that it was a precise and poetic conveyer of Big Ideas — will serve it well in the future, albeit among fewer people. Reviews of the book are here and here.

1. Annoying “Americanisms”

British journalist Matthew Engel has railed against the invasion of what he calls Americanisms into British English. His BBC article was hugely popular, and largely inaccurate according to Language Log. That didn’t stop hordes of BBC users posting their own irritating “Americanisms”. It also, thankfully, didn’t stop fellow podcaster Grant Barrett from penning a riposte on the BBC site.

On public radio show The Takeaway, host John Hockenberry called up Matthew Engel (who was at a cricket match, of all things). The two of them jabbed and parried, mainly entertainingly. And Language Log continued posting (here and here). Still, as a Brit who has lived in the United States most of my adult life, I am now confused and a little disheartened. Let’s call the whole thing off.

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Think Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe.

But the younger generation of writers from Nigeria have veered away from politics, and the feeling that they have to somehow represent or fight for their country.

Sefi Atta is a good example. She’s a rising star among Nigerian writers.

Her two novels and book of short stories have won critical acclaim and awards, including The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, named after the continent’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Sefi Atta is from a generation of Nigerian writers who have no memory of the heady days of Nigerian independence from Britain in 1960, and the great hopes that Nigeria would take its place as a thriving new democracy in Africa.

“I always say to people that every generation gets the writers they deserve,” Atta said. “The previous generation had writers like Soyinka, Achebe; they had come of age at a time when there was a nationalist struggle, and then we got our independence. And for a short while, Nigeria belonged to them. And shortly afterward it was taken away from them by the military.”

Atta says that generation of Nigerian writers got involved in the newly independent Nigeria, took bold political stands, and suffered for it.

Wole Soyinka was imprisoned in 1967 during Nigeria’s civil war for trying to broker peace.

Chinua Achebe supported the secessionist region of Biafra during the civil war, and since the early 1970s has lived mostly in exile in the United States. Sefi Atta says her generation has a different relationship with Nigeria.

“I came of age at a time that there was military rule, so I never had that sense that Nigeria was a country I could fight for,” Atta said. “It never belonged to me. And so a lot of my writings expression that frustration that you feel detached from the politics of Nigeria and you’re not quite sure why.”

In the 1980s, Nigeria was 20 or so years into its independence. Already it had a civil war and a few military coups.

So Atta just went about living her life. She trained and worked as an accountant. By 1994, she was living in New Jersey with her Nigerian husband, a doctor.

One day while working as a certified public accountant in Manhattan she saw an ad for a writing course at New York University. She enrolled thinking it might be a nice diversion. And she got hooked.

Several novels, short story collections, and prizes later, she’s given up accounting altogether and even handed over annual tax return duties to her husband.

Like Sefi Atta, Tolu Ogunlesi, started out in a much more practical line of work: he was a pharmacist in Lagos. Ogunlesi came of age in the 1990s, during the dark days of dictatorship under Sani Abacha.

“We were born into disillusionment. We were born into a Nigeria that had fallen apart,” Ogunlesi said. “And in a sense, what we are seeing is sort of attempting to come together.”

Ogunlesi is now a poet and a journalist. He’s the arts and culture reporter for the Next Newspapers in Lagos.

Ogunlesi, too, is more concerned in his writing with the personal and emotional rather than politics. His fiction and poetry are concerned with small moments and feelings, like what he loves about the chaotic city of Lagos, or meeting someone for the first time.

Ogunlesi is 28, so by definition he’s a wired guy. He’s on Facebook, Twitter, has a website. He said the Web has had a huge impact on his writing, and on how he thinks of himself.

Ogunlesi recalled something an overseas publisher said to him in an email.

“She asked me, ‘by the way, where exactly are you based?’ That, I think, just says it all about the world in which we live,” Ogunlesi mused. “You can no longer identify people by postage stamps, for example, you know. The New Yorker joke where a dog sitting behind the computer says ‘on the Internet know one knows you’re a dog.’ So on the internet, nobody knows that you’re 3rd world, you know developing world. It’s worked a lot in my favor.”

Ogunlesi’s poetry and fiction is published in Australia, India, the UK, all over. He feels he’s part of a much larger world.

Sefi Atta is more reluctant. She kind of likes the relative anonymity of her current home, Meridian Mississippi.

“My neighbors … no one knows what I do,” Atta said. “And when they do they’re not impressed. They think I’m rich like John Grisham, which makes me laugh,” Atta said.

They don’t know, for instance, that she’s won the Wole Soyinka Prize one of the most prestigious honors in Africa.

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Lisa Mullins: I am Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WBGH in Boston. International observers described this weekend’s election in Nigeria as one of the country’s fairest in decades but yesterday riots broke out in the north. It happened just after the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan was named the winner. Jonathan is a Christian from the south. Nigeria’s south is predominantly Christian, the north is mostly Muslim and there is an informal agreement to rotate the Presidency. Some in the north thought that the agreement had been violated with Jonathan’s election so they went on rampages destroying churches and homes and businesses. These witnesses who fled say they saw people lose everything in the riots.

Witness 1: They are homeless. I saw people that have been killed.

Witness 2: I saw people running just to save their lives. Houses were burnt where I reside.

Witness 3: This is my home.

Witness 4: There is no peace here. People have been running out of their place. They have to run to save their own lives.

Mullins: The BBC’s Dan Isaacs witnessed the elections in the north. He is now in the capital Abuja.

Dan Isaacs: I was in the northern city of Kaduna, one of the places where there is now being serious trouble and unrest and the voting there went extremely well. And for Nigerian elections, I have been to the past few; this was remarkably well carried out. It was peaceful. It was orderly. The ballot papers and all voting materials arrived on time. People did queue for a long time in the hot sun to be able to vote but it a good optimism that the polling was going very well. What happened after that was that people started to in the north, the people that had been voting for the opposition candidate, the main opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari, when it became evident that he was losing and losing badly to the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, people started to get very upset. They believe there had been rigging, not at the polling stations but afterwards, at the counting, the central counting station in Abuja. And that is what they got very upset about and that’s when the unrest started and it started with those opposition supporters of Muhammadu Buhari going for the known supporters of Goodluck Jonathan and that largely was Muslim communities going for Christian communities in the very divided cities such as Kaduna in the north of Nigeria.

Mullins: What are the main issues that people there are concerned about, both in the north and in the south?

Isaacs: Well there are so many issues facing a President of Nigeria and a government of Nigeria. I mean just one of them is so well illustrated by what you might be able to hear in the background. It is an enormous generator keeping the power of this hotel going perhaps half the day. A country that produces an enormous amount of oil and gas, it is one of Africa’s largest energy producers, it doesn’t have the capability to provide power to its people. So that is one of the reasons and you can hear behind me the generators just stopped, the power has come back to the hotel and this is a constant, constant sound in Abuja and across Nigeria.

Mullins: One of the questions; Goodluck Jonathan is seen as good news for Nigeria by many in the international communities. Many thought that he would fight the corruption that is so endemic in Nigeria. Does he right now seem to have the support of the international community?

Isaacs: I think by the fact, that the election was seen to be carried out in a very straight forward and free and fair way and in a transparent way, in a rigorous way by the Election Commission here for the first time in the last twelve or so years. By that very fact he has the support of the international community. I think it will be interesting to see whether the complains by the opposition that there was fraud and rigging at the central level during the counting of this election, whether that holds any sway. But yes, the international community wants a stable Nigeria. They want a democratically elected President they can do business with and that somebody that could actually hold sway in the international stage as a leader of a country by popular mandate. That is what countries not just further field but in the region as well. Nigeria is a very important player in the region. If Nigeria gets it right with its elections, the rest of the region would look to it and try to follow it and emulate it.

Mullins: Dan, thank you. The BBC’s Dan Isaacs in Abuja, Nigeria speaking to us about the post-election violence in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Thanks very much Dan.

Isaacs: Thank you very much Lisa.

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