A 10-week-old leadership crisis that has paralyzed government lies behind a threat by southern rebels to not only resume their war against Africa’s largest oil industry but expand it with an “all-out onslaught” in which “nothing will be spared.”
Worse, the power vacuum caused by the absence of President Uramu Yar’Adua, who has been hospitalized in Saudi Arabia with heart problems since Nov. 23, threatens to rekindle the traditional rivalry between the Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian south.
The absence of Yar’Adua has caused a constitutional crisis since he has not formally handed power to his vice president, Goodluck Jonathan.
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