2015-01-06 21:50
Abuja - Facing an increasingly violent Islamist insurgency,
governors from three states in northeast Nigeria asked President
Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday to deploy extra troops to secure their
regions before next month's presidential election.
With less than
six weeks to go before the polls, officials are concerned the northeast
may be so destabilised by Boko Haram militants that millions of people
are prevented from voting in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, the worst affected
of Nigeria's 36 states.
"We need more troops. The troops on the
ground we have in our various states are not enough," Yobe state
governor Ibrahim Gaidem told journalists at the presidential villa after
meeting with Jonathan. "We appealed to the president to deploy
additional troops with full equipment to tame the situation."
The
presidency was not immediately available to comment, but a presidential
source told Reuters Jonathan had accepted the request in principle. The
source did not give further details.
Security
will be a major election issue in the country with the biggest economy
and population in Africa. The electoral commission says more than a
million Nigerians displaced by the Islamist insurgency in the northeast
may not be able to vote on Feb. 14 unless the law is changed to enable
them to do so away from their home regions.
Parliament is
considering such a law. Jonathan's main opponent is Muhammadu Buhari, a
Muslim from the north who, as a former military leader, is seen as tough
on security.
The five-year-old insurgency, which is trying to
revive a medieval Islamic caliphate, has killed thousands of people and
uprooted more than a million. The militants have also kidnapped hundreds
of children: 200 girls snatched from a school in the village of Chibok
last April remain missing.
The military seems ill-equipped and
overstretched against a determined foe. Boko Haram killed dozens of
civilians and at least 11 soldiers when it took control of a Nigerian
town and army base on the shores of Lake Chad, at the borders with Chad
and Cameroon, at the weekend.
Refugees aside, it may be too
insecure in some parts of the northeast to hold an election at all,
officials say, and many foreign observers will not get security
clearance to go up there.
But the governors of the three states under a military state of emergency were confident the polls would happen everywhere.
"Definitely in all those areas where the insurgency exist, elections will hold," Gaidem said.
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