For the second time in two weeks, Nigerian authorities have found themselves on the defensive in the wake of organized media attacks designed to widen the country’s fragile Christian/Muslim divide. On Sept. 29, U.S. comedian/commentator Bill Maher retailed the unfounded charge that Nigerian jihadists were planning to wipe out the entire Christian population of the country by 2050. On Oct. 25, scientists at Nigeria’s Ahmadu Bello University (ABU, located in the Muslim north) were charged with secretly constructing a nuclear weapon during the 1980s.
In a statement released to (but not posted by) News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Auwalu Umar, the public relations officer of ABU, declared as “baseless, unfounded and unsubstantiated” charges that ABU scientists had, in the 1980s, “secretly enriched weapons-grade uranium in Kaduna and that ABU researchers obtained centrifugal equipment from the AQ Khan network in Pakistan.” Omar later repeated that “ABU has no connection whatsoever with the AQ Khan network and has never received any equipment for the construction of a centrifuge or a nuclear device.”
