ICC Note: Boko Haram militants have grown in power despite government claims that they are succeeding in their mission. Nigerian citizens claim that there is too much corruption in their government and that gives more power to the Islamic radicals. Last week, 82 Chibok girls were released by Boko Haram, but they accepted to release them only because they exchanged them with 5 of their imprisoned fighters.
05/19/2017, Nigeria (Newsweek) – Nigeria is set to pass a record-breaking federal budget. After months of political wrangling, several governmental departments are in line to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from state coffers. Among the biggest beneficiaries is the country’s Ministry of Defense, which will receive around $440 million in capital expenditure alone.
But for Nigerians in the country’s troubled northeast, the planned cash injection isn’t necessarily good news. For years, the federal government has been amping up defense spending, hoping to stamp out Boko Haram, a militant group that has waged an armed insurgency in Nigeria since 2009.
Though the group has been degraded, it is far from defeated. On Tuesday, three of its female suicide bombers blew themselves up in northeast Borno state, killing five people. Their deaths add to the group’s increasing death toll, now at around 20,000 victims. (The militants have displaced a further 2 million people.)
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