Nigeria's War on Polio

Six years ago, Muslims in northern Nigeria formed a boycott of polio vaccinations because they claimed they were a Western plot to infect them with AIDS. The number of crippled children doubled in result of this. Now, after another tripling of polio cases, an anti-polio group is rising to clear the country of this disease. People crowd the streets to urge parents to get their children vaccinated at one of the hundreds of provided vaccination centers. This movement has increased the number of vaccinated by 26%. There is a fear that polio could be spread to surrounding countries, destroying their multibillion dollar plan to wipe the disease from the globe.


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This relates to what we have been learning in class because of different views on society by different religions. Some Muslims do not support getting children immunized, whereas others track down kids who have no recieved the vaccination. Getting rid of polio in Nigeria is important because it could easily spread around the globe, crippling many.

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Distribution of Oil Income not Equal

Nigeria's income from oil revenue is huge. But much of that wealth does not reach the common people. This article features some of the groups that have come out on the losing end of this unequal arrangement - the Rumuekpe Youth Council, comprised of armed young people from the formerly-inhabited town of Rumuekpe, and the Rumuekpe Justice Fighters, a more organized group of men from the same town who relocated to Port Harcourt, the regional capital. Both groups agree that the four multi-national oil companies opperating in Rumuekpe did not invest in the community and are willing to react, an example of pressure from the bottom up, if revenue is not, in their opinion, distributed fairly. The oil producers argue that they are paying the rightful owners of the land they opperate on.
There is no question that oil has the potential to boost Nigeria's local economies. What is in question is the method of delegating these revenues. The Rumuekpe Justice Fighters claim that the current method of paying landowners divides the community against itself, a coinciding cleavage, and that the only way to peacefully repopulate Rumuekpe is to distribute funds directly to the community.

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