US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the Nigerian capital for a day of talks yesterday, pressing the government of Africa’s most populous nation to curb widespread corruption and enact democratic reforms.
Clinton met with Nigerian officials to urge the nation, known as one of the most corrupt countries in Africa, to do more to tackle graft. She was also scheduled to hold a roundtable discussion with religious leaders to discuss recent violence, sparked by the killing of the head of an Islamist sect, that left more than 700 people dead in the mainly Muslim north.
Clinton’s top Africa advisor said that ties with Nigeria were crucial to the US relationship with the continent due to the country’s vast size and its major oil industry, much of which feeds the US market.
“Nigeria is undoubtedly the most important country in sub-Saharan Africa,” Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for Africa, told reporters on Clinton’s plane to Abuja from the Democratic Republic of Congo late on Tuesday.
Carson said that the US had a “very good relationship” with Nigeria over recent years and hailed the country’s increasingly active regional profile, including efforts to stabilize Sierra Leone and Liberia.
“Despite our close relationship, Nigeria faces a number of major challenges,” Carson said.
He pointed to attacks on oil facilities in the Niger Delta — which cost the developing country hundreds of thousands of barrels in crude oil a day — and a flare-up in religious strife in a nation with sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest Muslim population.
Nigerian security forces late last month crushed an uprising by a self-styled Taliban fundamentalist group in several northern states, leaving more than 800 people dead, the majority of them sect members.
The Obama administration has made outreach to the Islamic world a signature US policy, hoping to assuage some of the bitterness among many Muslims over former president George W. Bush’s policies, especially on Iraq.
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