President to address the nation

President Olusegun Obasanjo will make a broadcast to the nation at 9:00 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Wednesday on the withdrawal of Islamic Sharia law. The broadcast will be shown on all national television channels and carried on the radio, news organisations reported the president’s office as saying. Some Nigerians are complaining that Obasanjo, a Christian, reacted belatedly to the Sharia crisis hoping that it would resolve itself without intervention from the federal government, the BBC reported on Wednesday. Controversy over the proposed introduction of Sharia law has been building up for several months, it added. The government’s failure to take a stand until now on Sharia has been cited by the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria as the cause of the riot last week in Kaduna, ‘The Guardian’ newspaper reported on Tuesday. “It is our strong conviction that the present tragedy could have been avoided if government had heeded our warning as contained in our memo to it as early as October 1999,” Archbishop John Onaiyekan, the vice-president of the conference, said.