And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism.

create serious protections for minority groups, with consideration of joint citizenship for certain populations, backed by significant international consequences for attacks on southerners in the North or northerners in the South.

Doubts linger about whether longtime northern PDP leaders, used to cutting midnight deals with their southern counterparts, would break ranks and support Ribadu next year. Conservative northerners also view Buhari, an ascetic politician popular with the region s poor, with unease.

Political sensitivities in the predominantly Muslim north have forced Jonathan, a Christian southerner, to tread lightly in his efforts to contain Boko Haram. Many northerners resent that the presidency was returned to a southerner after only one term with a northerner in office (an informal agreement mandates that the presidency should alternate between north and south every two terms).

These policies would require Germany to accept higher inflation and explicit bank losses, which assumes that Germans can embrace a different narrative about the nature of the crisis. And that means that German leaders must portray the crisis not as a morality play pitting lazy, profligate southerners against hard working, frugal northerners, but as a crisis of interdependence in an economic (and nascent political) union.

But resentment of northerners perceived dominance of national politics runs deep in the south, particularly in the Niger Delta, where 50 years of uncontrolled oil production has resulted in polluted farmlands and deepening poverty. The ethnic minority groups that inhabit the area complain that the current revenue allocation formula, which leaves Nigeria s oil producing states with only 13 of oil revenue, is grossly unfair and insufficient compensation for the damaged ecology they endure.