Five bombs exploded on Christmas Day at churches in Nigeria, one killing at least 27 people, raising fears that Islamist militant group Boko Haram – which claimed responsibility – is trying to ignite sectarian civil war.

Gun battles between security forces and the sect also killed at least 68 people in the last few days in northern Nigeria. Earlier this year, the Islamists struck the capital, Abuja, twice, including a suicide car bomb attack against the United Nations headquarters that killed 26 people.

Nigeria has stark ethnic and religious divisions and a history of Muslim-Christian violence. Such attacks are unlikely to improve matters.

Unfortunately, the country’s weak institutions make it ill-prepared to deal with threats like this. It is unlikely to have the capacity to meet the challenge. Expect more attacks in the coming months.

A prosecution witness in the trial has claimed that Fumbah Sirleaf, son of Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and former director of Liberia’s National Security Agency, agreed to pose as a corrupt official (not too difficult a disguise for most West African politicians) to help the US Drug Enforcement Agency in a sting operation.

As the Canadian Press reports, Sirleaf and a colleague allegedly met a pair of Colombians representing a South American drug trafficking organisation, and extracted from them a promise to give them $1m and 50 kilos of cocaine in return for letting them use Liberia as a hub. ‘What these defendants did not know,’ said the witness, a DEA agent, ‘was that Liberian officials had not put their country up for sale. The Liberians had been pretending to be corrupt.’ Sirleaf recorded the conversations with the Colombians, and handed the tapes to the DEA. Defence lawyers say their clients were entrapped. Watch this space for updates.

But these claims pale into insignificance compared with the article’s overarching point, which is that the West wants to remove Gaddafi because he is a ‘dangerous African likely to cause a united front against neo-colonialism in Africa.’ According to the Africa Review, the kindly dictator ‘identified himself with sub-Saharan Africa, championing a united Africa and showing the continent how if they formulated a collective vision, they would be able to stand on their own feet.’

The basis for this claim is unclear, for when one thinks of Gaddafi and sub-Saharan Africa, unity and self-reliance are very far from the first things that spring to mind. Was Gaddafi championing a united Africa when he armed Charles Taylor in Liberia and Foday Sankoh in Sierra Leone, enabling them to kill tens of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans and maim, rape and torture many more (even Taylor’s defence lawyer at the Hague has asked why Gaddafi is not in the dock)? Was he formulating a collective vision when he sent Libyan troops to help the mad cannibal Idi Amin crush a popular uprising, or when he gave Amin arms to massacre sub-Saharan Africans in northern Uganda? Was he helping Africans stand on their own feet when he sent weapons to a rebel leader in the Democratic Republic of Congo who is now on trial for war crimes? The list goes on and on; with friends like these, as sub-Saharan Africans reading the Africa Review must surely be asking themselves as they splutter over this morning’s cornflakes, who needs enemies?

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb – the terrorist organisation’s West African branch – is already gaining strength thanks to ransom payments it has received in return for releasing Western hostages. There must be a risk that what is happening in Libya will push new recruits into its arms.

Gbagbo’s strategy from an early stage, no doubt drawing on lessons learned from Kenya and Zimbabwe in recent years, seems to have been to angle for a power-sharing agreement with the election winner, Alassane Ouattara. Early on in the crisis, he predicted that there would not be a war over the succession, and asked his opponent to ‘sit down and talk.’ Ouattara rejected the invitation, buoyed by the impressive array of international leaders who have queued up to call for the president to step down. The Ivory Coast’s West African neighbours, the United Nations, America, France and Britain have been united in condemning Gbagbo and in threatening to use force to evict him.

This show of strength, however, particularly when combined with the threat that the International Criminal Court might be waiting for Gbagbo if he resigns (as alluded to by Chris Blattman in an interesting discussion on his blog), has forced the incumbent into a corner. He may now feel he has little choice but to dig in. Losing power in West Africa means you and the many people who rely on you for jobs, money and influence instantly lose everything. But the threat of violence or arrest adds a new dimension; now, you and those close to you not only lose money and status, but potentially your freedom or your life too. I remember a friend in Sierra Leone last year telling me that the reason so few of his continent’s leaders exit power peacefully is because ‘in Africa, they come after you.’ The insistence by the West, West Africa and Ouattara himself that the democratic process be respected could result in many thousands of Ivorian deaths. The alternative is unsatisfactory and unpalatable, but wouldn’t a power-sharing deal, followed by renewed efforts to strengthen political and civil society institutions so that such chaos doesn’t happen again, be preferable to carnage?

Guinea-Bissau’s leaders will at least be pleased it’s not the other way round.

It will be sending this convoy in the knowledge that there is a serious risk of a second kidnapping. The French, British and American governments all strongly advise their citizens against travel through Mauritania, northern Mali and northern Niger, and the number of kidnappings of Westerners in this region has risen sharply in the past two years (five French citizens working in Niger, snatched two weeks ago, were the latest victims). Even the governments of the West African nations concerned have acknowledged the danger, and they are busy promoting other parts of their countries as safe havens for tourists.

Acció Solidaria knows that, although it calls itself a non-governmental organisation, if a second kidnapping takes place it will be able to count on the Spanish government to bail it out. That government gave seven million Euros to AQIM and its intermediaries to secure the release of those freed in August. In recent years, AQIM has also reportedly received large ransom payments from the Canadian, Italian, German, Swiss and French governments. As a further part of the Spanish deal, moreover, an AQIM militant was released from prison in Mauritania.

The leaders of AQIM are growing rich. The funds acquired will enable them to buy faster jeeps, more weapons and men, and the latest in GPS and communications technology. But kidnapping is unlikely to remain their sole raison d’être; the pressures on them are such that hostage-taking can only be a means, not an end. Even if AQIM’s leaders wanted to just take the money and spend it on a life of luxury, the patrimonial nature of relationships in West Africa would make this impossible. Those who have wealth here cannot enjoy it alone; just as they have been helped by others on their way up, so must they now repay that assistance and dispense largesse to their growing band of dependents. If they refuse, they will be ostracised. Their families and communities will cast them out. As word gets around that they have come into money, the number of supplicants will swell; they will have no choice but to continue to accumulate, to amass and dole out ever more wealth and ever more power.

The recent escalation of kidnappings may be a response to the growing pressures faced by AQIM’s leaders, or it may simply reflect their increased capacity for action. Kidnappings, however, are a finite resource; Western tourists are avoiding the region (attendances at Mali’s Festival du Dessert are down 70%), aid workers are being evacuated by the week, and foreign businesses have stepped up security. When the well runs dry, AQIM will have to find other means of keeping its supporters happy. It will be able to accrue some income from the trans-Saharan drug trade (one of the group’s two main leaders is known as Mr Marlboro because of his involvement in tobacco contraband), but a more worrying prospect is that it uses its ransom booty to gun for real power. Already the group has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly bombings of official buildings in Algeria, and in the last couple of months it has carried out attacks on barracks in Mauritania and Mali. If its links with the central Asian branch of Al Qaeda grow stronger (Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri has publicly welcomed AQIM’s emergence), a jihad to bring down insufficiently fanatical governments across West Africa cannot be ruled out. Given the weakness and poverty of many of those governments, the danger that such a jihad might succeed is real.

So should European governments continue to fund AQIM’s activities? If Acció Solidaria suffers another kidnapping, should Spain cough up another large ransom? And what of tourists who brave the region despite the warnings of their foreign ministries – whose responsibility are they if they are captured? These are difficult questions, but for Africa’s governments the answer is clear. It is Africans, not Europeans, who will suffer most if AQIM grows in strength and if convicted terrorists continue to be released, so in July 2009 the African Union passed a resolution condemning ransom payments and asking the international community ‘to criminalize the payment of ransoms to terrorist groups.’

Back in March of this year, I spent a couple of weeks in the far north of Burkina Faso. I slept under the stars on the edge of the Sahara, was offered a live goat at Dori’s spectacular weekly livestock market, and discussed the upcoming hunger season with nomadic Fulani herders. I also spent money (although not on the goat) and contributed a little to the local economy.

Today I could do none of these things. The whole northern half of this beautiful, welcoming country has been declared off limits by the British, American and French governments. Last month, the US evacuated dozens of its citizens from north-western Burkina. Last week, France withdrew twenty-five students from the city of Fada N’Gourma, near the Niger border, and sent them back to Europe. Across that border, in southern Niger, NGO workers helping to deal with that country’s hunger crisis (a crisis which my Fulani interlocutors had foreseen) have been recalled to the capital, Niamey, for unspecified ‘reasons of security.’

Were I to go back to northern Burkina and fall sick or have a traffic accident (statistically by far the greatest dangers to my person), my insurance would not cover the costs of recovery. Were I to be kidnapped by elements linked to Al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), which the European governments see as the greatest threat to my safety, nobody would pay my ransom and, like the tragic Briton Edwin Dyer last year, I might well be murdered.

My first reaction to this expansion of the already large map of forbidden West African territories was one of anger. So far, two of the dozens captured by Al Qaeda have died. Edwin Dyer was executed because his government refuses to negotiate with terrorists, and earlier this month the 78-year-old French humanitarian worker Michel Germaneau, whose own government normally has no such qualms, either met the same fate or died of natural causes (it is not yet clear). When I compare this figure to the annual number of deaths in car crashes on the M25, on which the Foreign Office is happy for me to drive, or stabbings in London, which I can freely visit, it seems a disproportionate response to tell all foreign visitors that they must avoid northern Burkina and most of Niger, thereby impeding the famine relief effort, hobbling the fledgling tourist industry, and deterring any foreigner thinking of doing business there.

But on reflection, I wondered whether I would be brave enough to revisit the region myself (as I plan to do next year). In March I did not feel in any danger, but if the intelligence the Europeans and Americans claim to have received is correct and AQIM is actively hunting for foreigners to kidnap, would it not be foolhardy to ignore the warnings? In my two weeks, after all, I did not see a single other white face: it would not have been difficult for a desperate local wanting to earn a fast buck to find me and sell me on to the extremists. Perhaps I was lucky not to be snatched myself, although it did not feel that way and no local people seemed concerned that there was any threat.

Michel Germaneau’s fate was probably sealed when the French military botched an attempt to rescue him. He was being held in Mali, and the night-time raid succeeded in killing six or seven terrorists, but not in finding the hostage. AQIM claims that it subsequently executed him in retaliation, although experienced observers of the group believe he may already have been dead, and that the Algerian government, which some allege to be a supporter of AQIM, joined in the raid knowing that it was too late to rescue its target.

The killing of the six terrorists may not be without consequences. There appear to be two main AQIM factions. One, run by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, has never killed any of its captives, and may be driven more by pecuniary than religious considerations. This faction is currently holding two Spanish aid workers, Roque Pascual and Albert Vialata, who were kidnapped in Mauritania last November (their kidnapper, who sold them on to Belmokhtar, has just been sentenced to twelve years in a Malian prison). The other faction, led by the Algerian Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, killed Dyer and was holding Germaneau at the time of his death. It is thought to be the more fanatical of the two groups, and the six dead terrorists were Abou Zeid’s men. The latter is reported to be furious at the raid, and is trying to pressure Belmokhtar into executing his two captives. So far, Belmokhtar, who is haggling for a big ransom, has refused, but the Spanish government has stepped up its negotiations for their release, and it denied rumours yesterday that the two men had been freed.

This intensification of AQIM activity, and the response by Western governments in evacuating personnel from the region, is likely to jeopardise the Islamists’ activities in the short-term. There are very few Westerners in the region already, particularly outside the main cities, and there may soon be nobody left to kidnap. What they will do then is anybody’s guess. They could extend their hunting grounds south into Nigeria, joining up with like-minded groups there, or northwards into Morocco (perhaps with Algerian backing). Or, lacking funds and widespread support, they could fade away as suddenly as they have emerged.

Whatever happens in the future, AQIM’s effect today on those dying of hunger in Niger or trying to scrape a living from tourists in northern and eastern Burkina Faso is clear. In other parts of the world, Al Qaeda has an explicit strategy of wreaking economic havoc. In this desert region of West Africa, however, whose economies are already destitute, the terrorists’ actions are exacerbating the misery of the poorest people on earth. I wonder what their God thinks of that.

Update: The two Spanish hostages are now confirmed freed. The kidnappers wanted a $5m ransom. It is not yet clear whether that was paid, although given the increased threat in the wake of the botched French raid, it seems likely that it was.

Update II: Spain paid 7.6 million euros for the release of the hostages, according to today’s Sur newspaper. Some of it went to intermediaries from Mali, Mauritania and, mysteriously, Burkina Faso, the rest went to AQIM. That should keep them in business for a while.