Death toll rises to 276 in Somalia's worst bomb attack with about 300 injured in the capital

The most powerful bomb blast ever witnessed in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital killed 276 people with around 300 others injured, the country's information minister,  Information Minister Abdirahman O. Osman said early Monday morning, making it the deadliest single attack in this Horn of Africa nation. The toll was expected to rise.

The attack occurred when a truck carrying explosives detonated Saturday in a crowded street packed with cars and pedestrians, near government ministries and hotels.

OUR PRESIDENT MISSING IN ACTION

For two weeks, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s septuagenarian president, has been out of action, receiving medical treatment in London for an undisclosed illness. His absence has sent the rumour mill of Africa’s most populous nation spinning, with frequent erroneous reports that the president is dead. The tragedy for Nigeria is that policy making has been so ponderous during the 20 months since Mr Buhari took office that, dead or alive, it is not always easy to tell the difference.

Under Mr Buhari’s slow-blinking leadership, Africa’s largest economy has drifted into crisis. Brought low by the weak oil price, on which government revenues are woefully dependent, the system has been starved of dollars. That has driven businesses into the ground, people on to the margins and the economy into its worst recession in 25 years. What had been a growing middle class is being daily eviscerated. High inflation, especially for food, is damaging the poor in whose name Mr Buhari ran for office.