The long-running sectarian conflict, a simmering insurgency in the southern oil fields of the Niger Delta, rampant corruption and poverty, and a frenzy of intrigue by power-hungry politicians in the absence of an ailing president bedridden in a Saudi hospital threaten to pull the continent's most populous country apart.

On top of all this, Nigeria is having to address Western governments' concerns about possible links to Islamic terrorism after the scion of one of its leading families allegedly tried to blow up a U.S. airliner with 290 people aboard on Christmas Day over Detroit.

The would-be suicide bomber's apparent connection to al-Qaida has heightened fears that the global jihadist network is moving into this major oil producer and pivotal African giant that sits on a potentially explosive Muslim-Christian fault line.

The latest surge in religious violence was centered on the city of Jos, capital of Plateau state. At least 27 people were reported killed Sunday in clashes between Muslims and Christians.

The city lies in Nigeria's so-called middle belt, where ethnic groups mingle in territory that is hotly contested between the Muslim-dominated north and the overwhelmingly Christian south.

The country's 150 million people are fairly evenly split between Christian and Muslim.

Sectarian rioting in Jos, triggered largely by local disputes rather than global conflicts, left more than 1,000 people dead in 2001, many killed by security forces who ruthlessly crushed the Islamic radicals blamed for the bloodletting.

Another 700 people perished in fighting in 2004. In 2008 the death toll was more than 300.

The religious divide figures prominently in the constitutional crisis that emerged when President Umaru Yar'Adua was taken ill on Nov. 23 and flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment, leaving an increasingly dangerous political vacuum in his wake.

Yar'Adua, 58, is a gaunt-faced Muslim northerner and has been plagued by poor health for many years. Under the constitution, he should have transferred power to his vice president, Goodluck Jonathan.

But Jonathan is a southern Christian, a little-known former governor of one of the oil-producing states that are now in such ferment.

Under an unwritten power-sharing agreement between north and south since the transition to democracy in 1999 in which they alternate holding the presidency every eight years, a Christian should not take power during a period when the north has the post.

Yar'Adua's prolonged absence, supposedly because of a heart condition, has caused severe disruption in a government already beset by crises.

The constitutional problem was deepened by the president's total silence as his political rivals jockeyed for power in his absence.

Opposition parties, suspecting skullduggery by the president's allies, demanded proof Yar'Adua was still alive.

Finally, on Jan. 11 -- 50 days after he vanished -- a faint-voiced Yar'Adua, clearly ill, gave an interview to the BBC from his sickbed in Jeddah, saying he would soon recover.

That temporarily assuaged fears that he was dead or dying. But it did not settle the question of whether he will be fit enough to resume his duties as president as the country heads for national elections next year.

On Jan. 13 a federal court ruled that Jonathan had the right to begin assuming the powers of acting president. But it was also clear that no formal transfer of presidential power would be made to him.

"The most important result of the Jan. 13 ruling is that there has been no fundamental shift in the country's power structure," according to U.S.-based security consultancy Stratfor.

Meantime, former rebels in the south who accepted a government amnesty in August are becoming restive because the jobs and allowances Yar'Adua promised have not been forthcoming, nor have pledges to give the impoverished southern tribes a greater share of Nigeria's oil wealth.

There has been some scattered violence and threats that the five-year war against the oil industry will resume.

Oil exports provide 85 percent of state revenues. The southern insurgency slashed production by one-third -- 1 million barrels a day -- to the current 1.5 million barrels daily -- the level it was in the 1960s.

Prolonged religious bloodletting in the north is the last thing Nigeria needs right now.

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