February 05, 2007

NIGERIA: Surveillance efforts to increase after reported bird flu death

ABUJA, 1 Feb 2007 (IRIN) - Health authorities in Nigeria were redoubling surveillance efforts on Thursday to track the deadly H5N1 virus in birds and humans after the first human death from avian flu was reported in the country.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Laboratory tests conducted in Nigeria showed that a 22-year-old woman who died on 17 January following symptoms of bird flu was infected with the same virulent strain of avian flu that has killed millions of birds around the world and raised fears of a potential human pandemic, a government statement said on Wednesday.

The woman had slaughtered chicken to prepare a family meal before her death, health officials said. Her 52-year-old mother had also died of similar symptoms on 4 January but was not tested for the virus, officials said.

“The federal government is strengthening surveillance efforts across the country with particular emphasis on monitoring human contacts with poultry populations to prevent animal-to-human and human-to-human infection,” Information Minister Frank Nweke said in a statement on Thursday.

Samples taken from the victim and people who were in contact with her have also been sent to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United States Centres for Disease Control for independent review, he added.

WHO said in a statement on its website that it was working with Nigerian authorities to monitor the avian flu situation in the country. It said preliminary tests on samples taken from three other suspected cases and other people who were in contact with them turned out negative.

The agency advised that people should only consume chicken that has been properly cooked “until none of the meat is red”, stressing there is no evidence of infection from poultry or eggs that have been thoroughly cooked.

“The greatest risk of exposure to the virus is through the slaughter and handling of live or already dead infected poultry,” WHO said in the statement.

Nigeria reported Africa’s first case of bird flu a year ago. Since then the H5N1 strain of the virus has been confirmed in 17 of the country’s 36 states, but no human cases had been reported until now.

As part of new surveillance measures, movement of poultry around the country is to be restricted. People are also being urged to wash their hands thoroughly after handling live or dead poultry and to report any cases of suspected avian influenza to the authorities.

However, in poultry markets in Lagos on Thursday, both buyers and sellers were engaged in business as usual. Boys who make their living from slaughtering and cleaning birds for buyers in the markets did their job without the protection of gloves and seemed unimpressed by warnings about the dangers of their trade.

“We heard about this bird flu last year and nothing happened to us,” one of them, Isa Musa, told IRIN. “We are not going to stop our business because of something we are not sure exists.”

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Development suffers as corruption thrives, rights group says

PORT HARCOURT, 31 Jan 2007 (IRIN) - The states of Nigeria’s southern, oil-rich delta region are receiving more money than ever before thanks to booming world oil prices and constitutional reform. But corruption has undermined prospects for development there, leaving schools without books and desks, clinics without medicine and running water, and youths lacking hope other than through violence.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

“You see local governments by and large investing almost nothing into healthcare and education beyond the very bare minimum to pay salaries and sometimes they don’t even do that,” said Chris Albin-Lackey, Nigeria researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a report released on Wednesday, HRW detailed alleged corruption in Rivers State in the delta. Albin-Lackey told IRIN that civil servants in the state have a “profound sense of demoralisation” in the face of graft, official neglect and a sense of opportunity lost, following elections in 2003 that people hoped might change things for the better.

Those polls were marred by violence and blatant vote rigging, most prominently in Rivers State, according to international observers. They fear even greater violence this time around because resentment has deepened among youths in the delta who have fewer job prospects but easier access to arms to carry out the will of local politicians seeking office.

Nigeria is Africa’s top oil producer and was plagued by decades of military rule and corruption. Democratic elections in 1999 brought President Olusegun Obasanjo to power and Nigerians hoped the newly elected leaders would help stop the graft and waste that had bled Nigeria of as much as US$380 billion between 1960 and 1999, according to the nation’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

Poor social indicators

As a result of misused and mismanaged funds, basic health and social indicators for Nigeria’s wealthiest states are dismal, according to the HRW report, which is based on more than 100 interviews with people across a spectrum of Nigerian society.

“A few decades ago Nigeria was considered to have one of the best education systems in Africa and now the schools in the richest state in the country are literally falling apart,” Albin-Lackey said of the schools he saw in Rivers State during his research mission there.

Overall, despite Nigeria’s wealth, the nation has one of the worst child survival rates in the world. About one out of five Nigerian children die before the age of five, most succumbing to diseases that are easily preventable or treatable at low cost, according to the United Nations children’s agency. The country’s maternal mortality rate is also among the highest in the world, the UN says.

Data for the delta, including Rivers State, reflects the national picture. The delta has the worst post-neonatal mortality rate in Nigeria, according to the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey of 1999. It said nationally 30 percent of women said they cannot afford healthcare, compared with 47 percent in the delta.

Photo: IRIN
Apart from corruption, residents of the Niger Delta complain of environmental damage.
Defending the delta

Magnus Abe, commissioner for information for Rivers State, said it was unfair to single out his state and its local governments when looking at corruption and poor development in Nigeria.

“What people have to appreciate is that the problems of the lack of development in the Niger Delta were problems not created today,” Abe told IRIN. “These are problems created over the years.”

Abe said schools, roads and clinics were being built, and electricity was being restored. He called attention to the Braithewaite Memorial Hospital under construction in Port Harcourt to replace one built during British colonial rule.

But patients using the old hospital doubt the new buildings will mean improved services.

“Right now we are simply given prescriptions and are required to buy everything required for treatment ourselves,” said Amadi Woji, one of a group of patients waiting to see a doctor at the hospital. “It’s not just the drugs that we are required to buy, but also syringes, bandages and disinfectants. I don’t think it will make sense to move into the new hospital complex where patients will continue buying for themselves things a normal hospital should be able to provide.”

Other patients who did not want to be named said they believed politicians were investing in grand building projects because it provided channels for inflating costs and siphoning government funds for private use. They said they believed what was needed was better medical services rather than new buildings.

Hope denied

When Nigerians went to the polls in 1999 and 2003, they had hoped that their votes would result in a better standard of living. On paper, for the people of the delta, this was the promise. The constitution was amended to stipulate that no less than 13 percent of revenues would go to oil-producing states.

Rivers State had a budget of $1.3 billion in 2006 – roughly 10 times the budget of post-war Liberia, which has a slightly smaller population.

“You would have expected that [increase in revenue] would have translated into a qualitative improvement in health and human welfare and it just hasn’t worked out that way,” said Nnamdi K. Obasi, Nigeria analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “There is tremendous leakage, to use a very charitable word, with state and local governments – a lack of accountability.”

Thirty-one of Nigeria’s 36 governors face possible charges of corruption after leaving office, according to the EFCC. Its executive chairman told HRW that the conduct of many local government officials went beyond corruption, saying it was tantamount to “gangsterism” and “organised crime”.

The HRW report said the governor of Rivers State “budgeted tens of millions of dollars” in 2006 “on questionable priorities like foreign travel, ‘gifts’ and ‘souvenirs’ to unspecified recipients, and the purchase of jet aircraft and fleets of new cars for his office.”

The report also said the chairman of Khana local government in Rivers State was allocated nearly $376,000 for his own salary and “allowances” – nearly half the total amount allocated for the wages and allowances of Kana’s 325 health-sector workers.

“There’s greed all over,” said Obasi, who is based in Abuja. “Everybody wants some of the money and they know the governor has the money and everybody just plays along with him.”

Enduring challenges

Elections coming up in April could be an opportunity for change if the polls are carried out peacefully and transparently, Albin-Lackey said.

“It would make a difference if they could be turned out of office,” he said of the region’s allegedly corrupt governors, assembly members and councilors. “One of the biggest questions in the coming months… is whether people will have the opportunity to put someone in there who has an interest in trying to meet their responsibilities.”

Albin-Lackey and other Nigeria analysts said the federal government has made efforts to tackle corruption by establishing the EFCC and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, but more needs to be done. They said graft at local and state levels often escapes scrutiny, despite the existence of state legislatures that are supposed to provide checks and balances.

“All they do is rubber stamp,” Obasi said. “We can only hope that with time you may have legislatures that are more alive to a watchdog role over their executives but that’s a very tall dream.”

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Lagos pays the price of population surge

LAGOS, 26 Jan 2007 (IRIN) - For Iyabo Aduni, a 29-year-old mother of three, home in Lagos, Africa’s biggest city, is a wooden shack next to a huge, burning garbage dump.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Located on the edge of a canal that drains into the lagoon that splits the city’s islands from the mainland, the refuse has not been collected for years. Residents of Iganmu regularly set the dump on fire, using the burned rubbish as a means of reclaiming land from the swamp and building new shacks as soon as the ground appears firm enough.

“When it rains our homes are often flooded because garbage blocks the canal, making it difficult for the water to flow,” said Aduni as her children played on the fringe of the dump. “And we have to sweep up plastic bags and other trash that washes into our rooms.”

As the population of Lagos has exploded in the past two decades to more than 13 million people, the infrastructure to deal with the resulting waste was not improved to keep pace.

It is a problem repeated all across the large cities of Africa, where urbanisation is outpacing the capacity of governments to keep up and improve infrastructure and waste-collection networks.

The equatorial heat makes matters worse by turning the garbage into a toxic, fetid compost of organic, chemical and hazardous waste.

Health risks

Lagos, Nigeria’s sprawling commercial capital, lacks an effective garbage collection network and has no central system for treating sewage and effluents from industries. Filling the vacuum are self-employed collectors who push carts through the streets, collecting rubbish from residents for a fee. Similarly, private operators evacuate sewage for the city’s residents.

Lagos State health and environment officials acknowledge that most of the garbage and sewage collected by these private operators, as well as the effluents from industries, ends up in the lagoons and creeks. Much of the rest is burned either in the numerous illegal rubbish dumps that dot the city or in the three official dumps run by the government. Tendrils of black smoke are a frequent sight on the Lagos skyline.

The untreated sewage not only pollutes the lagoon waters, but also destroys marine and aquatic life, says Kenneth Iwugo, a marine scientist affiliated with the University of Bristol, who has studied water pollution problems in Lagos. In places where rubbish and other solid waste are dumped in officially appointed landfills, contaminants are released that leak into both ground and surface water, he added.

“This brings about the risks of water pollution and destroys marine animal and aquatic food sources in the metropolis,” said Iwugo.

He said Lagos is particularly susceptible to water pollution because the water table is very close to the soil surface, sometimes only 3m deep. The soil is also relatively loose and easily permeable, allowing the infiltration of contaminants.

For the millions of inhabitants of the city the health risks inherent in the poor disposal of waste are many. According to Iwugo there is always the danger of viral and bacterial diseases such as polio, meningitis, diarrhoea, cholera, parasite infection and fevers spread by waterborne carriers. Heavy metals discharged by industries are an additional health threat.

Poor infrastructure

Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu blames previous governments for failing to address the city’s waste disposal problems. Following his election in 1999, Tinubu introduced a system of government-licensed, private refuse collectors. They go around neighbourhoods collecting trash for a monthly fee and dump it in the officially designated landfills.

While only 100 trucks picked up rubbish at the start of the project about five years ago, now more than 600 trucks collect refuse, tipping an average of 4,000 tonnes of waste every day, said Tunji Bello, the Lagos Commissioner for Environment. The government has also signed a deal with two international companies specialising in waste management to recycle waste at the landfills and produce fertiliser.

“The project has a twin objective of ridding Lagos of garbage and providing gainful employment to many citizens,” Bello told reporters in Lagos.

With funding from a US $20 million World Bank loan the government plans to tackle the city’s drainage and flooding problems by dredging more canals and new channels to ease the flow of water, Bello said. The loan was granted, he said, because the government was successful in cleaning out the garbage that used to litter the city’s highways.

Although efforts are underway to rid the downtown of refuse, things remain unchanged in the city’s crowded, outlying districts such as Iganmu.

“I will be happy if they can take away this rubbish,” said Iyabo Aduni as she watched a child with a stick pursue a goat near the burning dump. “But I don’t think the authorities know we exist.”

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Bird flu re-emerges, culling underway

ABUJA, 12 Jan 2007 (IRIN) - Nigerian veterinary teams were killing thousands of birds in two northern Nigerian states on Friday to halt the spread of fresh cases of the deadly H5N1 virus.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Nigeria was the first West African country to register bird flu when the disease jumped from Asia to Africa last year. Government veterinary teams slaughtered more than 900,000 birds in 2005, according to Nigeria's Agriculture Ministry. But sporadic outbreaks continued, with the last case reported in September in a suburb of Nigeria’s largest city Lagos.

Junaid Maina, Nigeria's national director of livestock, said new cases of the virus were confirmed this week in northwestern Sokoto and nearby in Katsina state, 800 kilometres northeast of Abuja. “Our teams are out there now culling birds,” Maina said.

Sokoto's cases are the first ever in the state, while Katsina is among 14 of Nigeria's 36 states struck last year. More than 18,000 birds have been culled in the two states since the beginning of the week, with more than 15,000 killed in Sokoto alone, an official involved in the operation told IRIN.

Most of the infections were in commercial poultry farms as supposed to family smallholdings, and compensation is being paid immediately to the farmers, the official said. “Any farm with any sign that looks like avian influenza, we simply depopulate and pay compensation,” the official said.

Funding has been provided under a scheme supported by the World Bank for immediate compensation of farmers whose birds have been killed by the veterinary teams.

Scientists fear the deadly H5N1 strain, which mainly affects birds but has been responsible for over 100 human deaths, could mutate into a strain transmittable between humans and spark a global pandemic.

More than 600 Nigerian animal health officials have been trained under a scheme funded by the European Union and the Food and Agriculture Organisation to undertake a nationwide surveillance to track bird flu. The experts will be deployed nationwide later in January, agriculture officials said.

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Emergency response to pipeline blast mostly a national affair

LAGOS, 28 Dec 2006 (IRIN) - The Nigerian Red Cross has taken the lead in responding to the latest pipeline blast in Lagos on Tuesday that killed at least 269 people and left scores of others severely burned.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

“We were the first to get first aid to survivors at the site,” said Umoh Okon, a spokeswoman of the local humanitarian organisation, told IRIN in Lagos.

With more than 2,000 Nigerians killed in pipeline fires in the past decade, the organization has had plenty of experience in dealing with such disasters. “We have volunteers on the ground trained in emergency aid,” Okon said.

Red Cross workers quickly evacuated survivors to hospitals and set up a register to help people identify bodies of family members and locate missing persons, she said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) provided them with some drugs and other supplies, she said. Officially ICRC operations are limited to conflict zones.

The pipeline exploded in the Abule Egba District of Lagos after it had been ruptured by what government officials describe as criminals gangs. At the time of the explosion hundreds of people were gathered around the leaking pipe scooping up fuel to sell illegally.

The Red Cross said that, as of Wednesday, relief workers had buried 238 unidentified bodies.

More than 50 people had come to the Red Cross to report missing family members, he added. Many were also seen going around hospitals with pictures of charred bodies taken at the blast site in the hope of exchanging information on the identities of the deceased.

Residents in the area said many burn victims were still in hiding, fearing that if they sought medical help they would be arrested and prosecuted for having tampered with the pipeline.

The government pledged that it would not prosecute. “When something happens on this scale our main concern is how to save lives,” Ibrahim Talba, the permanent secretary in the health ministry, told reporters in Lagos.

State-run hospitals are also providing free treatment to survivors, he said. A blood bank has been set up by the National Emergency Management Agency and the government has set aside 50 hospital beds and put 20 plastic surgeons along with 40 nurses on stand-by.

However officials at various hospitals said they lack the equipment and expertise to deal with the many severe cases. Burns typically covered between 60 and 100 percent of victims’ bodies, they said.

International expertise is welcome, said a senior official in the health ministry. “To have any chance of a normal life, most of the injured need expert plastic surgeons and we just don’t have enough,” he said.

A team of doctors from Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have been in Lagos since Tuesday visiting hospitals and providing victims with treatment and drugs, an MSF official told IRIN on Thursday. “They’re using this time to assess what other help is needed,” he added.

Also the local Red Cross is conducting a needs assessment, Okon said.

Soot released into the atmosphere following the blast is a health risk, Sikuade Jagun, the director of the Lagos State Ambulance Services, told reporters. He advised residents with breathing difficulties to seek medical help.

“That environment is unhealthy for people living and working in the area, and even for those involved in the rescue,” he told reporters. “My advice is that people should not stay too long in the area.”

The explosion comes during an acute shortage of fuel in the city. It is the second such disaster this year in Lagos, with an earlier blast in May in Ilado District killing at least 200 people.

The single worst incident occurred at the town of Jesse in the Niger Delta in 1998. It claimed more than 1,000 lives.

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October 03, 2006

NIGERIA: Collapsed dam sweeps away 500 houses

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

GUSAU, 2 Oct 2006 (IRIN) - Hundreds of people were homeless in Nigeria’s northwestern Zamfara state on Monday after a dam collapsed at the weekend, washing away more than 500 houses, officials and residents said.

The Barrage Dam located outside the state capital, Gusau, gave way on Saturday afternoon following more than 24 hours of heavy rain, Zamfara governor Sani Yerimah told reporters on Sunday.

“The water came with excessive force and caused so much destruction,” he said.

Yerimah said about 40 people who were initially feared dead were later found.

However, more than 98 people, mainly women and children, remain unaccounted for in the worst hit village of Birnin Ruwa, the village head, Muhammadu Ruwa, told reporters.

“We can’t find them and we’re afraid they may have died in the flood,” Ruwa said.

Rescue teams comprising military personnel, fire service officers and local residents on Monday continued the search for missing persons. Thousands of people displaced by the flood are staying at temporary shelters in primary and secondary schools around Gusau.

Apart from destroying homes, the water also washed away many acres of farmland and some people have lost their entire season’s crop. Wells on which people depend for drinking water have also been polluted by the floodwaters.

Sluice gates used to let water out of the reservoir failed to function, causing the rain to overwhelm the dam, said an official of the Zamfara Water Board, which operates the dam that supplies water to Gusau.

Zamfara is part of Nigeria’s relatively arid Sahel belt, which faces torrential rains between August and October, often leading to large-scale flooding.

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September 27, 2006

NIGERIA: Living in fear as tensions rise

LAGOS, 26 Sep 2006 (IRIN) - The town of Dutse in northern Nigeria was recovering on Tuesday after 1,000 people fled their homes in the latest in a series of inter-communal flare-ups that analysts warn could escalate in the coming months.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

The violence that erupted in Dutse, capital of Jigawa state and close to the border with Niger, last week was sparked by rumours that a Christian market trader had blasphemed against the Prophet Mohammed. Analysts say the unrest is part of a trend whereby unemployed youths in the dirt-poor, yet oil-rich, former British colony are using religious pretexts for looting sprees.

Mobs of young men rampaged through the predominantly Muslim town, looting shops and burning churches and other buildings belonging to Christians. Over 1,000 people sought refuge in police stations, according to police officials.

Violent precedent

In similar violence in February, at least 150 people were killed and 50,000 displaced in a week of riots across six of the country’s 36 states after Muslims attacked Christians in the northeastern city of Maiduguri. They were ostensibly angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in Denmark.

Teeming with 130 million Nigerians, Africa’s most populous country has experienced dozens of incidents like this since civilian leadership took over in 1999. More than 14,000 Nigerians have been killed and three million have fled their homes because of violence since 1999, according to the Brussels-based conflict-analysis NGO International Crisis Group.

Most people displaced by violence in Nigeria seek refuge with family, friends or communities where their ethnic group is in the majority. Many appear to return to their homes or resettle nearby after violence has subsided, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in Geneva, although thousands of Nigerians now live abroad.

Rivalry among the country’s main ethnic groups - the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Igbo in the southeast and the Yoruba in the southwest - and religious tension between Muslims and Christians are frequently blamed for outbreaks of violence.

But Crisis Group says polarisation has been exacerbated by the disintegration of public services, forcing people to rely on “self-help measures through ethnic, religious, community and civic organisations”, and that resulting friction has been fuelled by the “eagerness” of the oil-rich country’s ruling elites to exploit social cleavages and factional mobilisation.

Warning issued

Analysts warn that if the run-up to the presidential election, which is scheduled for April 2007, proves to be violent or divisive, thousands more people could potentially be displaced by unrest.

The IDMC said in a report last week that “splits within the government of Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and increasing jockeying for power have seen a rise in the number of political assassinations and a general sense of insecurity across the country”.

“Failure to strengthen Nigeria’s fragile democracy and to ensure free and fair elections could ultimately result in massive population movements both within and well beyond the country’s borders,” the Norwegian Refugee Council-sponsored group warned.

The IDMC highlighted the Christian-dominated Plateau state in the centre of the country as being especially at risk of inter-communal conflict. Tensions there in 2004 between Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers left up to 1,000 people dead and 258,000 temporarily displaced.

Other potential flash-point issues in Nigeria that the IDMC warned could trigger more displacement are violence linked with secessionist demands in Nigeria’s southeast, local resistance to the official handover by Nigeria of the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon, and unrest in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. Dozens of people have been kidnapped and killed in the Delta this year alone as demands grow for greater access to the region’s oil wealth.

Despite being the world’s tenth largest oil producer, 37 percent of Nigerians live on less than US $1 per day, according to the World Bank. By comparison, the much-smaller West African state of Senegal, which exports groundnuts and fish and has no major natural resources, enjoys more than twice Nigeria’s per capita income.

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September 06, 2006

NIGERIA: Lagos, the mega-city of slums

LAGOS, 5 Sep 2006 (IRIN) - Canoes glide through the black, stinking water as children run along an overhead maze of precarious walkways through Makoko, a growing slum on stilts in Nigeria’s sprawling commercial capital, Lagos.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Many of the original residents of Makoko are fishermen attracted from across the region to hopes of a better life in Nigeria, West Africa’s oil-rich economic powerhouse. But life is tougher than they had imagined.

“I moved here to fish, to set up a business,” said Martins Oke, in his 70s, who left his village on the Benin border when he was a small boy. “But some days I don’t even catch a single fish.”

Many Makoko residents have been here for generations, losing touch with family back home. Pride stops others from returning to their communities empty handed.

Despite the hardship, every year more and more people come to Lagos.

It is already one of the world’s mega-cities – a crime-ridden, seething mass of some 15 million people crammed into the steamy lagoons of southwest Nigeria. Two out of three Lagos residents live in a slum with no reliable access to clean drinking water, electricity, waste disposal - even roads.

As the city population swells by up to eight percent every year, the slums and their associated problems are growing. The government estimates that Lagos will have expanded to 25 million residents by 2015.

“By 2015 Lagos will be the third largest city in the world but it has less infrastructure than any of the world’s other largest cities,” said Francisco Bolaji Abosede, Lagos Commissioner for Town Planning and Urbanisation.

Abosede is keen to emphasise that his is not a political appointment – a euphemism for corruption. His desk is piled high with maps and proposals for new developments and regeneration projects for Lagos Island – the city’s central business district.

A WORLD AWAY

Sunday Merunu rarely ventures from his stilt-home in Makoko into downtown Lagos, although he can see it from where he sits amongst his fishing nets.

Merunu shares a two-room shack with three other adults and eight children. The family buys water by the bucket for drinking, cooking and bathing. Like the estimated 15,000 other residents of Makoko, all the family’s waste and raw sewage go directly into the inky water beneath their homes.

Merunu’s house has a couple of light bulbs and even a television, but electricity supply by the state power company, NEPA, is at best erratic and most nights the family has only kerosene lamps for light.

“We spend 20 naira [15 cents] to buy water every couple of days and divide the electricity bill between a few families,” said Merunu. “There isn’t enough money left over to send the kids to school.”

The World Bank has identified nine of Lagos’ largest slums, Agege, Ajegunle, Amukoko, Badia, Bariga, Ijeshatedo/Itire, Ilaje, Iwaya and Makoko, for upgrading with a US $200 million loan to improve drainage and solid waste management.

An estimated one million people will benefit from the loan, which is the largest single project backed by the World Bank in Nigeria.

Since President Olusegun Obasanjo’s elected government came to power in 1999, ending 15 years of military rule, millions of dollars have been spent on urban regeneration and projects aimed at reducing crime, but results have been poor.

Security forces rarely venture into Makoko, except perhaps for the occasional demolition of shanty houses. Instead, security is provided by “Area Boys”, self-styled vigilante groups made up of unemployed young men that defend their territory with threats and often violence.

CORRUPTION AT THE ROOT

Like the Area Boys, at every level of society in Lagos someone is looking to make their levy.

Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to international NGO Transparency International. Since independence in 1960, billions of dollars of Nigeria’s oil revenue have been siphoned from state and government coffers into Swiss bank accounts of the country’s rulers.

Nigeria’s rampant corruption and lack of enforced regulations have enabled buildings to go up unchecked – only 30 percent of houses in the city have an approved building plan.

The Ebute-Metta area of Lagos is a short drive inland from Makoko. New buildings are falling down almost as fast as they are going up. Poor workmanship and corrupt inspectors means that buildings less than five years old are collapsing, sometimes crushing to death whole families inside.

“We had noticed the cracks in the walls, but we never thought it would collapse,” said Debola Igbosanmi, who had a shop on the ground floor of 71 Bola Street before it caved in without warning in mid-July, killing about 20 people.

According to Abosede at the Lagos Town Planning office, 199 buildings in Ebute-Metta alone have been identified for testing for poor workmanship. Many still have people living inside.

Abosede says his office is cracking down on corruption. It’s a crusade that President Obasanjo says he is spearheading since taking up office nearly eight years ago. Although Obasanjo has won praise overseas for his anti-corruption drive, his critics say that the president has used his Anti-Corruption Bill only against his opponents.

In August, the woman at the forefront of his government’s anti-graft campaign, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, quit as foreign minister after being relieved as finance minister in June. This was evidence, critics said, that she had been a little too good at her job.

Okonjo-Iweala led negotiations that resulted in Africa’s biggest debt write-off of US $18 billion. She also initiated reforms which saved Nigeria US $500 million by forcing the renegotiation of contracts that had already been awarded.

But Okonjo-Iweala’s successes merely scratch the surface in a country where corruption is not just a government pursuit but has seeped into the very fabric of society.

Abutting Makoko is Iwaya, one of the oldest slum areas of Lagos. There, Chief Murtiala Aremu Oloko sits in this three-storey home rising out of the haphazard sprawl.

When asked to list the needs faced by his “subjects”, Oloko laughs, “It would take all day.” The problems are too numerous, ranging from healthcare shortages to schools shortages and more, he says.

When asked what he was doing as the traditional leader in Iwaya to help his people, Oloko didn’t pause: “That depends what they give me.”

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September 04, 2006

NIGERIA: Government cracks down on Biafra separatist resurgence

ONITSHA, 4 Sep 2006 (IRIN) - Armed soldiers shielded behind sandbags stand guard on both ends of the bridge over the River Niger and into Onitsha, a sprawling trading town of more than one million people in southeastern Nigeria.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Vehicles entering the city are subjected to searches, ostensibly for weapons and signs of membership in the separatist Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), blamed for a recent series of violent incidents in the city.

More than three decades ago Onitsha and the bridge across the Niger were key battlegrounds as Nigeria fought a bloody civil war to prevent the attempted secession of the Republic of Biafra by the region's mainly ethnic Igbos.

Now Onitsha is once more at the centre of the latest attempt to resuscitate the Biafra cause.

The 1967-1970 civil war was one of Africa's most devastating ・it claimed more than one million lives, most of them Igbos who starved to death. Nigeria, Africa痴 most populous country, has been increasingly challenged from within by groups demanding greater sovereignty since democratic elections in 1999 ended decades of military rule.

Generals had used Nigeria's diversity ・it has more than 250 ethnic groups ・as justification for their rule, reasoning that only the firm hand of the military could keep the country together.

While MASSOB claims its campaign is non-violent, bloodletting has nevertheless become increasingly associated with its endeavor. Hundreds of people have died in clashes between MASSOB and the security forces since lawyer Ralph Uwazurike founded the group seven years ago.

CLAIMS OF MARGINALISATION

Uwazurike says ethnic Igbos have continued to face repression from successive Nigerian governments since the end of the civil war in 1970. Evidence, he says, includes the fact that no Igbos have been appointed to top positions in the security forces since the war ended, even though Igbos comprise one of Nigeria's three largest ethnic groups. MASSOB also says that the Igbo region's roads and other infrastructure have been neglected.

While secession is not popular with the vast majority of Igbos, who number more than 30 million, MASSOB has won fanatical following from large numbers of young and unemployed youths in major cities in the Igbo areas. Most of its members were not born at the time of the civil war.

A series of clashes in July between activists linked to MASSOB and the police left dozens dead in Onitsha and several towns in southeast Anambra state, prompting President Olusegun Obasanjo's government to deploy troops.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew ordered by Anambra state governor Peter Obi, who has jurisdiction over Onitsha, remains in force in the city and several other towns across the state. Obi also banned MASSOB and a transport workers・union that residents said was engaged in a proxy war with the separatist group with the backing of some influential local politicians uncomfortable with MASSOB's growing influence.

It is true MASSOB started out as a non-violent group but it is not exactly non-violent anymore,・said Kene Ezeanyi, an Onitsha-based lawyer. Thousands of unemployed street boys in recent years flocked to its ranks and they have been intimidating residents, with some of them even bearing arms.・

Residents say MASSOB frequently declared street-cleaning campaigns, which provided a pretext for the group to show its strength in numbers. As thousands of members mounted street processions, waving Biafran flags depicting the rising sun, passers-by were frequently beaten and businesses forced to shut and join their activities, residents said.

With the arrest of the group's leader, Uwazurike, in September last year and his subsequent trial for treason, the street demonstrations were often to demand his release and regularly resulted in clashes with the police.

Early in July the clashes escalated with members of the National Association of Road Transport Operators (NARTO) taking on MASSOB activists. During a two-week period of mayhem in Onitsha, two police stations and the main prison in the city were burnt down. Dozens of people were killed. The violence then spread to other towns in Anambra state.

The government imposed a curfew and troops were invited to join the police in enforcing peace. While relative calm has returned to the streets, both Onitsha residents and MASSOB activists say summary killings and other violations by the security forces have continued.

SECURITY FORCES ACCUSED OF ABUSES

Several residents interviewed said the security forces upon their deployment embarked on cordon-and-search operations in sections of the city, particularly in Fegge and Okpoko, believed to be strongholds of MASSOB.

Many people found with guns or MASSOB identity cards were summarily shot dead,・Isotonu Nkwankwaka, a resident of the Fegge district, told IRIN.

Residents also accused the security forces of invading shops and markets in the city, which is one of the biggest trading towns in Nigeria, looting goods and stealing money. At the Bridge Head Market and Nkpor Market, residents pointed out charred buildings and shops they said were burned by soldiers.

Emeka Uzoka, a shopkeeper on Mbaukwu Street, said a group of soldiers came into the street one day shooting into the air, forcing residents to flee. Soldiers then went into their shops and helped themselves to drinks and money left behind.

All the money I had in drawer, my sales for the day, was stolen by the soldiers,・Uzoka told IRIN.

According to Innocent Dike, a MASSOB official in Onitsha, at least 200 suspected members of the group have been killed since troops were deployed. Several houses believed to belong to MASSOB activists were also razed, he said.

Dike insisted that the group remained committed to its stated non-violent principles and accused the government of using provocateurs in the road transport union to stir violence to create a pretext to clampdown on MASSOB.

We are a non-violent organisation but the government became very nervous about our growing popularity in Igboland,・Dike told IRIN. What they did was to use NARTO, which sometimes carried our flags while committing violent acts to provide an excuse to destroy us.・

Both the military and police deny the allegations of human rights abuses and brutality in Onitsha, insisting that the damage to buildings and property resulted from instances where the security forces faced gun-battles from the separatists.

Col. Ekanen Ikpeme, who leads the military force in Onitsha, dismissed the allegations as mere 途umours・

There are these rumours because some people are not happy with the job we are doing, so they try to come up with stories to blackmail the security・forces, Ikpeme told reporters.

He said the military was poised for a long campaign in Anambra to ensure there was no resurgence of violence. "If people out there think that we will do this for two or three months and go back to the barracks, they are wrong,・he said.

In late August, more than 100 armed soldiers sealed off a hotel in the nearby town of Nnewi to prevent a meeting of Igbo youth organisations after security forces linked it to MASSOB. Those arrested at the event included Peter Ejiofor, a university professor scheduled to give a lecture on the Need to Promote Igbo Language・and two organisers, Jerry Emejuru and Bruno Akudo.

Chris Nsoedo, who leads the Igbo Youth Association in Canada, told reporters the troops said they had 登rders from above・to stop the meeting.

We came to the country with this project to unite Igbo youths at home with those in the diaspora,・said Nsoedo. We want to know the person above who will not let people gather to discuss their destiny.・

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July 27, 2006

NIGERIA: No respite for people of Niger Delta

Environmental damage from an oil spill in Kegbara-Dere in the Ogoni district of the Niger Delta. Residents say the spill is more than 10 years old.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

YENAGOA, 26 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - When oil began seeping from pipelines owned by Italian oil company Agip recently, Nigerian newspapers reported that the spill was caused by sabotage.

Agip denied it had been forced to cut production because of an alleged attack, but acknowledged that its network had been damaged and that repairs were underway.

It is unclear exactly what happened to the Agip pipelines but that is nothing unusual in Nigeria痴 troubled delta region, where sabotage, accidents, oil siphoning and deteriorating infrastructure all mean the same thing to millions of local villagers: more pollution.

徹il spills have become a great environmental tragedy in Nigeria, polluting streams, farmlands, the air and destroying lives,・said Nnimmo Bassey, head of Environmental Rights Action (ERA), which is affiliated with the international environmental group Friends of the Earth.

Prior to the oil boom of the 1970s, Nigeria痴 main exports were agricultural products. Although the majority of the population identifies farming as their livelihood, investment in the agricultural sector over the years has been sidelined in favour of oil.

Since December last year, more than 10 major oil or gas pipelines have been blasted allegedly by militants belonging to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Foreign oil workers are routinely taken hostage, although they are released within days or weeks unharmed.

Nigeria痴 oil output has been slashed about about one-quarter because of recent leaks, sabotage and unrest in the delta.

Royal Dutch Shell, Nigeria's biggest oil producer, said on Tuesday that a leak to an oil pipeline in Rivers State had cut its output there by 180,000 barrels per day. The source of the leak was not immediately clear.

Militants claim to be fighting for an increased share of oil wealth for the delta痴 inhabitants, many of whom live without electricity, running water or access to education. Although the country now has a democratic government after decades of military rule, the people of the Niger Delta complain that little has changed in terms of their standard of living.

Environmental Damage

Each pipeline blast has caused a major oil spill, and in one case in December at least eight people were killed when a fire borne by an oil slick swept through their homes.
In the report 哲igeria: Want in the Midst of Plenty,・the Brussels-based Crisis Group said recently that despite more than US $400 billion in oil revenue over the past three decades, nine out of ten Nigerians live on less than US $2 a day.

Crisis Group said growing tensions in the delta were a direct result of decades of environmental harm and political neglect.
While oil companies blame most of the spills on sabotage and vandalism, activist groups insist that more of the damage and spills come from poorly maintained pipelines.

典he spillage has been there long before the militants,・said Peter Ajube, spokesman for Ijaw Youths Council (IYC), an influential activist group campaigning for the rights of the delta痴 dominant ethnic group, the Ijaw.

展e don稚 like what the militants are doing because we池e non-violent, but we know that most of the spills are caused by aged pipelines,・said Ajube. 鄭nd whenever you have a spill it is the communities in the area that suffer, losing their fishing areas, losing their farms and source of drinking water.・BR>
Inhabitants of Igbomotoro, in Bayelsa state, suffered short- and long-term effects from an oil slick that came from a ruptured pipeline on Nun River in July.

的 lost my fishing nets used to trap fish in the river along with a night痴 catch,・said Inikro Alaowei. 的 don稚 expect any harvests either later this year from my cassava farm, which was also affected.・BR>
A communal forest serving Igbomotoro was also swamped by the oil, destroying a source of food and traditional plant medicines.

Alienated from Land and Resources

Community members expect no solace since oil companies as a tradition do not pay compensation for ecological damage caused by sabotage. The rationale is to discourage wilful vandalism in expectation of compensation, a practice the companies blame for a larger share of oil spills than the activists and the communities accept.

In other cases, residents damage pipelines in an effort to siphon oil to sell. The practice, known as 礎unkering・ is highly dangerous. Scores and sometimes hundreds of people die each year if the gushing fuel catches fire as they scramble to scoop it up.

The heightened threat to the environmental health of the Niger Delta resulting from oil operations are highlighted in a recent human development study published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Nigeria.

徹il spills and gas flares in particular have destroyed natural resources central to local livelihoods,・said the report.
Gas flaring produces greenhouse gases and exposes communities to heat, noise and air pollution.

The UNDP report said people in the delta have been alienated from their land and resources, leaving them frustrated with both the oil companies and governments that have failed to regulate them.

Royal Dutch Shell, the biggest international oil operator in Nigeria, accounting for roughly half the country痴 exports of 2.5 million barrels daily, also has more onshore operations in the delta than other major oil companies. Figures released by the company show it has more than 1,000 oil wells in the region linked by more than 6,000 km of pipeline network.

Shell acknowledges the extent of its presence in the delta poses a major environmental challenge, which it says it is working hard to manage.

徹ur environmental programme is geared towards reducing the negative impact of our operations on the environment,・Shell states on its website. In this regard the company has since 1997 made environmental sustainability a key principle to be considered in all business undertakings. This has resulted in increased environmental monitoring and more rapid response to remedy situations created by spillages.

Lack of Enforcement

Inyang Duke, an environmental expert from the University of North Carolina visiting Nigeria, said strict enforcement of regulations is key to improving environmental practices in the delta.

Nigeria recently acquired patrol boats to help monitor the delta. However, observers say it is difficult to affectively monitor much of the region because of dense mangroves.

哲igeria has the right (environmental) regulations and policies but lacks the technical capacity to implement and enforce them,・Duke said.

One major reason for this failure is the government痴 awkward position as regulator and primary beneficiary with the majority stake in joint venture operations run by oil multinationals that produce nearly all the country痴 oil, said Duke.

添ou have to separate the regulated from the regulator; there must be no conflict of interest,・he said.

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July 24, 2006

NIGERIA: Four killed in latest attack on police stations in the southeast

AWKA, 24 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - Dozens of armed men attacked a police station in Nigeria’s southeastern Anambra state leaving four people dead, among them two policemen, police said on Monday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

The attack on the police station in the trading town of Nnewi on Saturday is part of a pattern of recent attacks on police stations Anambra linked to a group campaigning for an independent Biafra republic for the region’s mainly ethnic Igbos.

Police commissioner Haruna John in charge of the state blamed the attack on the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), who he said raided the police station in 13 buses in a retaliatory attack. John said a police patrol had exchanged fire with some MASSOB activists on Friday, killing two of them.

“On Saturday they came to Nnewi, dressed in military uniforms, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying sophisticated arms,” John told reporters. “They attacked our men and set the station and vehicles on fire.”

Apart from the two dead policemen, two of the attackers were also shot dead by the police. Fourteen detainees were freed by the attackers who also escaped with some police weapons, the police said.

According to John, those who attacked the Nnewi station were among members of the separatist group dislodged from the nearby city of Onitsha following clashes with the police in June. The violence had spiraled in the city afterwards as it drew in other armed gangs residents say are being sponsored by politicians jostling ahead of elections early next year.

Troops were subsequently drafted in by the authorities to help the police quell the unrest after the main prison in the city was attacked and all its prisoners released.

MASSOB officials have tried to distance the group from these incidents, including the latest attack on the Nnewi police station, accusing the government of sponsoring the violence to discredit the group.

“We are a non-violent organisation and we’re not responsible for the attack on the police station,” said Uche Nwoha, a spokesman for the group. “The violence is being sponsored by people close to the government as an excuse to kill our members,” he said.

Several residents of Nnewi and Onitsha contacted by IRIN said while some MASSOB members carry arms and have been involved in recent violence, some of the violence has been linked to a transport union whose members have been hired as thugs by some prominent politicians.

The local state-owned radio quoted Anambra governor Peter Obi as also blaming the attack on some unnamed top politicians seeking to destabilise his government.

Tension has been mounting in Africa’s most populous country of more than 126 million people ahead of general elections due in April 2007. Rival ethnic and interest groups are not averse to using violence to achieve political ends, with separatist and sectarian tendencies also on the rise in the country split between a mainly Muslim north and a largely Christian south.

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July 17, 2006

NIGERIA: Rights activists see growing threat against free expression

ABUJA, 14 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - When Bukhari Bello condemned the arrest of two journalists by the Nigerian secret police last month, he believed he was performing his duty as head of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

But three days later, Justice Minister Bayo Ojo sacked him. In taking the action, rights activists say Ojo failed to follow the legal procedure for removing the head of the NHRC.

Authorities charged the two journalists, Rotimi Durojaiye of the Daily Independent and Gbenga Aruleba of Africa Independent Television (AIT), with sedition over news reports questioning the true age and cost of a jet recently added to President Olusegun Obasanjo痴 fleet. Prosecutors accused the journalists of conspiring 鍍o bring into hatred or contempt or excite disaffection against the person of the president or the government of the federation・

Local and international human rights activists fear the move against Bello and the journalists signals a trend of growing repression of freedom of expression and the press by Obasanjo痴 government.

撤ress freedom and freedom of expression are under a renewed threat, part of an effort to cow the media and the public,・Nigerian human rights lawyer Clement Nwankwo told IRIN.

Authorities alleged that Bello was removed pending an investigation into allegations of financial impropriety.

Kayode Areh, head of the SSS, told journalists earlier this week that authorities were attempting to preserve the security of individuals and the state in the midst of a politically delicate period.

With more than 120 million people, Nigeria is Africa痴 most populous country. Clashes among ethnic groups and between Christians and Muslims have claimed thousands of lives in recent years, according to human rights groups. Tension and violence often escalate ahead of elections, which are due next year.

Nwankwo said he believes the recent moves by authorities stem from Obasanjo痴 failure to secure a parliamentary change to the constitutional two-term limit that would have allowed him to run for a third term.

的 still don稚 believe he (Obasanjo) plans to leave office,・Nwankwo said. 鄭nd he is moving to clamp down on those who opposed the third-term project and teach them a lesson.・BR>
Apart from condemning the arrest of the two journalists, Bello is believed to have annoyed Obasanjo痴 government at a meeting of the African Commission on Human Rights earlier this year. In a speech, Bello condemned African leaders who seek to prolong their rule.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said it had documented 殿n increase in harassment of the media in the run-up to the 2007 presidential elections・ The CPJ said it was 菟articularly worrying・that the secret police or State Security Services (SSS), 努hich reports directly to the presidency, is behind many of these attacks・

Ahead of the crucial vote in parliament that defeated the third-term bid, the SSS had raided the offices of the AIT to confiscate the tape of a documentary that tracked failed efforts by previous Nigerian leaders to stay in power. AIT also said it received bomb threats by telephone for providing live coverage of the unflattering debate of the proposed amendment in parliament.

Rights groups say previous displays of intolerance to news media criticism include the arrest and detention of newspaper publisher Orobosa Omo-Ojo in May 2005 for publishing a report alleging that Obasanjo痴 wife was using her influence to corner lucrative government real estate.

The secret police also raided the premises of the Insider Weekly magazine in the country痴 commercial capital, Lagos, a year earlier to seize an entire edition of the publication, which carried a story alleging government corruption.

Activists say they fear a slide toward military-style authoritarianism.

展e are appalled at the treatment of Bello,・said Chinonye Obiagwu, head of the Legal Defence and Aid Project, and one of the leaders of a coalition of rights groups protesting government interference in the rights commission.

典his is not just an issue about Mr. Bello. It is about the rule of law, due process, and proper governance,・said Obiagwu. 的f we allow this to go unchallenged, it is going to be a return to anarchy. This is a call to the trenches.・BR>
On Wednesday the coalition of rights groups called a public forum in the capital Abuja, tagged 典he People vs. Ojo・ to discuss the treatment of Bello and other alleged threats against free expression by Obasanjo痴 government. However, the forum was aborted after police and state security agents cordoned off the venue and barred participants from entering.

展e have orders from above to stop this meeting,・Femi Ogunbayode, the leader of the security team, told the activists.

For rights activists and government critics, it was further confirmation of their worst fears.

典he unlawful and forceful dispersal vindicates the growing fears ・that the government of Nigeria is now fully committed to subverting the protection of human and constitutional rights,・the groups said in a joint statement.

展e are no criminals and we were not plotting to commit any crime,・said Clement Wasa, one of the participants. 展e only wanted express our feelings on the illegal removal of Bello.・BR>
dm/cs

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July 03, 2006

NIGERIA: Polio campaign under way in northern states

KANO, 3 Jul 2006 (IRIN) - Health workers are wrapping up a key effort to vaccinate under-fives against the crippling and sometimes fatal effects of polio in northern Nigeria, the world's polio hotspot.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Five states in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria account for most of the world's polio cases, according to the World Health Organisation, which is leading an international campaign to eradicate the virus.

WHO's target of wiping out polio by 2005 failed after Nigerian Muslim clerics warned parents against the polio vaccine saying that it was part of a Western plot and could cause sterility and AIDS.

Polio cases have since spiked in northern Nigeria, leading to fears that regional efforts to tackle the virus are coming un-done.

The five-day programme, which began last Thursday, aims to vaccinate 10,000 Nigerian children. It is backed by United Nations health agencies and conducted by Nigeria's national immunisation agency.

So far our deployment has been smooth and we expect to meet our target,・Mahmud Mustapha, a senior coordinator of the National Programme of Immunisation in the northern city of Kano told reporters.

There is no cure for polio, but a cheap oral vaccine in most cases offers a lifetime of protection.

In Kano city on Friday, parents presented their children for vaccination in Tudun Wada district. Amina Saleh, a 28-year-old mother, said she decided to bring her four-year-old daughter for vaccination after she heard a religious leader on radio say it was now safe.

I didn't produce him for vaccination before now because we heard it was not safe,・Saleh told IRIN.

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June 16, 2006

NIGERIA: Polio surge thwarts global eradication plan

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ABUJA, 16 Jun 2006 (IRIN) - Health officials have confirmed a surge in polio infections in northern Nigeria that threatens to undermine global efforts to eradicate the crippling disease.

Edugie Abebe, head of Nigeria's National Programme on Immunisation (NPI) announced on Thursday that 467 new polio cases have been recorded this year, more than double the number of cases recorded in the whole of 2005.

的n 2005 we had about 224 wild polio viruses,・said Abebe. 釘ut so far this year we have reported 467 cases and five states in northern Nigeria contribute almost 90 percent of this figure,・she added.

Some 15 of Nigeria's 36 states have reported new outbreaks of polio this year, according to figures released by NPI.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) failed to reach its target to eradicate polio by 2005. Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan are the only four countries in the world to have never stamped out polio. Of these, all except Nigeria have reduced the number of polio cases in recent years.

Nigeria accounts for nearly 70 percent of the world's polio cases.

Polio spreads through ingestion of contaminated faecal matter and affects mainly children under the age of five. Once contracted polio cannot be cured, though vaccination can provide protection.

Global efforts to eliminate the polio virus through immunisation suffered a severe setback in northern Nigeria last year when some northern states in the mainly Muslim north boycotted the vaccination programme.

Polio vaccinations were interrupted for up to 10 months after Muslim clerics alleged that the polio vaccine contained impurities that could cause infertility in women and even infect those immunised with the HIV virus and cancer. They presented the vaccination campaign as a Western Christian plot to try and reduce the Muslim population of Nigeria.

Polio vaccinations only resumed after the Nigerian government conducted international tests to disprove the claims, and new vaccines were imported from mainly Muslim Indonesia.

However, distrust of the vaccines continues to linger among the poor and in many rural areas, enabling a resurgence of the virus.

Strains of the virus found in Nigeria have re-emerged in many west, central and southern African countries that had been declared polio-free.

After missing last year痴 target to eliminate polio, health authorities in Nigeria are stepping up immunisation efforts in the affected states to ensure that polio transmission is stopped by 2007, the NPI official said.

We believe that if we can win in these states then we have won in the whole country,・Edugie said

DM/NR/SS

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February 24, 2006

NIGERIA: Fighting misconceptions is first hurdle in battle against bird flu

KANO, 24 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - “It’s a government set-up,” “It’s a white man’s disease,” “Getting close to chickens kills.” Since Africa’s first cases of the deadly H5N1 virus were reported in northern Nigeria early this month, rumours, conspiracy theories and scepticism have been rife.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

And as the federal government steps up the battle to stem the spread of the virus, many Nigerians are still puzzling over what to make of this strange poultry disease that has created such panic in the west.

With national information campaigns not yet off the ground, the leading question is: “Can one still eat chicken?” Yes, say experts interviewed on TV and quoted in national newspapers - bird flu cannot be transmitted even from eating an infected chicken. “Just boil and boil and boil until the flu demon is cooked to death,” one such expert advised.

But here in the mostly Muslim north, where at least 40 poultry farms have been infected, health officials are battling more than just plain ignorance. They also face the deep distrust that many Nigerians have toward their appointed leaders.

It is an attitude some say could contribute to the spread of the disease, which has now been confirmed in seven of the nation’s 36 states, including the capital territory.

“A lot of people think this bird flu is a set-up because they’ve had so many disappointments from the government,” said Faisal Lawal, who owns a business centre in the northern city of Kaduna. “Most people believe that anything from the government has to be self-interested and therefore it’s difficult to get them to believe this bird flu is real. Maybe they’ll believe it after a lot of campaigning. But ask them now and they will tell you: rubbish.”

With Nigeria for years listed as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, much suspicion greeted news of the first confirmed case of bird flu at a poultry farm owned by the country’s Sports Minister Samaila Sambawa. A taxi driver who gave his name only as Timothy said: “It was all stolen money. Now they’ll just steal more.”

And when the government offered to pay out 250 naira (less than two dollars) in compensation for every culled bird, reactions ranged from surprise to anger.

Business centre owner Lawal said he had finally come to believe in the existence of bird flu when officials announced the compensation package. “The government was actually going to pay money? I thought, in that case, it must be real,” he said, laughing.

But poultry farmers say the sum must be increased to keep farmers - 60 percent of them backyard producers - from continuing to bring infected birds onto the market, where they believe they can obtain a better price.

“This is economics,” said Haruna Awalu, chairman of the poultry farmers’ association of Kano. “It will come to a point where farmers will prefer to sell their chickens than declare they are sick, because they will get a bigger margin.”

Launching messages in local languages

Juggling with two mobile phones, Awalu took a steady stream of calls all day from worried farmers. One woman wanted to know how to continue to feed her chickens now, given it was known she would die if she entered the pens. “Really, you won’t die,” Awalu reassured her. “Just wash your hands properly and make sure others stay away from your poultry.”

A lack of campaigns in the local Hausa language remains a reason for concern, said David Heymann of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which is assisting the Nigerian government in combating the virus. “Community perception of this problem has been recognised as a difficult issue,” Heymann said. “Plans are being put together to come up with a message that will be understandable and appropriate - the campaigns clearly have to be tailored to the needs of the community.”

International health authorities fear the H5N1 strain could evolve into a virus affecting humans and have stepped up efforts to stave off a pandemic that could prove deadly. But few believe the Nigerian government is sufficiently equipped to stamp out the bird flu virus, let alone deal with a strain infecting humans.

“Disaster management in Nigeria is almost zero,” said Emmanuel Ijewere, former director of the national Red Cross. “If there’s a major disaster in Nigeria, we won’t be able to cope.”

Compounding the problem is the scepticism aired by some veterinary experts and health officials about the potential danger of the H5N1 virus. One veterinary assistant, for example, who had just destroyed hundreds of chickens on a farm outside Kano, told IRIN on condition of anonymity he didn’t believe it was bird flu at all.

Taking off his gloves and facemask, he opined that the sickness affecting this farm was probably a new strain of Newcastle, a different more common poultry disease.

And he added: “Okay, so everybody thinks it’s bird flu. Now, how many humans have died of that? Less than 200, right? Is that such a big deal?”

This is a point of view shared by many in the north, including poultry farmers, poultry farmers’ chairman Awalu said.

“We live with flu, we laugh about it,” he said. “Many see it as a white man’s disease. You are scared, but we are not. When we talk about health, you guys should be worried for us about malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis and the other diseases that are ravaging Africa.”

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February 21, 2006

NIGERIA: Bird flu confirmed in five states and the capital

ABUJA, 21 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - Tests have confirmed the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus – also fatal in humans – has now infected poultry in five contiguous Nigerian states and the federal capital, Abuja, according to the government.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Information Minister Frank Nweke confirmed in a statement on Monday that the northern states of Katsina and Zamfara and Abuja in the centre of the country are the latest to have confirmed cases of bird flu.

Africa’s first cases of the virus were detected on 8 February in Nigeria’s northern state of Kaduna and two days later the virus was seen in the neighbouring states of Kano and Plateau.

In addition to the five states where H5N1 has been confirmed, large-scale bird deaths have been reported in at least three other northern states, but tests there to date have not identified bird flu.

International experts fear the H5N1 virus, which has killed scores of people in Asia, could evolve into a strain transmissible between humans, triggering a global pandemic. Nigerian officials say so far no human cases of the virus have been detected in Africa’s most populous country of more than 126 million people. “Extensive diagnostic tests have been conducted and are ongoing among poultry workers nationwide and to date no human cases have been recorded in Nigeria,” Nweke said.

However, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), communities who live in close quarters with domestic poultry are most at risk of contracting H5N1. “To date, most human cases have occurred in rural or periurban areas where many households keep small poultry flocks, which often roam freely, sometimes entering homes or sharing outdoor areas where children play,” WHO says on its website.

Information Minister Nweke says Nigeria has imported large quantities of Tamiflu, the drug currently used for the treatment of H5N1 infection in humans.

Across Africa there is concern the virus could spread to other countries, devastating the poultry industry and potentially endangering humans.

The regional economic body ECOWAS said in a statement on Monday it has set up an emergency committee to provide assistance to West African countries to prevent the spread of the virus from Nigeria to neighbouring nations.

In the event of bird flu spreading to other countries in the region, ECOWAS will assist authorities to ensure that all affected birds are culled with the method prescribed by the World Organisation for Animal Health. It will also work to see that all workers in poultry farms are screened for the virus.

ECOWAS also recommends that adequate compensation be paid to poultry farmers who lose their birds.

In Nigeria teams of international experts from UN agencies and the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention are working with local health and veterinary officials to exterminate birds in suspect farms, while conducting tests on birds and humans to detect and control the spread of the virus.

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February 17, 2006

NIGERIA: Army attack on smugglers injured villagers, Niger Delta residents say

WARRI, 17 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - Nigerian military helicopters have attacked what the government says were barges used for smuggling in the Niger Delta region, but residents said the attack injured several people, leaving six unaccounted for and feared dead.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Two helicopters carried out the air attacks on Perezouweikoregene community near the oil town of Warri on Wednesday afternoon, community spokesman Perezouweikore Ebiwei told reporters. “The helicopters just arrived in the community and started shooting,” Ebiwei said. “We don’t know what we have done to warrant the attack.”

One person had an arm cut off by shrapnel and six people are missing, he added.

Major Said Hammed, spokesman for a joint army, navy and air task force charged with security in the volatile Niger Delta, confirmed that military helicopters had been in action in the area but said they were targeting barges used by criminal gangs to tap crude oil from pipelines. “Helicopters on routine patrol in the area sighted the barges being used to steal oil and fired to put them out of use.”

Nigeria estimates that at times as much as 10 percent of its daily output of 2.5 million barrels is stolen from pipelines by gangs who sell the crude illegally to vessels waiting offshore. Security agencies believe the trade finances weapons used by gangsters and ethnic militants active in the region.

The army helicopter attack this week prompted a militant group to warn that it has the means to shoot down aircraft. The group, calling itself the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), in a statement accused Royal Dutch Shell of providing its airstrip in Warri as the staging post for helicopter attacks. “We are very well capable of shooting down aircraft landing and taking off from this airstrip and may consider doing so,” the group said.

Tension has been particularly high in the delta since early January when MEND kidnapped foreign oil workers and attacked several oil facilities. MEND freed the four hostages after 19 days, during which President Olusegun Obasanjo’s refused their demands to free detained leaders of the Ijaw ethnic group, the biggest tribe in the delta.

MEND claims to be fighting for greater local control of oil wealth, and accuses Obasanjo of continuing oppression by a succession of governments that has left the region among the poorest in Nigeria despite its oil wealth.

[ENDS]

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February 13, 2006

NIGERIA: Children tested for human bird flu

KADUNA, 13 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - Health officials in Nigeria have begun clinical investigation of a family in the northern state of Kaduna whose two children may have been infected with the H5N1 avian influenza virus, officials said on Sunday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Abdulsalami Nasidi, head of a national health task force charged with coordinating efforts to halt the spread of the virus, said blood samples have been taken from the children and all other members of their family. Should the tests be positive, they would be Africa’s first confirmed human cases.

The family lived close to a large commercial farm in Jaji, some 30 kilometres north of Kaduna, where tens of thousands of poultry deaths were confirmed last Wednesday to be due to bird flu.

“We are testing the samples both here in Nigeria and abroad,” Nasidi told IRIN without giving further details.

The deadly H5N1 virus has also been confirmed in chicken farms in two neighbouring states of Kano and Plateau.

Nigeria’s agriculture ministry has dispatched veterinary teams to the affected farms to place them under quarantine and exterminate remaining birds in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. Many farmers have begun killing birds without the protective clothing necessary to prevent any transmission of the virus from birds to humans.

Experts from the US-based Center for Disease Control and Prevention arrived in Nigeria over the weekend, bringing with them protective clothing for 200 Nigerian health officials, Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello said.

Officials from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) are also heading to Nigeria to help the government draw up a control plan and the World Bank has approved a US $50 million grant to tackle bird flu.

The FAO on Friday advised the Nigerian government to “immediately close down poultry markets throughout Kaduna and Kano states,” but IRIN correspondents at the scene said that chickens were still being bought and sold over the weekend.

In Kaduna state the local authorities have launched a publicity campaign calling on people to report bird deaths in large numbers.

“Our emphasis now is to identify farms with poultry deaths, to cull surviving birds, and then check people who have been in contact with the birds for the virus,” Abdulhamid Abubakar, head of Kaduna’s task force on preventing avian influenza, told reporters.

All workers at Sambawa Farm in Jaji, the farm owned by Nigeria’s Sports Minister Samaila Sambawa where the virus was first detected, will undergo clinical screening to check them for bird flu infections, Abubakar said.

And birds found within a three-kilometre radius of the farm will be exterminated in order to halt further spread of the virus, the official said.

But in nearby villages, residents complained that no government officials had visited them to advise them on what to do about the mass deaths of poultry.

“Our chickens have been dying for several weeks now and it is only recently that we heard the problem is from Sambawa Farms,” said Ibrahim Hassan, a resident of Birnin Yaro Gari village next to the farm.

Most of the villagers, who live in thatch-roofed mud huts, let their chickens roam the village for food, picking their way among goats, sheep and children playing in the dust during the daytime, before being placed in coops at night.

Villagers say thousands of birds have died in the past month but that they have kept no precise count.

Experts have warned that unless the virus is identified quickly and contained, it could spread rapidly. Countries across West Africa have moved to ban imports of live fowl and poultry products from Nigeria and tighten border controls.

To see Africa's response to bird flu click HERE

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: “Nobody has told us that it is bird flu”, says farm official

KANO, 10 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - As birds perish by the thousands in the northern Nigerian state of Kano, farmers and local officials say they are still waiting for the government to confirm whether they are dealing with an outbreak of the killer H5N1 bird flu virus.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

“We are sad that until this hour nobody from the ministry of agriculture has shown up,” said Awalu Haruna, secretary of the Kano State branch of the Poultry Association of Nigeria. “We are only doing what we can to stop the spread of this disease, believe me nobody has told us that it is bird flu.”

As he spoke, three kilometres away at Savet Farms, a commercial poultry operation, workers on Friday were busy picking dead chickens out from live ones using their bare hands.

No protective clothing was used. The piles of dead carcasses were burned or buried. Live birds remained on the farm.

Nigeria this week reported Africa’s first confirmed case of the H5NI strain of avian flu, which has killed millions of birds and has jumped to humans, infecting over 100 people. Handling sick birds is believed to be one way of catching the disease.

The deadly H5N1 strain was confirmed in the neighbouring northern state of Kaduna on Wednesday, where tens of thousands of fowl are reported dead.

In Kano on Friday, where more suspect poultry deaths have been reported, Agriculture Ministry official Salihu Jibrin could not confirm there was an outbreak of bird flu. “I cannot tell you anything yet, we are still awaiting test results,” he said.

The National Veterinary Research Institute has confirmed bird flu cases in poultry in Kaduna, Kano and Plateau states.

Experts have warned that unless the virus is identified quickly and contained it could spread rapidly, and countries across West Africa this week moved to ban imports of live fowl and poultry products from Nigeria and tighten border controls.

In the neighbouring state of Kaduna, where 40,000 cases of bird flu were confirmed on the poultry farm of Sports Minister Alhaji Samaila Sambawa, authorities have begun culling fowl.

“We are shooting them to stop the spread of the virus, we are still working on the issue of compensation for the owners,” said Dantani Tanimu who supervised an ostrich cull on the minister’s farm.

But some farmers fear they will miss out on compensation as they are not registered with the poultry association. “I don't know how to approach authorities to get paid,” worried Ado Ibrahim. “I lost nine hundred chickens I cannot quantify the number of eggs.”

In an impoverished region where poultry-farming is an important source of income and poultry products and eggs are affordable, the issue of compensation is key to reducing the risk of farmers trying to hide or sell birds infected or exposed to the virus.

Donors in January promised Africa US$ 150 million to tackle bird flu at a special conference in China, and part of those funds were intended for compensation but none of the funds have arrived yet, according to pan-African body the African Union.

Haruna said the Nigerian government has promised poultry farmers compensation of 250 naira, the equivalent of US $1.90, for each chicken killed due to bird flu. But that was too little, he said.

“The 250 naira offered per chicken is grossly inadequate. We sell full-grown chickens for up to 1,000 naira. This is aside from the fact we make some money selling eggs,” Haruna said.

An IRIN correspondent saw frozen chickens that usually sell for 700 or 1,000 naira being sold for 250 naira in Kano town. And at the Tarauni market, poultry vendors complained the few customers they had were offering rock bottom prices.

“We are selling poultry products but sales have been on the decline since this thing started. Those who come to buy ask for live birds for ridiculously low prices,” said Ibrahim Mai-Kaji. “I usually sell between 20 to 25 birds daily, but in the last three days I have been unable to sell more than six.”

But by the roadside in Kano, streetside food-stall owner Maimuna Garba isn’t sure what all the fuss is about. He’s simply noticed he’s not selling as many chicken or egg dishes.“There is less demand for poultry products such as fried eggs and chicken. I hear people talk about a strange disease killing off chickens.”

One of his customers, however, Halima Usman, wasn’t going to be put off his favourite dish: “I haven’t heard anything about the flu,” he said. “I love chicken and I have not stopped eating it.”

"Maybe I will stop if it’s true that the virus is in town.”

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: Bird flu virus spreads through north

ABUJA, 9 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - The deadly H5N1 bird flu virus was confirmed in two more Nigerian states on Thursday as authorities grappled to contain the disease with quarantine orders and culling.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Nigeria reported Africa’s first confirmed cases on Wednesday of the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza, which has forced the slaughter of more than 100 million birds in Asia and jumped to humans in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

The bird flu outbreak was first reported at a poultry farm in northern Kaduna State, affecting tens of thousands of birds, but by Thursday authorities had reported new cases of fowls with H5N1 in neighbouring Kano State and Plateau State.

“The federal government is doing everything to contain the disease within the three centres that have been located,” said a statement from Agriculture Ministry spokesman Tope Ajakaiye.

The United States has pledged US $25 million to help Africa’s most populous nation combat the disease, and is dispatching an expert team expected in the next four days from the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ajakaiye added.

“The team will come with 2,000 protective suits that will be used in the affected areas,” he said.

Fowl have been dying in large numbers across northern Nigeria for the past four weeks and surveillance teams have been sent to scour northern Nigeria in search of suspect farms.

Once identified, farms are placed under quarantine and birds marked for destruction if infected.

The BBC reported on Thursday that farmers in northern Nigeria are rushing to sell dead chickens at cut-price rates before government bans are put into place.

The “highly pathogenic H5N1” strain of the avian influenza virus was confirmed by the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) at a battery farm in Jaji village, Kaduna. All the 46,000 chickens, geese, and ostrich at the farm have been destroyed, according to OIE.

OIE spokeswoman Maria Zampaglione told IRIN by phone on Thursday a team of global experts on bird flu was being assembled to travel to Nigeria but could not say when they would arrive.

“Some experts are still on assignment in Turkey, and in eastern European countries,” she said. “It’s not easy, there are not that many avian flu experts around.”

Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello said samples were taken on 16 January from the farm in the town of Jaji, Kaduna.

The avian viral strain found, isolated by a reference laboratory in Padova, Italy jointly run by the OIE and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), is undergoing further investigation to determine its relationship with other known strains of the virus, the organisation said.

To read how other countries in West Africa are preparing to deal with bird flu:
[WEST AFRICA: Africa’s poorest nations fight to ward off deadly bird flu]

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: First confirmed cases of killer bird flu in Kaduna

ABUJA, 8 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - Tens of thousands of chickens have died of the killer bird flu virus in northern Nigeria, the first confirmed cases of H5N1 in the country, the International Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Wednesday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Tests revealed that 40,000 birds had died of the H5N1 virus at a poultry farm in a village in the northern state of Kaduna, Maria Zampaglione of the Paris-based OIE told IRIN by telephone.

"An outbreak has been detected,2 Zampaglione said. "A local poultry farm keeping 46,000 birds was affected, of which 42,000 were infected and 40,000 of those, died."

Though Nigerian authorities have only confirmed bird flu in Kaduna State, neighbouring Kano State has also reported high numbers of poultry deaths.

The infected Kaduna birds were kept in battery cages in Jaji village, and so far no human cases of bird flu have been reported in Nigeria.

Bird flu was first diagnosed in Asia in 2003, prompting a massive slaughter of commercial poultry before fatal cases began appearing in humans. So far most of the human deaths have been in Asia, but recently the H5N1 virus has killed in Iraq and Turkey.

West Africa lies on the migratory path of birds that may already be affected with avian influenza. And the region is littered with ecologically important reserves where birds flock to seek warmth during the northern hemisphere winter.

Late last month, as migratory birds fly to Africa, experts from 18 West African countries gathered in the Malian capital Bamako to draw up an action plan to deal with the threat of bird flu, putting US $120 million into the pot for surveillance of commercial and wild birds.

Experts are fearful of an outbreak in Africa, because of the lack of veterinary services and a poor state capacity to deal with such outbreaks. Poultry meanwhile is an important and cheap source of protein for many people in Africa, where chickens typically roam freely around compounds in towns and villages.

The OIE, which confirmed the Nigeria outbreak, together with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), promised an immediate and coordinated response in a statement issued on Wednesday.

Nigerian authorities have already imposed a quarantine, restricted animal movement inside the country, and begun to disinfect the affected farm, said the OIE statement.

Nigeria is West Africa's most populous nation, with an estimated population of 110 million people. It is also a regional centre for trade and commerce with some of the region’s largest ports and markets.

"If the situation in Nigeria gets out of control, it will have a devastating impact on the poultry population in the region," warned Samuel Jutzi, Director of FAO's Animal Production and Health Division, in a Wednesday press release, "it will seriously damage the livelihoods of millions of people and it will increase the exposure of humans to the virus."

[ENDS]

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February 01, 2006

NIGERIA: Militants free foreign oil workers but vow more attacks

PORT HARCOURT, 30 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Four foreign oil workers were released on Monday after being held hostage for 19 days by ethnic Ijaw militants in Nigeria's turbulent Niger Delta.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

But the militants, who are fighting to take control of the region's oil wealth, said the release was a purely humanitarian gesture and warned oil firms that their struggle to radically cut Nigeria's oil exports would continue.

The four foreigners were released unharmed, Stephen Dick, executive vice president of Royal Dutch Shell contractor Tidewater Inc., a US oil services company, said in a press statement.

US national Patrick Landry, Honduran Harry Ebanks and Bulgarian Milko Nichev of Tidewater and Briton Nigel Watson Clark, employed by Ecodrill, were released in the early hours of Monday.

All the workers will undergo medical examination before repatriation to their families, Dick said.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a newcomer on the scene which has also claimed responsibility for a string of oil installation attacks that have killed more than 12 people in the past two weeks, said in an e-mail statement to IRIN they freed the hostages purely on humanitarian grounds.

But, the group said, this release does not signify a ceasefire or softening of our position to destroy the oil export capability of the Nigerian government. Nigeria is Africa's top oil producer.

Officials in Nigeria's Bayelsa State, where the attacks occurred, said the hostages were released to local government representatives at an undisclosed location in the delta swamps. The men, accompanied by state Governor Goodluck Jonathan, were later flown to the capital, Abuja, where President Olusegun Obasanjo planned to accompany the former hostages to their diplomatic missions.

Obasanjo has not yielded to MEND's demands for the release of leading militia leader Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, who is currently detained on treason charges, and other imprisoned ethnic Ijaw leaders in exchange for the hostages.

The militant group has said it will fight to give its people control over the oil wealth, now in the hands of the central government and the oil companies.

We will shortly carry out greatly significant attacks aimed at ensuring our February target of a 30-percent reduction in Nigeria's export capacity,・the group said in the statement, warning all expatriates working in Nigeria's oil industry to leave.

Industry officials and human rights activists said recently that the Niger Delta region is seeing a new level of violence on the part of militant groups, which one rights activist said had become guerrilla warfare.

Tensions have been particularly high in the delta since the Nigerian government last September arrested Dokubo-Asari and charged him with treason.

Dokubo-Asari's Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force took up arms in 2004 to fight for the interests of the region's majority Ijaw ethnic group, alleging that successive governments had cheated their impoverished communities of the oil wealth produced in the region.

[ENDS]

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January 28, 2006

NIGERIA: Oil-rich Niger Delta faces shocking new wave of violence

WARRI, 27 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Foreign oil companies accustomed to high tension in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta are being forced to grapple with a new level of violence one industry official called shocking.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

In the past two decades, the multinational corporations producing Nigeria's oil in the impoverished southern region have grown used to disruptions caused by protests or sabotage by locals who feel dispossessed of their oil wealth by the central government.

But in the past 14 days Nigeria has been confronted by something different: militants vowing to cripple oil exports and kidnappers with political demands. One new militant group has said it has now resolved to take control of the region's oil resources by force.

We're certainly facing a more intense level of violence and it's very disruptive to our operations,・one industry source said on condition of anonymity. We're really shocked by the amount of violence unleashed on Benisede [a facility recently attacked]. It was quite ugly.

Armed groups frequently take oil workers hostage, but up to now have usually freed them after payment of a ransom.

But gunmen who seized four foreign oil workers from the offshore EA oil platform run by Royal Dutch Shell more than two weeks ago are insisting on the release of regional militants and political leaders detained by the Nigerian government.

The same group is claiming responsibility for an attack four days later that destroyed Shell's Benisede oil pumping station in the delta swamps and left at least 12 people dead. The violence led Shell to evacuate more than 300 workers from other vulnerable facilities and close down about 10 percent of Nigeria's production.

'Guerrilla warfare'

And this week's attack on the offices of Italy's Agip oil company in the oil industry capital of Port Harcourt, in which nine policemen and one company employee were killed, bears all the hallmarks of the militants despite police calling it a robbery.

Armed men in military fatigues rode in speedboats to the riverside premises of Agip and opened fire on policemen guarding the main building. Police commissioner Samuel Adetuyi said the men took the equivalent of US $30,000 from an office before retreating into the maze of creeks that makes up the region.

Adetuyi described the assailants as robbers. But analysts see a new phase of violence emerging in a region that has seen nearly two decades of unrest.

This is not just another instalment in the delta violence we're used to,・said Pius Waritimi, a rights activist based in Port Harcourt.

We're entering another phase; this is guerrilla warfare.

The militant group claiming the recent kidnappings and attacks - the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) - has displayed considerable military capability, repeatedly catching Nigerian security forces unawares.

MEND militants evaded navy troops guarding Shell's EA platform located six miles offshore in the shallow Atlantic waters adjoining the delta to invade a supply boat and seize four men.

The hostages are US citizen Patrick Landry, the boat's captain; his two ship engineers - Harry Ebanks from Honduras and Nilko Michev from Bulgaria; and Nigel Watson-Clark, a retired British paratrooper working as a security expert.

MEND's dawn attack on Benisede began with rocket attacks on the quarters housing soldiers stationed to guard the facility, followed by more blasts from explosives, Shell and military officials said. The Nigerian army said eight militants were killed in that attack and four soldiers confirmed dead, with 11 still missing and presumed dead.

Two major pipeline attacks since December claimed by the group have targeted Shell-operated trunk pipelines that carry crude oil produced in the delta swamps to its export terminals, in line with militants・vow to cripple exports.

Militants say locals deprived as oil flows

One prominent militia leader protesters want freed is Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, who led an armed uprising of ethnic Ijaw militants in 2004 to back demands for local control of oil resources in the Niger Delta.

Dokubo-Asari's demand has resonance among the ethnic minorities of the oil region, who feel deprived of oil wealth by an alliance of foreign oil companies and successive governments dominated by members from Nigeria's dominant ethnic groups.

Dokubo-Asari's threat to target oil companies last year helped drive global oil prices beyond the $50 mark for the first time. But his Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF) called off the threat after their leader met with President Olusegun Obasanjo and agreed to a truce. The group subsequently agreed to surrender its arms for cash.

But Dokubo-Asari, who remained a strident critic of the Nigerian government, was arrested in September and charged with treason after he declared in a newspaper interview he would fight for the disintegration of the country, Africa's most populous with more than 126 million people.

MEND is also calling for the release of Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, the former governor of Bayelsa state (Nigeria's only wholly Ijaw state), who is being held on corruption charges. Arrested in Britain on money laundering charges in September, Alamieyeseigha jumped bail in November and returned to his governorship in Nigeria.

Alamieyeseigha was arrested three weeks later by the police after his state's legislature impeached him as governor.

MEND insists both men are being persecuted by Obasanjo more for opposing his alleged plan to extend his rule and for their support of local control of oil revenue, than for any crimes they are alleged to have committed.

We don't want any money. We only want Dokubo-Asari and Alamieyeseigha released,・a man who gave his name as Brutus Ebipadei and described himself as MEND's leader, told IRIN by telephone. They're the only ones who can negotiate the release of the hostages.

Ebipadei added: we want the Nigerian state to leave our oil for us, and we have started our fight to achieve it.・He allowed the reporter to speak to two of the hostages, whom Shell confirmed as being among the company's kidnapped employees.

MEND does not claim any direct links with Dokubo-Asari's NDPVF apart from demanding his release. During a court appearance for his treason trial last week Dokubo-Asari said he did not know the group but expressed support for their action.

A Shell-sponsored security study completed in late 2003 showed a pattern of weapons influx into the delta fed by an illegal trade in crude oil and used in widespread violence claiming an average of 1,000 lives every year. The study predicted that violence may force Shell to quit onshore oil production in Nigeria by 2008.

Nigeria estimates that up to 10 percent of its oil production is sometimes lost through criminal gangs that siphon crude oil from pipelines for sale to tankers waiting offshore. Militant leader Dokubo-Asari has acknowledged in interviews that a major source of militia weaponry has been the illegal trade in crude oil.

While Obasanjo has remained restrained with regard to the hostage-taking - appealing to the militants not to do anything that could result in the loss of lives・- residents in the Niger Delta are beginning to flee for fear of military reprisals against local militia.

Similar standoffs in the past give citizens cause to worry. In November 1999, months after taking office as elected president after more than 15 years of military rule, Obasanjo sent troops after a group of armed militants that had killed 12 policemen. Government troops levelled the town of Odi where the killings had taken place and killed more than 1,000 people, according to human rights groups.

Almost everyone in my town has fled,・said Enitowari Inengi, a resident of Ozobo, a fishing community near Shell's Benisede facility. Everyone one is afraid the military will do to us what they did at Odi.・

But even getting at the militants poses a huge challenge for authorities as the delta environment - a region of more than 70,000 square kilometres criss-crossed by thousands of rivers and creeks - is impossible to police. Militants have used their mastery of the terrain as their main strength, taking refuge in the labyrinth of creeks from where they attack targets at will.

In a recent e-mail statement MEND said: we want to prove that the oil on our soil cannot be taken without our consent.

[ENDS]

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January 19, 2006

Militants threaten to cripple oil exports if demands not met

WARRI, 17 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Ethnic Ijaw militants claiming responsibility for a spate of attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria痴 Niger Delta have threatened new raids to cripple the country痴 oil exports if demands to free detained leaders are not met within 48 hours.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, a spokesman for a militant group told IRIN they would hold on to four foreign oil workers taken hostage last week failing the release of militia leader Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, who is in government custody pending trial for treason.

The oil workers were kidnapped last Wednesday in a raid on an offshore oil platform run by Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta region.

In addition to recent attacks on pipelines that triggered cuts in Nigeria痴 oil exports, the militants claimed Sunday痴 attack of Shell痴 Benisede flow station in which one oil worker was killed. The assault forced the company to evacuate four platforms in the delta swamps.

展e maintain our demands that they should free Dokubo-Asari and other Ijaw leaders in detention in 48 hours,・Brutus Etikpaden, who claims leadership of the new Movement for Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), told IRIN by phone.

徹therwise were going to attack oil installations and stop oil exports from Nigeria,・he added.

Etikpaden last week allowed IRIN to speak to the hostages by phone.

He said the group was offering to free the four captives in exchange for the release of the Ijaw leaders, but warned that MEND's long-term aim was local control of the delta region's oil wealth.

展e have embarked on Operation Climate Change, to take over our oil and show the Nigerian government that the Niger Delta people are not fools,・he said.

Tensions have been particularly high in the delta since the Nigerian government arrested Dokubo-Asari, the delta痴 most influential militia leader, in September and charged him with treason.

Dokubo-Asari痴 Niger Delta People痴 Volunteer Force took up arms in 2004 to fight for the interests of the region's majority Ijaw ethnic group, alleging that successive governments had cheated their impoverished communities of the oil wealth produced in the region.

Dokubo-Asari suspended armed struggle later that year after world oil prices soared and President Olusegun Obasanjo granted his group amnesty. But the milita leader was arrested late last year after saying in an interview that he would fight for the disintegration of Nigeria ・Africa痴 most populous country with more than 126 million people.

During a court appearance in the capital Abuja on Tuesday, Dokubo-Asari said he supported the actions of MEND even though he did not know those leading the group.

的f it痴 the decision of Ijaw people to go back to armed struggle, I知 in total support,・he told reporters.

徹il has brought a lot of misery to the Ijaw and Niger Delta. Shell and the other oil conglomerates should leave the Niger Delta or the Ijaw people will make them leave whether Dokubo-Asari is in prison or not,・he said.

Officials of Bayelsa State, where the recent attacks have occurred, said on Tuesday that contact had been made with the kidnappers and there were hopes that they would release the hostages soon.

擢rom initial reports there are positive signals that the matter will soon be resolved amicably,・state government spokesman Ekiyor Welson said in a statement.

Inhabitants of the Niger Delta remain largely impoverished despite the region痴 being the source of nearly all the crude oil that is the lifeblood of Nigeria痴 economy.

[ENDS]

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January 17, 2006

Shell evacuates oil platforms after fresh attacks

WARRI, 16 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has pulled workers from four oil platforms in Nigeria's volatile Niger Delta after armed militants launched the third attack in a week on its facilities.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Heavily armed persons attacked the Benisede flow station in the early hours of Sunday, Shell said in a statement. The attackers invaded the flow-station in speed boats, burnt down two staff accommodations, damaged the processing facilities and left.

Troops protecting the Benisede facility came under fire at dawn from the attackers, said Brigadier-General Elias Zamani, commander of a joint military task force deployed by the government to try to contain spiralling violence in the oil-rich southern delta.

A group claiming responsibility for recent attacks has warned Shell to evacuate workers from the region. Oil operations in the region have been disrupted repeatedly by local militants claiming to fight for the rights of the impoverished local population.

Zamani said both the army and the militants suffered casualties in Sunday's attack but he gave no details. Several national newspapers reported on Monday that at least 13 soldiers had been killed.

Injured Shell workers were taken to hospital while workers in nearby facilities identified as Ogbotobo, Opukushi and Tunu were evacuated on Sunday, the company said.

A group calling itself the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta claimed responsibility for a recent spate of attacks in the region, including an 11 January raid on Shell's EA offshore platform in which four foreigners were kidnapped, and a subsequent explosion that ruptured a major oil pipeline.

The group is demanding local control of the region's oil wealth as well as the release of militia leader Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, currently detained by the government on treason charges.

We want to control our oil and want Dokubo-Asari released,・a man who gave his name as Brutus Etikpaden and claimed to be the leader of the group told IRIN by phone from an undisclosed location. We have warned all foreign oil workers to leave the Niger Delta in their own interest.

In an e-mail statement sent to media organisations the group gave the names of the hostages as Bulgarian Milko Nichev, US national Patrick Arnold Landry, Briton Nigel Watson-Clark and Honduran Harry Ebanks.

Shell, which controls just under half of Nigeria's daily exports of 2.5 million barrels, is operating at a reduction of 106,000 barrels per day due to last week's pipeline rupture.

In December an attack on another key pipeline similarly forced the company to suspend export of large quantities of crude oil from its Bonny oil export terminal for two weeks.

Tensions have been particularly high in the delta since the Nigerian government arrested Dokubo-Asari in September and charged him with treason. He is currently in custody awaiting trial.

Dokubo-Asari was charged after saying in a newspaper interview he would fight for the disintegration of Nigeria.

His Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force has taken up arms in the name of the region's majority Ijaw ethnic group, alleging that successive governments have cheated impoverished communities of the oil wealth produced on their land.

[ENDS]

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January 11, 2006

NIGERIA: In overcrowded prisons, survival is a daily battle

KADUNA, 11 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - As visitors approach the death row block at Kaduna's central prison in northern Nigeria, a sea of hands waving tin cups automatically jerk through the bars of the dark cells.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Get back! shouts the prison guard at the 118 detainees crammed inside a dilapidated building originally meant to house 33. Up to three inmates live in less than four square metres of space. An overpowering stench of urine and mould billows out into the courtyard.

In the turmoil of the shouts some of the prisoners draw back to their spots on a tattered mat on the floor that aside from a few plastic bowls is the only object in the cell.

But the guard is jumpy and cuts short the visit, prohibiting any further interaction with the detainees.

Rights organisations working in Nigerian prisons - and even prison officials themselves - say the conditions of death row inmates do not fulfil even minimum international human rights standards.

In Kaduna prison, death row inmates are locked up all day long, said Festus Okoye, executive director of Human Rights Monitor (HRM), a group based in the northern city.

典hey are allowed out only rarely, for a few minutes, one by one,・he said. Meanwhile some prisoners collect the buckets used as toilets.

Most of the death row inmates are utterly alone and never receive visitors - their families living too far away and having abandoned them for fear of being associated with their crimes, rights group sources say. Some simply cannot pay the 宋isiting rights・fee charged by the wardens.

Nigeria this year acknowledged the sorry state of its jails, announcing plans to free some 25,000 inmates still awaiting trial - some for as long as 10 years - in a bid to relieve overcrowding and bad conditions.

The move could ease conditions for those left waiting on death row for years. Since Nigeria legalised capital punishment in 1999, only one prisoner has been executed by the state in northern Nigeria, with authorities openly reticent to carry through with executions, according to HRM.

Nigeria countrywide has 548 prisoners awaiting capital punishment - 10 of them women - among a total 40,000 detainees, according to Ernest Ogbozor of Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), Nigeria痴 largest prisoners・rights organisation.

Under Nigerian law, crimes punishable by death include armed robbery, murder and treason. Islamic Sharia law, in force in 12 northern Nigerian states, also calls for the death penalty in other crimes such as adultery.

Lack of food

If conditions for death row inmates are harsh, they are hardly any better for other prisoners. For the sick and weak, incarceration can be tantamount to a sentence to death.

典he two main problems in Nigerian prisons are overpopulation and lack of food,・said Hassan Saidi Labo, assistant to Nigeria痴 prison inspector general.

Kaduna is a clear example. In December 2005, 957 detainees were crammed in 10 buildings designed for about 550 people.

Labo says some prisons hold up to four times their capacity.

In such conditions, just surviving is a daily battle, according to 54-year-old Felix Obi who was condemned to 27 years in prison in 1986 for drug trafficking. He spent 13 years and three months behind bars in the economic capital, Lagos, before benefiting from an amnesty in 1999.

You fight for a scrap of blanket, a piece of soap, a bit of food or medicine if you get sick,・said Obi, who now works with PRAWA.

Prisoners fight for space on the floor to sleep, they fight not to become depressed, and not to be victims of violence. They fight to survive.

Monitoring by outside groups has had some impact. Since prisons were opened to religious and humanitarian organisations more than 10 years ago, the prison death rate has fallen from 1,500 per year in the late 1980s to 89 deaths in 2003, according to authorities.

Still the risk of death in prison remains high, particularly because of lack of food, said Harp Damulak, the Kaduna prison hospital doctor.

The daily ration generally consists of a bowl of beans in the morning then cassava in the afternoon and evening. Prisons have a budget of 150 Naira (US $1.15) per prisoner per day.

But this small amount does not necessarily get to all prisoners. Supply is in the hands of subcontractors who - poorly paid, acknowledge prison officials - sometimes dip into the goods, according to PRAWA and HRM.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says a prison employee earns about 6,000 Naira ($45) per month at the start, earning a maximum of about 40,000 Naira monthly at the end of a career. As a consequence corruption is common.

Conditions favour disease

Lack of food moreover aggravates already poor hygiene conditions. Damulak said that malnutrition makes prisoners highly vulnerable to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis or skin diseases caused by lack of hygiene.

The situation is the same for women inmates in Kaduna prison, where 18 women live in two cells, sleeping on iron beds stacked one atop another, some without mattresses. The bathroom has long been without running water.

We are devoured by mosquitoes, we all suffer malaria but don稚 have bed nets and the hospital has no medicine except paracetamol,・said Zainab, 32, who has been incarcerated since April. 典here is nothing. Even sanitary napkins - we have to share one between two women every month, or even every two months.・BR>
Prison conditions weigh heavily on the detainees, often causing depression and other psychological problems, according to Damulak. And prison personnel are not trained to handle such issues, he said.

To survive in their environment, some prisoners have taken things into their own hands.

典hey have created a veritable government,・HRM痴 Okoye said. 徹ne prisoner is president, another police chief, another head of justice.・He added that some prison officials see the initiative as a positive thing because it helps foster order in the institutions.

Former prisoner Obi said, 鉄ome [prison 鼠eaders綻 invent rules that are impossible to follow.・Punishment generally comes in the form of an order to do chores, such as washing the clothes of 'chiefs,' but often prisoners pay for misdeeds by being beaten or even sexually assaulted.

Despite efforts by inmates to impose some sort of organisation, prison riots are common, PRAWA痴 Ogbozor said.

的n the past six months we have seen five riots in prisons across the country - all linked mostly to the lack of food for detainees.・BR>
Under the recently announced plan to release prisoners, those who have spent three to 10 years awaiting trial will have their cases reviewed for immediate release. Also eligible will be the elderly, the terminally ill and those with HIV, as well as people locked up for longer than the prospective sentence for their crime.

Among those who have languished in prisons for years, human rights activists say, are some who were picked up by mistake or for very minor infractions and simply could not pay a fine.

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: Worsening security, lack of progress bog down Darfur talks

ABUJA, 9 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Talks to end the bloody conflict in Darfur have been suspended for a week to respect a Muslim holiday, mediators said on Monday, but there is little sign of progress as the security situation in the western Sudan region worsens and the two sides fail to agree on key aspects of sharing power.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

African Union (AU) officials called off the peace negotiations in Abuja on Sunday to allow Muslim delegates from the Sudanese government and two Darfur rebel movements to celebrate the Eid el-Kabir festival. Discussions are set to resume on 15 January.

Mediators had hoped that this seventh round of talks between Khartoum, the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), which began in November, would yield a breakthrough in the conflict which has been raging for three years.

But they admit that the only tangible result so far has been keeping the sides talking.

"We have been here for more than a month now but I can't even report any progress. It's been very slow," one of the senior AU officials, Sam Ibok, told reporters at the weekend.

Putting their bickering from the previous rounds of talks on one side, the rebel groups have jointly demanded that a new vice-president post be created that would go to someone from Darfur. The Sudanese government has flatly rejected the idea, saying its best offer would be the position of a special advisor to President Omar el-Bashir.

Another sticking point is a rebel plan that would enlarge the Darfur region so that it includes pieces of land excised by Khartoum and added to other regions in the past.

With the deadlock dragging on for weeks, AU mediator Ibok said these issues had been shelved for now.

The other two main areas of negotiation are wealth sharing and security arrangements, but some delegates have said that any progress in those areas would be meaningless without a power-sharing deal. And Ibok said that wide differences remained in subsequent discussions.

With the talks mired in disagreement, the security situation in Darfur continues to worsen. One of the AU's 6,000 peacekeepers was killed on Friday in the latest breach of the ceasefire and mediators say a crisis between Sudan and Chad risks escalating tensions and damaging the Darfur peace process.

The Darfur conflict erupted in early 2003 when JEM and SLA/M took up arms against Khartoum to end what they call the neglect and oppression of the mainly black inhabitants of Darfur, a semi-desert region the size of France. The Sudanese government responded by backing Arab militias known as the Janjawid.

Humanitarian workers estimate that more than 180,000 people have been killed and nearly two million forced to flee their homes because of the bloodshed. And last week the United Nations declared Darfur a high-risk zone and reduced the number of its personnel in the area.

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: Thousands of prisoners awaiting trial to be freed

ABUJA, 5 Jan 2006 (IRIN) - Nigeria plans to free some 25,000 inmates, many of whom have been awaiting trial for years, in a bid to decongest overcrowded and unhygienic prisons and improve its human rights record.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

"The issue of awaiting trial inmates has become an endemic problem in Nigeria," said Justice Minister Bayo Ojo after a cabinet meeting late Wednesday. "The conditions of the prisons are just too terrible. The conditions negate the essence of prison, which is to reform."

According to government figures, two thirds of Nigeria's 45,000 prisoners have not yet had a trial - in some cases because their files have gone missing, in others because witnesses were unavailable.

A government-commissioned survey published last year found that suspects were dumped in violent, overcrowded cells and left with no legal assistance, no trial date and no hope of getting out - a process which has long drawn the ire of human rights groups.

"We have found that recently there has been a series of jailbreaks which are just samples of what is waiting to happen if immediate intervention is not undertaken," the justice minister said on Wednesday.

Under the new government scheme, inmates who have spent between three and ten years waiting for a trial will have their cases reviewed for immediate release. Prisoners who have already been in jail longer than they would have been if convicted are also eligible, as are the elderly, those infected with HIV/AIDS and other terminally ill prisoners.

"By the time the process is completed we hope to have reduced the number of inmates to between 15,000 and 20,000," Ojo said.

Six "halfway houses" will be set up across the sprawling West African nation, to rehabilitate inmates and offer them trade and skills training before they go back to their communities.

An official at the justice ministry said that around 1 billion naira (US $78 million) had been set aside for the plan to free up prisons, with much of the funds going to government-hired lawyers who will review the thousands of cases.

The government has also approved setting up a prison board for each of the country's 227 prisons, which will be made up of law enforcement officials and human rights workers. There will also be a nationwide chief inspector of prisons who will report to President Olusegun Obasanjo.

The president has in the past pledged reform of the prisons system after acknowledging his first-hand experience of conditions in Nigerian jails, during the time he was imprisoned for allegedly plotting a coup under the rule of former military leader General Sani Abacha. Obasanjo emerged from prison after Abacha's death and went on to win elections designed to end a 15-year stretch of military rule.

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December 13, 2005

NIGERIA: Fugitive governor to face UK money laundering charges

PORT HARCOURT, 12 Dec 2005 (IRIN) - President Olusegun Obasanjo said Nigeria will comply with the UK authorities and hand over a prominent state governor charged with money laundering who evaded British police disguised as a woman.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

“As a member of Interpol…Nigeria will take the appropriate action as required by the British authorities on this matter,” Obasanjo said on Saturday.

Nigerian police arrested the governor of oil-rich Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, at his office on Friday after state legislators voted by a two-thirds majority to oust him for corruption and abuse of position.

Alamieyeseigha’s impeachment effectively ended his immunity from prosecution as a state governor and cleared the way for the armed Nigerian officers who had surrounded his offices to make an arrest.

British Police originally arrested Alamieyeseigha at Heathrow Airport in September while en route to Nigeria from Germany and charged him with laundering 1.8 million British pounds (over US $3 million) found in his London home.

But Alamieyeseigha skipped bail and, donning a dress and wig, used a false passport to board a plane back to Nigeria.

Supporters cheered when he reappeared in Bayelsa on the 21 November, thanking God for making his return possible.

Obasanjo encouraged Alamieyeseigha’s prosecution in Britain and threw out claims of diplomatic immunity as part of his personal war against corruption.

Nigeria has made some progress in fighting graft, according to Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International. Its 2005 corruption perceptions index showed Nigeria in 7th-to-bottom place worldwide against second-last in 2004.

Obasanjo commended the legislators for removing the governor in a speech at his ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) convention in the capital Abuja where Alamieyeseigha now remains in police custody.

Alamieyeseigha, who is a member of PDP, says he is innocent and has accused Obasanjo of engineering his arrest to punish him for supporting Vice President Atiku Abubakar in a political dispute rocking the party.

Alamieyeseigha is the second Nigerian state governor facing charges of money laundering in Britain. Plateau State governor Joshua Dariye was arrested last year and later granted bail that allowed him to travel to Nigeria. He subsequently failed to show up for appointments with the Metropolitan police.

[ENDS]

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December 07, 2005

NIGERIA: Compensation for families of six youths killed by police

ABUJA, 6 Dec 2005 (IRIN) - The Nigerian government in a landmark move has paid compensation to families of six people wrongly shot and killed by police.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Police Affairs Minister Broderick Bozimo on Friday paid out cheques of three million naira (US $21,000) each to representatives of the families of five men and one woman killed by police in June 2005.

The police had claimed the six were armed robbers, killed while trading gunfire with police in the Apo district of the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

Bozimo said a judicial inquiry launched by the government found “incontrovertible evidence” the victims were not armed robbers.

“Government therefore exonerates the six victims and apologises to their families and in fact all Nigerians,” he said.

The government’s pay-out could unleash a flood of compensation claims in Nigeria where, according to a July report by New York-based Human Rights Watch, security forces have operated with impunity for years carrying out torture, extortion and executions.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in August publicly acknowledged widespread extrajudicial killings of suspects and innocent citizens by the country's police and pledged a clean-up operation.

Families of the six youths killed in Apo say their loved ones had a brief argument with the police on their way home from a party and were later gunned down by the officers.

Seven police officers have been arrested and charged with murder, including Ibrahim Danjuma, the number-two police official in Abuja.

Prosecutors allege Danjuma personally ordered the killings and shot four of the victims.

Word of the shootings, which took place on the night of 7 June, provoked violent street protests in which a police station and several patrol cars were set alight.

Police commonly use charges of armed robbery as a pretext for detaining people and extorting money from them, according to a UN human rights expert who visited the country in July. Police were also guilty of excessive force, often resulting in death, the UN official said.

[ENDS]

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November 25, 2005

NIGERIA: Obasanjo and the danger of the third term agenda

LAGOS, 25 Nov 2005 (IRIN) - After only six years of democracy in Africa's most populous country, growing suspicions that Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo is planning to seek a third term in office are polarising the country's political figures and raising the spectre of instability ahead of 2007 elections.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Obasanjo, whose election in 1999 put an end to 15 years of military dictatorship, has repeatedly denied that he plans to stay on beyond the constitutional limit of two four-year terms but his critics are becoming increasingly alarmed by the actions of the president's allies.

There is a looming danger on the political horizon of the country and it is the danger of the third term agenda,・said Ghali Umar Na但bba, a former speaker of the House of Representatives and member of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), known for his opposition to Obasanjo.

Last week, the Senate Constitution Review Committee called for an amendment that would allow the president to run for another four years in power and the local media were full of allegations that a number of legislators had been offered bribes to push the change through.

But concerns go back to February when Obasanjo convened the National Political Reform Conference, citing the need to review the constitution in order to stabilise West Africa's giant.

The president said at the time that he hoped the conference could work out mechanisms for managing differences in a country with a history of violent ethnic and religious upheavals among its 126 million people who are divided into a largely Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.

However, his critics suspected other motives when some of Obasanjo's close aides used the conference to propose a new draft constitution that would have extended his tenure by at least two years.

Although the proposal was shelved and Obasanjo declared that he longed to retire to his farm when his mandate expired, subsequent events suggested to some that the president was trying to consolidate his grip on the political machinery of the ruling PDP.

Feud with vice president

In September, a close Obasanjo ally started a party membership evalidation process which left many of the president's opponents without a say in PDP decision making.

Atiku Abubakar, the country's vice president with whom Obasanjo has been feuding over a perceived lack of loyalty, did not receive his new membership card until after he protested publicly earlier this week.

And according to an Abubakar aide, even though the vice president has not lost his right to vote on party matters, the exclusion of many of his supporters could throw a spanner in his plans to secure the PDP's backing for a 2007 run at the country's top office.

But ruling party chairman Ahmadu Ali has dismissed any talk of an internal coup de force through a revised membership list.

Let me assure you all that there is nothing sinister in the exercise,・he said. It was only meant to streamline and strengthen our great party.

Workers split on third term question

Nevertheless, fears of a conspiracy have led a number of prominent politicians, including two former PDP chairmen, to form protest movements in the last month.

Moreover, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), a powerful workers・union, has denounced those who think Obasanjo should be given more time to carry out much-needed economic reforms in a country famous for its corruption.

Letting aside or willfully manipulating the constitution could begin a process of anarchy which will negatively affect the business environment,・the NLC said in a statement issued over the weekend.

PDP spokespersons were unavailable to comment.

But the private sector Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) believes that the country's need for a competent leader should trump arbitrary term limits.

The need to guarantee consistency of policy goes beyond the question of whether President Obasanjo remains in power or not,・Charles Ugwu, MAN痴 president said in a speech last week. We as a nation must view the tremendous achievements we have recorded and guard these jealously to prevent any possibility of a reversal before they are fully entrenched and clearly irreversible.・BR>
Obasanjo like Abacha before him?

There's no shortage of leaders in the region who cling to power: Gabon's Omar Bongo, Burkina Faso's Blaise Compaore and Cameroon's Paul Biya have all ruled for a generation or more.

On the other hand, Obasanjo, who had a brief stint as head of state in the 1970s, was the only one of Nigeria's succession of military rulers to give up power voluntarily and spent three years in prison in the 1990s for his outspoken criticism of the late soldier-president Sani Abacha.

And yet today, some are drawing parallels between Obasanjo's civilian incarnation and his former rival.

In every move he makes, Obasanjo shows the trappings that characterised Abacha,・wrote Ogbonna Ude, a columnist for a Nigerian online newspaper.

Like Abacha enjoyed all the ceremonies and endorsements associated with his self-succession, Obasanjo is no doubt enjoying the same, sipping champagne with his cronies in anticipation of another four years.・BR>

[ENDS]

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November 05, 2005

NIGERIA: Dream of freedom turns to prostitution nightmare

GENOA, 4 Nov 2005 (IRIN) - Rose thought she was coming to Europe to study and earn some money with a part-time job. What the Nigerian girl didn't realise was that books would be a distant dream and the work she would be doing was prostitution.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

"Two people working in an apparently-normal travel agency arranged my journey. But once we arrived in Europe, we were locked in an apartment for a month and a half," she recounts. "They emptied our bags and seized our documents."

Sophie tells a similar tale. She thought she was coming to work in a shop or a factory to give her and her family a chance of a better life. She now makes 2,000 euros (US $2,400) a week -- something she could never have dreamed of back home in her village in Nigeria -- but the price she pays is selling her body.

的 thought I would be free in Europe," she says wistfully in the dark, tiny one-room flat she shares in the Italian port city of Genoa with two fellow sex workers.

There are no official figures but the International Office for Migration (IOM) estimates there 70,000 women living in Italy after being trafficked for sexual exploitation. And some local rights groups believe as many as half of them are Nigerian.

Traffickers demand on average more than 50,000 euros (US $60,000) for travel expenses and accommodation, with the girls having to work for them until the debt is paid off.

"I think in one year, I'll be able to pay my debt," said 24-year-old Naomi, who came to Italy to earn a living for her younger siblings after their parents died. "I will pay. I don't want to offend them. I know there will be so many problems down there if I don't."

That is a fear often held by women forced into prostitution, says Sister Valeria, who has spent time in Nigeria's Edo State, and now works with victims of trafficking in Italy. She says traffickers often coerce victims by exploiting their belief in voodoo rituals.

典hey often make a sachet with the girl痴 hair or underwear and even menstrual blood and they keep it,・she said. 敵irls truly believe that if they reveal the names of these people or don稚 pay them back, horrible things will happen to them and their families.・BR>
Merciless journey

Even before the girls arrive to discover the reality of their new life in Europe, they have often undergone excruciating journeys just to leave their home continent.

These days the high-priced voyage from West Africa to Europe is most often via the Sahara Desert, where it is easier for people to move about clandestinely with no papers.

展e walked for months,・said Sharon, one of Sophie's flatmates in Genoa, who made what she called a "merciless journey" through the desert to reach the northern tip of Africa from which she could take a boat to Europe.

溺any people died. Sometimes we would drink our urine,・she said shaking her head at the memory.

The plight of West Africans desperate for a chance at a better life in Europe has been under the media spotlight recently after several migrants were killed trying to scale a wall into Spanish enclaves in Morocco last month.

The incident and ensuing mass deportations of Africans pushed the issue to the fore at subsequent meetings in Brussels between African and European leaders.

During those meetings, the European Commission proposed that member states come up with a plan to strengthen efforts to prevent people being trafficked for sexual and labour exploitation.

But many people -- from former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konare to aid workers trying to combat the problem -- believe that the focus needs to be back in Africa, tackling the root cause of illegal immigration. Poverty.

"Exploitation feeds on poverty," says Sister Florence, who leads an organisation called the Committee for the Support of the Dignity of Women based in Benin City, southern Nigeria.

展e are hungry here,・she told IRIN. 典he Nigerian economy is very bad and keeps getting worse every day. So children, especially daughters, become people痴 source of income.・BR>
Teresa Albano, who works for the IOM in Rome, says in nine out of ten cases, the families have signed their daughters away knowing full well what they are destined for.

典he girls are not free to decide for themselves and say no,・she said. 展hen the girls sign the 祖ontracts,・a family member has to be the guarantor, and there is always a clause that says girls will accept any job the organiser will offer in the destination country.・BR>
Breaking out?

For those girls who do want to break out of the bondage, there are few options. They are on Italian soil illegally with scant resources.

The only get-out that the Italian legal system provides is a "social protection residence permit", but that means denouncing your exploiters to the police, which is exactly what the girls fear.

According to the Caritas-Migrantes group, which studies immigration trends, only 999 of these permits were granted to Nigerian women between 1998 and 2004.

Another alternative is a repatriation programme, run by IOM, which can help women home on a voluntary basis. But there too, the way if fraught with problems.

"When the girls are released by the Nigerian police, after having undergone a mandatory HIV test, their traffickers are out there, ready to force them into the racket again," said Albano at the IOM.

And if they manage to dodge the traffickers, the girls can still run into to problems closer to home, says Sister Florence of the Benin City group.

"When the girls come back, they are expected to bring money and wealth and if they don't their families reject them and their trauma is twice as big," she explained.

But occasionally there are out-of-the-blue happy endings.

Rose, for example, says she was saved by one of her clients, Claudio. Now he's her partner and together they have written a book about their story, hoping to raise awareness about the problem of Nigerian immigrant girls on the streets of Italy.

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: Oil delta still subject to brutal repression from security forces

LAGOS, 3 Nov 2005 (IRIN) - Brutal repression of protests remains a routine tactic of Nigerian government security forces in the oil-rich Niger Delta, 10 years after nine minority rights campaigners were hanged by a military ruler, rights group Amnesty International said in a new report on Thursday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Communities in the impoverished southern oil region that dare protest actions against oil multinationals running joint ventures with the government are frequently subjected to 田ollective punishment・by security forces, said Amnesty.

典he inhabitants of communities suspected of obstructing oil production or harbouring criminals are sometimes targeted by the security forces,・said the report.

The report -- Ten years on: injustice and violence haunt the oil Delta -- focuses on two cases in February this year which it says illustrates the heavy-handedness of the Nigerian security forces.

Soldiers from a special government task force set up to quell violent unrest in the oil region fired on protesters that attempted to march to the Escravos oil export terminal run by Chevron on 4 February.

One protestor named as Bawo Ajeboghuku, later died of gunshot wounds and at least 30 more people were injured, some by blows from rifle butts.

Days later, at least 17 people were killed by members of the same task force during a raid on Odioma town in Bayelsa state in pursuit of an armed gang believed to have killed a local politician.

When the suspects were not caught, the security forces razed ・0 percent of the homes in Odioma,・and the dead included 105-year-old woman Balasanyun Omieh and her two-year-old grandchild, according to Amnesty.

The frequent resort to repressive violence shows not much has changed since the military government of General Sani Abacha hanged writer and environmental campaigner, Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 following a murder trial widely condemned as flawed said the rights group.

Despite the end of 15 years of military rule with the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, people in the region are still subjected to very serious human rights abuses.

哲iger Delta communities see little of Nigeria痴 oil revenues,・said the report. 典he only visible government presence in many parts is a heavily-armed security apparatus.・BR>
Nigerian government officials were not immediately available for comment.

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: World's broken electronics pile up in Lagos, creating toxic dumps

LAGOS, 27 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Nigeria is becoming a digital dump, the recipient of vast numbers of broken gadgets from the West that can leak dangerous substances into water supplies and create cancer-causing particles when burnt, a toxic waste watchdog said on Thursday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Basel Action Network, a US-based lobby group that recently conducted an investigation in Africa's most populous country, found that around 500 giant containers, packed with old computers, televisions and mobile phones, were arriving every month at the main city and port, Lagos.

These electronics are supposed to be for repair and re-use, but BAN estimates that 75 percent of the items are neither repairable nor of any economic value.

So they often end up being dumped at official landfill sites or offloaded illegally by the side of the road or in swamps where they are either burnt or simply left.

BAN says chemicals like lead can leak into the groundwater. And materials used in circuit boards, although safe when the computer is on a desk, can produce carcinogenic particles once set alight.

"Residents breathing in the fumes from the fires or drawing water from contaminated areas are going to be taking in some seriously dangerous substances," Jim Puckett, the BAN official who led the investigation, told IRIN by phone from the group's headquarters in Seattle.

迭e-use is a good thing, bridging the digital divide is a good thing, but exporting loads of techno-trash in the name of these lofty ideals and seriously damaging the environment and health of poor communities in developing countries is criminal,・he said.

The organisation traces most of the items back to the United States and Europe, and says the export of useless electronic equipment is illegal under the Basel Convention governing the international movement of toxic waste.

Washington has not ratified the treaty, and BAN says many other governments fail to enforce the laws by not certifying that electronic items are fit for re-use before they are shipped abroad.

When repairable products do arrive among the sea of junk, researchers noted that Lagos does have a legitimate and healthy market for restoring old electronic equipment.

Oludayo Dada of the pollution control unit at the Environment Ministry, says that the flow of electronic waste arriving on Nigerian shores has caught the authorities' attention.

We are still trying to quantify the magnitude of the electronic waste we have in Nigeria and the components that are toxic,・Dada told IRIN, adding that the government would need to update its laws to criminalise the import of such products.

We have regulations covering toxic products in general, but we need to zero in on electronic waste,・Dada said.

BAN says another solution is for manufacturers to stop using toxic chemicals in their products, such as brominated flame retardants, beryllium alloys, lead-based solders and mercury lamps.

"Things are completely out of control,・said activist Puckett. "It's time we all get serious about what is now a tsunami of toxic techno-trash making its way from rich to poorer countries."

[ENDS]

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NIGERIA: Investigators hunt for clues after plane crashes, killing 117

LISSA, 24 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Nigeria began three days of official mourning on Monday as investigators started scouring a still-smouldering crater for clues after a weekend plane crash that killed 117 people.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

A charred wrist, a single finger and a piece of intestine lay next to unidentifiable parts of the aircraft at the crash scene near the village of Lissa. Clothes and other fragments of the wreckage hung on treetops in the bush.

Bellview Airlines flight 210 crashed on Saturday night, minutes after taking off from Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, en route to the political capital, Abuja.

All 111 passengers and six crew died.

Relatives thronged the site on Monday, picking over the wreckage, hoping to find a piece of clothing or an identity card, all that remains of their loved ones.

典o the best of my knowledge no whole body has been recovered,・said Foluso Adebayo, a senior police officer leading the team guarding the crash site, some 40 km north of Lagos.

The bulk of the Boeing 737 aircraft appeared to be missing, swallowed by the ground after slamming to earth.

Officials said investigators would excavate the crater, which was still emitting an acrid smoke on Monday, almost two days after the crash.

徹ur preliminary position is that the plane seemed to have lost control and went down,・said Fidelis Onyeriri, head of the National Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). 典he weather was not too bad, but there was lightning. An airplane struck by lightning could lose total control.・BR>
State radio said pilots issued a distress call before the plane disappeared from the radar.

During the first 18 hours that followed the crash there was confusion among the emergency services about the location of the aircraft, with searches being conducted in the Atlantic Ocean and in the town of Kishi, some 300 km north of Lagos, before honing in on Lissa.

Aviation Minister Babalola Borishade said on Monday that Nigeria had asked the United States to send forensic experts and aviation investigators to help determine the cause of the crash.

鏑ooking at this site it痴 really devastating. For now we just believe it痴 an accident,・Borishade said.

Bellview is a privately-owned Nigerian company that began flights more than 10 years ago and serves a number of West African capitals as well as England and India. Saturday's crash was the first recorded by the Nigerian airline.

Further darkening the national mood was the news of the death of Stella Obasanjo, the president's wife. An official government statement said she had died in a hospital in Spain, while undergoing surgery.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: A lethal dose of shame

KADUNA, 18 Oct 2005 (IRIN/PLUSNEWS) - When it became clear that Awa was dying of an AIDS-related illness, her family left her on the side of the road where the 40-year-old's body was found three days later.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Halima was a bit luckier. Her family didn't abandon her for having the virus. Instead, they put her in a corner of the family home where, to avoid any contact with the virus, they fed her by means of a bowl pushed to her with a stick.

According to AIDS workers in Nigeria, the stories of Awa and Halima, which are not their real names, are all too common in and around Kaduna, a city located 200 kilometres north of the national capital Abuja.

Across Nigeria, the prejudice and denial surrounding HIV/AIDS are major obstacles in trying to stem the spread of the pandemic. But the predominantly Muslim North presents special challenges.

Kaduna State, like its capital of the same name, has an estimated infection rate of six percent, slightly higher than the national average of five percent or, in raw numbers, about 4 million people. Yet anti-AIDS campaigns face a difficult fight.

"There's a lot of prejudice," said Mohammed Sagir Auwal, coordinator of the STD/AIDS Awareness and Prevention organisation in Kaduna. "But there's also a huge problem of poverty. Families just can't afford to look after people who are HIV-postive."

"For a long time," he added, "HIV awareness campaigns were seen as a way for the West to spread foreign ways of thinking among traditional Muslim communities," he added.

A CITY CUT IN HALF

Kaduna in 2000 became one of 12 northern states to adopt Shariah or Islamic Law. The move was particularly contentious as Muslims and Christians make up roughly equal shares of the population. The waves of rioting that have broken out in the state capital since have left at least 3,000 people dead.

Although the two communities once mingled, living and working together in peace, today the Kaduna River marks the divide between the city's Christian and Muslim neighbourhoods.

Most HIV/AIDS organisations are on the Christian side of the river, making it difficult to reach Muslim communities, especially women, who have little access to information and health services, according to Andrew Yohanna at Kaduna's State Action Committee Against AIDS (SACA).

"Very few organisations work with Muslim women," Yohanna said. "The approach is crucial. If you get off on the wrong foot, you're in trouble. You can't just start talking directly about sexuality with them."

Reports about HIV-positive women being tortured, burned and abandoned have frightened many women, especially within the Muslim community, about seeking tests or treatment, according to local AIDS activists.

"Two Muslim women came to see us with their test results. They were HIV-positive and had pretty much decided to flee," said Ashi Appah, director of the Kaduna-based Gender and Human Values.

"There're also cases where the husband knows he's infected and takes ARVs but doesn't tell his wife," she added.

GETTING RELIGIOUS LEADERS ON BOARD

Faced with such social difficulties, state officials and AIDS groups are trying to enlist the help of religious leaders and prominent members of the Muslim community.

The Sultan of Sokoto, the supreme leader of Nigeria's Muslims, took part in a radio and television HIV awareness campaign calling for abstinence and fidelity that was organised by the National Action Committee Against AIDS (NACA).

Fati Mohamed, a famous actress in the country's North, has also helped out with messages that are plastered on billboards all over town.

"I thought I knew all about HIV but I learned a lot during this campaign," she told IRIN, adding that Muslim women do not have enough information.

The Jama'atu Nasrul Islam (JNI), a grouping of Muslim organisations, and its Christian counterpart, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), are increasingly active in raising HIV awareness among their respective communities and have also met with each other on a number of occasions.

"The existence of AIDS is slowly gaining acceptance," said SACA's Yohanna. "But there is still a lot of work to be done in the fight against ignorance, myths, and socio-cultural obstacles."

"We have to break through the wall of silence."

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Publisher arrested after newspaper accused governor of corruption

PORT HARCOURT, 14 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - A newspaper publisher in Nigeria was arrested and detained after his publication carried an article alleging a state governor was involved in money laundering.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Owei Kobina Sikpi of the Weekly Star, published in the main southern oil industry centre of Port Harcourt, was arrested on Tuesday by state security police and detained without charge since then, his colleagues said.

The security agents who raided the premises of the newspaper also impounded its current print-run of 4,000 copies and arrested four other employees operating the printing press who were later freed, editor of the paper, Obinna Ahiaidu, told reporters.

哲obody has been allowed access to Sikpi since his arrest. Not even his lawyer,・said Ahiaidu.

Ahiaidu said he believed the arrest was over a story in last week痴 edition of the paper alleging that Rivers State Governor Peter Odili laundered money through the purchase of an airplane for his trips.

President Olusegun Obasanjo痴 launched a war against corruption when he was sworn into office in 1999, but state security police frequently clamp down on news publications alleging corruption in high places. In May, reports that Obasanjo痴 wife, Stella, was involved in a government real estate scam, earned another journalist a week in jail.

The conduct of Nigeria痴 36 state governors has come under increasing scrutiny since Bayelsa State Governor, Dieprieye Alameiseigha, was arrested in London in September by the British police and charged with money laundering offences. He was released on bail by a magistrate on Thursday, but is not allowed to leave London until the end of his trial.

Both Rivers and Bayelsa states are located in the oil-rich Niger Delta, where states get an extra 13 percent allocation of federal money, the source of more than 80 percent of total government revenue in Nigeria.

There have been widespread allegations that many state governors are siphoning their share of federal revenue allocations into private banks outside of Nigeria.

Nigeria痴 Economic and Financial Crimes Commission says more than US $17 billion in cash and assets belonging to state governors have been traced abroad.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Schools shut in Lagos following smog scare

LAGOS, 13 Oct 2005 (IRIN) - Schools were closed in Nigeria痴 biggest city Lagos on Thursday, in a precautionary measure ordered by the authorities a day after a dense cloud of smog blanketed large parts of the city of more than 15 million people.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Officials blamed pollution from car emissions and industrial waste for the thick smoky mist that hung over the northern mainland areas of the city through most of Wednesday, causing panic as it irritated eyes and disrupted breathing.

Visibility was so poor that vehicles plying the roads had to use their headlights.

Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu ordered all schools closed down, while investigations began on the source of the fumes. No date was set for their reopening.

Lagos State commissioner for the environment Tunji Bello said tests conducted by his department showed unusually high levels of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere.

的t was found that the thick cloud was as a result of vehicular mobile emission arising from thousands of heavy vehicles plying Lagos roads on a daily basis, stationary emission arising from industrial stacks, chimneys and generating sets, and emission from indiscriminate burning of solid waste,・Bello told reporters.

典he incident should serve as a wake up call to all that Lagos is experiencing significant air pollution problems,・he added.

The state government will take immediate steps to curb further pollution by introducing emission tests for vehicles and stepping up inspection of industries to make sure they were equipped with 殿ir pollution abatement devices to ensure that only clean air is discharged into the environment,・said Bello.

Lagos does not have a rail transport system and the millions of people who commute around the city daily rely on cars and buses, mostly run by private transporters. A large majority of these vehicles are old and poorly maintained.

Bode Ojajuni, the police spokesman for Lagos, said no lives had been reported lost as a result of the smog.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2005

NIGERIA: A lethal dose of shame

KADUNA, 18 Oct 2005 (IRIN/PLUSNEWS) - When it became clear that Awa was dying of an AIDS-related illness, her family left her on the side of the road where the 40-year-old's body was found three days later.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Halima was a bit luckier. Her family didn't abandon her for having the virus. Instead, they put her in a corner of the family home where, to avoid any contact with the virus, they fed her by means of a bowl pushed to her with a stick.

According to AIDS workers in Nigeria, the stories of Awa and Halima, which are not their real names, are all too common in and around Kaduna, a city located 200 kilometres north of the national capital Abuja.

Across Nigeria, the prejudice and denial surrounding HIV/AIDS are major obstacles in trying to stem the spread of the pandemic. But the predominantly Muslim North presents special challenges.

Kaduna State, like its capital of the same name, has an estimated infection rate of six percent, slightly higher than the national average of five percent or, in raw numbers, about 4 million people. Yet anti-AIDS campaigns face a difficult fight.

"There's a lot of prejudice," said Mohammed Sagir Auwal, coordinator of the STD/AIDS Awareness and Prevention organisation in Kaduna. "But there's also a huge problem of poverty. Families just can't afford to look after people who are HIV-postive."

"For a long time," he added, "HIV awareness campaigns were seen as a way for the West to spread foreign ways of thinking among traditional Muslim communities," he added.

A CITY CUT IN HALF

Kaduna in 2000 became one of 12 northern states to adopt Shariah or Islamic Law. The move was particularly contentious as Muslims and Christians make up roughly equal shares of the population. The waves of rioting that have broken out in the state capital since have left at least 3,000 people dead.

Although the two communities once mingled, living and working together in peace, today the Kaduna River marks the divide between the city's Christian and Muslim neighbourhoods.

Most HIV/AIDS organisations are on the Christian side of the river, making it difficult to reach Muslim communities, especially women, who have little access to information and health services, according to Andrew Yohanna at Kaduna's State Action Committee Against AIDS (SACA).

"Very few organisations work with Muslim women," Yohanna said. "The approach is crucial. If you get off on the wrong foot, you're in trouble. You can't just start talking directly about sexuality with them."

Reports about HIV-positive women being tortured, burned and abandoned have frightened many women, especially within the Muslim community, about seeking tests or treatment, according to local AIDS activists.

"Two Muslim women came to see us with their test results. They were HIV-positive and had pretty much decided to flee," said Ashi Appah, director of the Kaduna-based Gender and Human Values.

"There're also cases where the husband knows he's infected and takes ARVs but doesn't tell his wife," she added.

GETTING RELIGIOUS LEADERS ON BOARD

Faced with such social difficulties, state officials and AIDS groups are trying to enlist the help of religious leaders and prominent members of the Muslim community.

The Sultan of Sokoto, the supreme leader of Nigeria's Muslims, took part in a radio and television HIV awareness campaign calling for abstinence and fidelity that was organised by the National Action Committee Against AIDS (NACA).

Fati Mohamed, a famous actress in the country's North, has also helped out with messages that are plastered on billboards all over town.

"I thought I knew all about HIV but I learned a lot during this campaign," she told IRIN, adding that Muslim women do not have enough information.

The Jama'atu Nasrul Islam (JNI), a grouping of Muslim organisations, and its Christian counterpart, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), are increasingly active in raising HIV awareness among their respective communities and have also met with each other on a number of occasions.

"The existence of AIDS is slowly gaining acceptance," said SACA's Yohanna. "But there is still a lot of work to be done in the fight against ignorance, myths, and socio-cultural obstacles."

"We have to break through the wall of silence."

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

NIGERIA: 3,000 people displaced after floods now camping out in schools

KANO, 16 Aug 2005 (IRIN) - More than 3,000 people displaced by flash floods in Nigeria’s eastern Taraba state are facing tough conditions at their temporary shelters, with food, medicines and sanitation materials in short supply, humanitarian officials said on Tuesday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Dozens of people were killed when the River Jalingo overflowed its banks following heavy rains last week and washed away more than 50 houses. Many of the deaths occurred when the bridge over the river collapsed as people stood on it to observe the rising waters.

Since then the 3,000 people made homeless by the floods have been camped in four primary schools in Jalingo, the state capital.

“The plight of the flood victims is pathetic,” Manjo Martin, the Nigerian Red Cross disaster response coordinator, told reporters. “I appeal to the government and others to come to their aid by providing food, medicine and bedding to reduce their suffering."

Hamza Faruk, head of the state's emergency relief committee, said the government had begun providing food, clothing and medical supplies to the flood victims.

But many of the displaced have complained of poor conditions in the impromptu camps.

“There are insufficient toilets and only 10 mattresses and three mats were given to more than 200 people. Women spread their wrap-arounds on the bare floor to sleep,” said Buhari Adamu, who is camped out at the Lamure Primary School.

Faiza Sule, a mother of twins, complained that the food rations were inadequate for the children and that there was a lack of drugs needed to treat the many cases of malaria and diarrhoea in the camp.

August and September are generally the wettest months in parts of northern and central Nigeria, with villages and towns on the banks of major rivers most at risk of flash floods.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

NIGERIA: Dozens killed in southeast feud over farmland

PORT HARCOURT, 26 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Dozens of people died in clashes last week between two rival communities in southeastern Nigeria over ownership of prized farmland, residents and officials said Tuesday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

More than 50 people were killed in the worst day of the violence last Thursday when fighters armed with machetes and rifles, believed to be from Cross River State, rampaged through a settlement of people across the border in neighbouring Ebonyi State, residents said.

John Otu, Ebonyi commissioner for information, confirmed there were many deaths but said he could not give definite figures. He said a longstanding dispute over farming land flared up again last week, with retaliatory attacks culminating in Thursday痴 mayhem.

典he people are farmers and this is the farming season which often brings such conflicts,・Otu told IRIN.

Ebonyi governor, Sam Egwu, on Saturday met his Cross River counterpart, Donald Duke, in an effort to calm rising tension in the area and stop the violence from spreading.

Police officials said reinforcements had been sent to the area to prevent more fighting and Otu said no further violence has been reported between the two communities.

Thousands of people have died in Nigeria in communal, ethnic and religious clashes often triggered by land disputes since the 1999 election of President Olusegun Obasanjo ended more than 15 years of repressive military rule.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:46 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Cholera outbreak kills up to 100 in Benue State

ABUJA, 25 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - The Nigerian government has rushed emergency help to Benue State in southeastern Nigeria to deal with an outbreak of cholera in the state capital Makurdi that has caused numerous deaths.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

A senior government official said at least seven people had died from cholera in Makurdi over the past two weeks but local residents said the true death toll appeared to be nearer 100.

Benue State Governor George Akuma visited the worst-hit Wadata district of the city on Monday and declared free treatment for hundreds of people in hospital because of the epidemic.

Cholera is an acute intestinal infection usually caused by poor sanitation and dirty drinking water. It causes severe diarrhoea and vomiting that leads to dehydration of the body and can prove fatal unless treated quickly.

Many residents of Makurdi depend on the River Benue, which flows through the city, for drinking water.

Government emergency health teams have concentrated on quick, oral re-hydration therapy to save lives.

They are also supplying purified drinking water in tanker trucks to the affected communities to break the transmission cycle.

Mike Iduma, Benue state commissioner for health, said the authorities had so far confirmed only seven deaths from cholera, but he acknowledged that many more deaths from the epidemic may not have been officially reported.

Accounts from residents in the affected districts of Makurdi pointed to a death toll nearer 100.

Murtala Tanko, a Muslim undertaker in the mainly Islamic Wadata district of the city, said he had buried more than 90 people who died from cholera in the past two weeks.

New outbreaks of cholera and some deaths from the disease have also been reported in the Gwer West and Apa local council areas, just outside the state capital.

Despite Nigeria's oil wealth, more than 70 percent of the country's 126 million people live below the poverty line and cholera outbreaks are common in poor urban areas which lack proper sanitation and clean drinking water.

In February, at least 46 people died of cholera in Kusa, a village in Oyo state in southwestern Nigeria, which is mainly populated by quarry workers and self-employed gold miners.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:45 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Polio cases dropping but still highest worldwide, says WHO

LAGOS, 20 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - The number of new polio cases recorded in Nigeria has declined sharply in recent months, but the country still accounts for more than half of all new cases of the disease recorded worldwide, the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

WHO said in its latest surveillance report that 41 cases of polio were recorded in 12 states of Nigeria between 27 February and 16 April, down from 86 cases registered in 23 states of the federation during the same period in 2004.

All the new cases were recorded in northern Nigeria, where many Muslim parents have been reluctant to vaccinate their children.

A WHO campaign to eliminate polio worldwide by the end of 2004 was set back by a vaccination boycott spurred by radical Islamic preachers in the mainly Muslim north of Nigeria.

They claimed that polio vaccines contained agents that would make people infertile, infect them with HIV/AIDS and cause cancer as part of a Western plot to reduce the Muslim population.

As a result, four states in northern Nigeria suspended polio vaccinations in late 2003. Kaduna, Zamfara and Kano states resumed vaccinations after a few months, but Kano state maintained its boycott for 11 months until July 2004.

"There has been a downward trend in the number of cases since May 2004," the WHO said, noting that this largely reflected the resumption of government polio immunisation campaigns throughout the north.

But it warned: "Although there have been no cases in the south since September 2004, Nigeria is still isolating poliovirus in the northern states."

WHO expressed concern that such a large number of infections had occurred during the dry season when transmission rates are lowest. It stressed that efforts must be intensified to improve immunisation coverage and break the transmission chain before the rains begin in June.

"If transmission is to be interrupted in 2005, the quality of immunization activities must improve in the low transmission season," WHO said.

Health officials in northern Nigeria acknowledged that many children have been missed during immunisation campaigns carried out over the past year as a result of residual resistance to vaccination in some areas.

Abubakar Hassan, an official of the Kano state health ministry, said immunisation coverage was still less than 70 percent in the state, which contains Nigeria's second largest city, Kano.

"Our governor (Ibrahim Shekarau) has shown his personal commitment, publicly immunising his own daughter to show the polio vaccine is safe," said Hassan. "We are now intensifying efforts to make sure the message reaches everybody and that every child is immunised," he added.

Polio can strike at any age, though half of all cases occur in children under three. The viral disease causes paralysis, usually in the lower limbs, leaving victims consigned to a wheelchair or forced to use crutches.

WHO said the 41 cases of polio recorded in Nigeria between late February and mid-April accounted for over half the 76 cases recorded worldwide during this period.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:43 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Government cracks down on Biafra secessionist movement

LAGOS, 19 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Fifty-three people who participated in an unusual soccer tournament last year in Nigeria's main city, Lagos, are now fighting for dear life.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

State prosecutors say the tournament, held in the name of a secessionist group, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), amounted to treason. They have demanded the death penalty.

The accused were arrested in September 2004 and were held in detention for more than six months before being formally charged in March this year.

The group, which includes three women, was eventually granted bail on Monday, 11 April.

"Some of them were arrested while playing football, some while watching football and some while selling water sachets at the football venue," said defence lawyer Anthony Omaghomi, while arguing the case for bail.

Overruling prosecution objections, high court judge Marcel Awokulehin said the defendants were entitled to bail until they were found guilty of planning to "levy war against the nation" and inciting Nigerians against President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Bitter memories of a brutal civil war

By bringing treason charges in this case, the government has indicated a readiness to use a very heavy hand indeed to crack down against the increasingly popular separatist movement campaigning for an independent republic of Biafra in southeastern Nigeria.

For many Nigerians, the very mention of Biafra raises bitter memories of a brutal civil war nearly 40 years ago that threatened to tear the nation apart shortly after its independence from Britain.

In 1967, the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria broke away from the Nigerian federation to declare the independent state of Biafra.

This contained most of Nigeria's oil wells, so the separatist move threatened to deprive the rest of the federation of its main source of revenue.

A civil war ensued that claimed more than one million lives as people in the steadily shrinking Biafran enclave succumbed to famine.

By 1970 the insurrection had been totally crushed and the immediate threat of Africa's most populous country splitting up into a series of tribal-based states had been averted.

But the problem has not gone away.

Non-violent protest

Ralph Uwazurike, the lawyer and politician who formed MASSOB in 1999, insists that his own campaign to resurrect the sovereign state of Biafra is completely non-violent.

His movement has organised a series of rallies, demonstrations, boycotts and stay-at-home strikes and the infamous Lagos soccer tournament to campaign for its demands.

MASSOB has often made symbolic declarations of independence during these events.

Support for the movement has grown as Nigerians in general have become more and more disenchanted with the present system of federal government.

Uwazurike's claims that successive governments have oppressed and discriminated against Nigeria's estimated 30 million Igbos have struck a chord among thousands of young Igbos, born after the civil war, who have joined MASSOB's ranks.

The government initially saw MASSOB as an irritant, but its attitude hardened after the group organised a successful stay-at-home protest on 26 August 2004. This not only shut down private businesses and markets in the southeast, but also in major cities such as Lagos and Kano, where Igbos are dominate in commerce.

"It was not just a vote for MASSOB but also a protest against Obasanjo's government," said Uche Okereke, a political science lecturer at the Awka university in Anambra state in southeastern Nigeria.

"People in this region believe they're still being punished for the Biafra war, and will point to the region's bad roads, poor electricity supply and absence of Igbos in top military and security positions to illustrate allegations of systematic neglect by successive regimes," he added.

But Okereke said that while many Igbos have increasingly questioned the existence of Nigeria as a nation, those who, like MASSOB, want to break up the federation, are not yet the majority.

"Many of those who are asking for Biafra are those who didn't experience the civil war," said Sylvester Mba, a 58-year-old engineer, who fought for Biafra during the civil war.

"If they had experienced Biafra, they would know it is not necessarily the solution to bad government," he said.

Seeking the peaceful break-up of Nigeria

MASSOB has never tried to put its popularity to the test by contesting elections - the movement simply says it is pushing for a constitutional conference to agree the peaceful break-up of Nigeria.

Obasanjo convened a three-month constitutional conference in the federal capital Abuja earlier this year to review the links that hold Nigeria together. But the 400 delegates, who debated the country's future there, were all personally invited by the president. MASSOB didn't get an invitation.

Obasanjo made very clear in his speech to open the conference on 21 February that the question of any part of Nigeria breaking away from the federation was not up for discussion.

"The National Political and Reform Conference is not designed to dismember or disintegrate Nigeria," Obasanjo told the 400 delegates assembled in the federal capital Abuja.

"The conference is about designing the most appropriate and relevant institutional mechanisms for managing our diversity and differences," he added.

Nigeria's 126 million people belong to about 250 different ethnic groups. But the country is dominated by the Hausa/Fulanis of the north, the Yoruba of the southwest and the Igbos of the southeast.

Rigged elections increase disenchantment

According to Okereke, sympathy for MASSOB has been growing since the general elections of April and May 2003, which were marred by widespread allegations of vote rigging.

The end result in southeastern Nigeria was that the All Progressive Grand Alliance Party (AGPA), a mainly Igbo party led by Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the leader of the Biafran secessionist movement in the 1960s, was eclipsed by the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) of President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Ojukwu, who is now 71, also ran unsuccessfully against Obasanjo for the presidency.

Since then, in-fighting between rival factions of the PDP in Anambra State, has led several local party leaders to declare publicly that they helped to rig the 2003 elections heavily in the PDP's favour.

Increasing public disgust with the PDP and Obasanjo's government has played into MASSOB's hands.

In major southeast cities such as Onitsha, Enugu, Aba and Owerri as well as towns and villages across the region, MASSOB has been hoisting the green, red and black Biafran flags with a rising sun in the middle.

"Whenever policemen go around the streets to take off the flags hanging on electricity poles, the flags are replaced overnight," said Izzy Achor, a resident of Onitsha.

In the city's Port Harcourt Street, a main thoroughfare, dozens of Biafran flags now flutter in the breeze.

A rash of publications including newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, has emerged in the region either published by MASSOB or its sympathizers, advocating the Biafran cause.

The independence movement even operates its own clandestine radio station, the Voice of Biafra International, which broadcasts on short wave in the 41-metre band.

Uwazurike, the leader of MASSOB, declined to speak to IRIN. He pointed out that he was currently subject to a court order banning him from making public statements. This was imposed after the police filed treason charges against him.

Soviet-style break-up

However, the secessionist leader has articulated his views clearly in a series of interviews already published.

"What you should understand prima facie is that Nigeria is no good, how Nigeria is being administered is not good," Uwazurike told reporters in September last year.

"That is why some people are even calling for a sovereign national conference, some people are calling for Biafra and others say self-determination."

"What I am saying as a person is that I want the Soviet experience to happen in Nigeria," he continued. "My idea is let Nigeria divide into as many places as possible; let the people go."

According to Uwazurike, those who want to prevent Nigeria from disintegrating are simply crooks on the make. He described them as those "who are taking what belongs to Peter to give to Paul, who rob Niger Delta people of their oil resources and send it to the north to establish Abuja (the federal capital) and a refinery in Kaduna.・BR>
Human rights groups say that dozens of pro-Biafran activists have been killed over the last six years for campaigning for such beliefs and more than 300 are currently in detention after being arrested by the police at marches and rallies organised by MASSOB.

One of the most dramatic confrontations occurred in March 2003, when armed police opened fire on unarmed MASSOB members at a rally in Uwazurike's hometown of Okwe in Imo State, killing seven people on the spot.

Human rights groups have accused the security forces of using brutal and excessive force to repress the non-violent activities of MASSOB.

The Civil Liberties Organisation, one of Nigeria's leading human rights groups, said in a recent statement that policemen frequently raided the homes of suspected MASSOB members, confiscated their property and used "disproportionate and often lethal force against a group that bears no arms".

Would violence be more effective?

MASSOB supporters say the movement is being unfairly punished by the government for its commitment to non-violence.

They point out bitterly that ethnic Ijaw militants in the Niger Delta appear to have gained more by taking up arms against the government.

The Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force, an Ijaw militia group led by Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, was invited to peace talks with the government in September last year after it threatened to attack oil platforms and shut down Nigeria's oil exports. Its leaders have been allowed to go free.

"Those who took up arms against the country, Obasanjo dined with them," said Biafran activist Martins Ukanwa. "But even though we don't have arms they are killing us because they see us as second-class citizens," he added.

The defunct Biafra had included areas occupied by oil region minorities such as Ijaws, Ogonis and Efiks. MASSOB activists said the new Biafra they are campaigning for still covers these areas if the inhabitants want.

的f they want to come with us they池e welcome, otherwise we Igbos are ready to go it alone,・Ukanwa said.

Nigerian police officials declined to comment on record about MASSOB.
Several described the Biafran nationalist movement as a banned organisation, but were unable to cite any law or decree banning it.

But the issue of Biafran independence remains touchy for the government, not least because Obasanjo, a former army general, fought personally in the civil war on the side of the federal government.

When in September last year Ojukwu, the former Biafran leader, told a weekly magazine that he had sympathies for Uwazurike's campaign to revive the independent state, he was immediately invited to an interview by the secretive state security police.

They sent Ojukwu a one-way ticket to travel from his home in the southeastern city of Enugu to appear for questioning at their Abuja headquarters.

Ojukwu declined the invitation and dared the authorities to take the politically risky step of arresting him.

Launching a stinging verbal attack on Obasanjo, he said: "Ralph Uwazurike is purely and simply a young man disgusted and frustrated by General Obasanjo's governance. It is significant as it appears that millions of Nigerians are with him."

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:41 AM | Comments (0)

CAMEROON-NIGERIA: Repatriation of Nigerian refugees to start on Monday

YAOUNDE, 15 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Cameroon, Nigeria and the UN Refugee agency UNHCR have signed an agreement providing for the voluntary repatriation of 10,000 Nigerians who fled across the border to escape ethnic clashes three years ago.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

We plan to start the voluntary repatriation of 10,000 out of an estimated 17,000 refugees on Monday 18 April,・Jacques Franquin, the UNHCR Representative in Cameroon told IRIN on Friday.

The repatriation will take place over a period of eight months, with 1,250 refugees expected to be repatriated every month, Franquin said.

Meanwhile, Cameroon faces a fresh influx of refugees from the Central African Republic (CAR).

Franquin said he had just returned from the border area where 3,000 people from the Mbororo ethnic group had sought shelter following attacks on their villages by former combatants who helped bring President Francois Bozize to power in a 2003 coup.

The gunmen had followed the refugees across the border causing further havoc in Cameroon, where 10,000 to 15,000 local people had also been displaced from their homes as a result of attacks and looting, he added.

Reuters news agency quoted the governor of Cameroon's Adamawa province, Joseph Noutsa, as saying the government had sent extra troops to restore order in the border area, where the raiders from CAR had staged a spate of night-time attacks in and around the villages of Djohong and Ngaoui, 500 km northeast of Yaounde.

Noutsa said the raiders were continuing to target cattle herders of the Mbororo ethnic group in Cameroon, kidnapping them and demanding a ransom, because of their perceived wealth.

The return of the Nigerian refugees was announced at a ceremony in Yaounde on Thursday, where the Nigerian and Cameroonian governments signed an agreement with UNHCR for their repatriation.

At least 23,000 Fulani cattle herdsmen fled from Nigeria into nearby Cameroon to escape clashes with farming communities on the Mambilla plateau in Taraba state between 1 and 7 January 2002. More than 100 people were killed in the fighting.

Some of the Fulani refugees later returned to Nigeria, but the majority remained in Cameroon.

Nigeria indicated last June it was willing to help these refugees come home.

However, Franquin said the UNHCR had made sure that proper reception centres were established and that the mainly Christian farmers on the Mambilla plateau were properly informed of the return of the Muslim Fulani refugees, before it started to truck them back across the border.

Franquin said a survey of refugees living in the Banyo and Donga-Mantung districts of western Cameroon, where most of the refugees had settled, had shown that 60 percent of them were willing to return home.

Edwin Edobor, the Nigerian High Commissioner (ambassador) in Cameroon, welcomed the repatriation agreement with a huge smile.

"Today is my happiest day since I took over the Nigerian diplomatic mission in Cameroon,・he signing of this accord now breaks the last barrier for the repatriation of 'my refugees',・he told reporters. "I will personally see to it that they go home safely and in the best conditions possible."

的 thank the Cameroon government for their hospitality, and the population of Adamawa (province) for proving that they are their own brothers' keepers," the high commissioner said.

The progressive departure of the Nigerian refugees will leave the UNHCR with about 30,000 urban refugees to look after in Cameroon. Most are concentrated in Yaounde, the administrative capital, and Douala, the country's main port and industrial centre.

Most of these are from Chad, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:39 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Ex senate leader, minister charged with corruption

ABUJA, 13 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Nigeria's former senate president and sacked education minister have been charged with corruption as President Olusegun Obasanjo continues his crusade against officials who fail to toe the line of honesty.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Adolphus Wabara, who as senate president was the country's third-ranking official until his departure last week, was charged with five other lawmakers. They were accused of taking a bribe of 55 million naira (US $410,000) from former education minister Fabian Osuji to mark up his budget figures.

The accused, who face up to seven years in jail if convicted, pleaded not guilty to the crimes alleged by the anti-graft watchdog set up by Obasanjo four years ago, the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC).

Hearings are to start 15 May and the accused have been granted bail.

Another senator, Chris Adighije, who publicly admitted to partaking of the bribe, was not charged, triggering local media reports that he may appear as a prosecution witness.

Appearing before the Senate Ethics Committee on Monday, sacked minister Osuji said the lawmakers through Wabara had demanded what he said was not a bribe but a 努elfare package・as the condition for approving higher education budget proposals after big cuts the previous year.

的 did not consider the episode bribery, and I still believe I acted in the overall interest of the education sector, and the nation,・said Osuji.

Obasanjo fired Osuji on 22 March, marking the start of a fresh offensive against widespread corruption that has seen a second minister fall and a former police chief charged in court with embezzling nearly US $100 million.

Obasanjo on Tuesday dismissed criticism that his anti-corruption war was targeted at his political enemies and renewed his resolve to battle Nigeria痴 culture of graft.

典hose doing bad are the enemies of Nigeria. They are not my enemies,・he told reporters in Abuja. 的f you are part of this government, you must toe the line of honesty.・BR>
He denied reports published in some local newspapers that millions of dollars have been traced to US bank accounts belonging to his son, Gbenga Obasanjo, and said people with the evidence must provide it.

鏑et the can of worms be opened up,・Obasanjo said.

The country of 126 million people is ranked third from bottom by the global corruption watchdog Transparency International in its 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index, doing just netter than Bangladesh and Haiti.

Obasanjo, who was elected president in 1999 after 15 years of military rule, began to tackle the problem after his re-election for a second and final four-year term in 2003.

But critics point out that no top official has actually been convicted and jailed for corruption since Obasanjo came back to power.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: More heads roll in crackdown on top-level corruption

ABUJA, 5 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - The leader of Nigeria's Senate resigned on Tuesday after being accused of bribe-taking. He quit less than 24 hours after President Olusegun Obasanjo sacked his housing minister for trying to sell off government houses on the cheap to people of power and influence.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

I hereby step aside as President of the Senate to enable me to attend to all the allegations against me,・Adolphus Wabara told the Senate chamber as he announced his decision.

"I pledge to make myself available to all panels investigating the allegations," he added.

Wabara's departure had been widely expected following public accusations that he and several other legislators had shared a $410,000 bribe paid by former Education Minister Fabian Osuji to ensure parliamentary approval of an inflated education budget.

Shortly after the information came to light last month, Obasanjo sacked Osuji.

On Monday the presidential axe fell on Mobolaji Osomo, the Minister of Housing and Urban Development as his campaign against corruption in the highest level of government continued.

Obasanjo sacked Osomo following weekend revelations that she had arranged to sell off 207 government houses in a plush suburb of Lagos to senior figures in the government and other people of influence.

Obasanjo stopped the deal and ditched the minister after discovering that two sisters and a brother of his wife Stella were among those in line to buy the luxury residences at knock-down prices.

擢ollowing an unsatisfactory explanation offered by the minister of housing・er appointment has been terminated forthwith by the president,・the government said in a terse statement.

Osomo cleared her office as former police chief Tafawa Balogun appeared before the high court in Abuja on Monday to be formally charged with 70 counts of graft and money laundering involving a total of 13 billion naira (US $98 million).

Balogun, who pleaded not guilty to all the charges, resigned suddenly as Inspector General of Police in January after three years in the job.

He was subsequently arrested on the order of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

The charges filed against Balogun include one that he forced a local bank to pay him a bribe of 30 million naira (US $227,000) to prevent the withdrawal of police security from its branches.

The institution, Societe Generale Bank, has since been closed by Nigeria's central bank for insolvency.

Balogun was remanded in custody until 18 April, when his application for bail will be heard.

Wabara is the most powerful head to roll so far in Obasanjo's current crusade against graft.

As President of the Senate, he was third in line to the head of state. But the politician's downfall was assured after Obasanjo went on national television two weeks ago to denounce him for bribe taking.

The final straw came on Monday when Wabara was instructed to resign by Obasanjo's People痴 Democratic Party, which has a comfortable majority in both houses of the federal parliament.

On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously elected Ken Nnamani, a 57-year-old senator from Enugu State southeastern Nigeria, to replace him.

The irregular deal to sell of government houses in the wealthy Lagos suburb of Ikoyi meanwhile threatens to claim further victims.

The list of alleged beneficiaries, which was sent anonomously to Obasanjo and was subsequently published by several Nigerian newspapers, included several ministers and state governors.

However, some of those named have publicly protested their innocence, saying they had not applied to buy any of the houses or had rejected offers made to them.

The government statement which announced Osomo's sacking apologised to those whose names appeared on the list of would-be house buyers, who were actually innocent of any wrongdoing.

Corruption is a deep-rooted problem in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country and the continent's top oil exporter.

The country of 126 million people is ranked third from bottom by the global corruption watchdog Transparency International in its 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index, just above Bangladesh and Haiti.

But Obasanjo, who was elected president in 1999 after 15 years of military rule, has begun to tackle the problem since his re-election for a second and final four-year term in 2003.

In January last Obasanjo sacked his then Labour Minister, Husseini Akwanga, for receiving bribes from a French company to help it secure a contract to produce national identity cards.

Akwanga was later put on trial along with two other former ministers, but the case has faced long delays and is yet to be concluded.

Government critics often point out that no top official has actually been convicted and jailed for corruption since Obasanjo came back to power through the ballot box six years ago after serving as military head of state from 1976 to 1979.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:35 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Wife's family implicated in Obasanjo's latest corruption crackdown

ABUJA, 4 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - In the latest corruption scandal to rock Nigeria, President Olusegun Obasanjo has cancelled the sale of 207 government houses at knockdown prices after discovering that close relatives of his wife and several cabinet ministers were to have been among the beneficiaries of this controversial deal.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

Obasanjo last week ordered Mobolaji Osomo, the Minister of Housing and Urban Development, to cancel the planned sale of these houses on well-to-do estates in Lagos, the commercial hub of Nigeria. He told Osomo to sell the houses by public auction instead.

的 must express my displeasure, in very clear terms, about the way you seem to be handling the sale of federal government property in Lagos,・Obasanjo told Osomo in his letter, dated 31 March, a copy of which was made available to IRIN.

The president said he had been alerted to the wrongdoing by an anonymous letter which informed him that 207 people were being 殿llocated or offered property for sale surreptitiously・ome without payment・

的 also feel personally embarrassed that almost all members of my wife痴 family are on that list,・Obasanjo said.

The list that was sent to Obasanjo has been widely published by Nigerian newspapers. It includes a brother and two sisters of Nigeria's first lady, Stella Obasanjo - Henry Abebe, Yemisi Abebe and Franca Abebe. All three were lined up to buy choice properties in the upmarket Lagos residential suburb of Ikoyi.

The list also contained the names of several government ministers, some of whom have claimed that they never submitted a request to buy any of the houses concerned.

The cancellation of the property deal has provided a temporary respite for government employees living in the affected houses who faced imminent eviction.

At two large condominium estates in Lagos, the news was received with celebration. The residents had long claimed they were being kicked out of their homes so that government ministers could get their hands on lucrative Lagos properties cheaply.

The government is currently selling off many of its houses as part of an IMF-backed policy to cut back on administration costs. In future, most civil servants will be expected to rent or buy their own accommodation.

Obasanjo recently launched a new crackdown on the corruption which has already claimed two high-profile victims.

Last month, Obasanjo sacked Education Minister Fabian Osuji, accusing him of bribing legislators, including Senate President Adolphus Wabara, to increase his ministry痴 budget for 2005.

And in January police chief Tafa Balogun retired suddenly amid allegations that he had salted away several million dollars of ill-gotten wealth in a series of bank accounts. Balogun was arrested last week by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. It was expected to formally lay charges against him on Monday.

Earlier, in January 2003, the president fired Labour Minister Hussein Akwanga over allegations that he took bribes from the French company SAGEM that enabled it to win a contract to produce new identity cards for Nigeria's 126 million inhabitants. Akwanga and three other senior politicians charged with him are currently free on bail pending the conclusion of their trial.

Corruption is rampant in Nigeria. However, no top government official has so far been convicted for corrupt practices during Obasanjo痴 six years in office.

The international corruption watchdog Transparency International ranked Nigeria third from bottom, just ahead of Bangladesh and Haiti, in its 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index.

[ENDS]

Posted by Publisher at 07:21 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2005

NIGERIA: Authorities predict 250,000 people on ARVs by mid-2006

The Nigerian government has said it aims to quadruple the number of people on antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) by mid-2006, enabling up to 250,000 HIV-positive people receive the medication.

DAKAR, 1 Mar 2005 (IRIN)
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

"With grants from the Global Fund, the US President's Initiative PEPFAR, the World Bank and the federal government, our projection is that we'll be able to treat 250,000 people by June 2006," Babatunde Osotimehin, the head of Nigeria's National Action Committee on AIDS (NACA), told IRIN.

The target was first announced last week at a press conference at the end of a visit to Nigeria by Richard Feachem, the director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Nigeria had previously set a goal of providing subsidised ARV treatment to 100,000 people by the end of 2005. About 65,000 already benefit from the scheme.

Nigeria has received funding for its ambitious AIDS programme from numerous international bodies. In July 2003, the Global Fund awarded a grant of US $70 million to the government in Abuja to be paid over five years, while the United States loaned Nigeria $150 million at preferential rates and the World Bank provided a further $110 million of soft loans

Nigeria has the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world after South Africa and India.

The authorities estimate that almost four million of the country's 126 million people are living with the virus.

In 1991, Africa's most populous country had an HIV prevalence rate of around two percent, but this shot up to five percent by 2003.

Last week the Nigerian Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo got approval from the cabinet to extend subsidised ARV treatment to 100,000 HIV-positive Nigerians by the end of 2005. Three years ago, the government launched the cheap treatment initiative, offering ARV drugs to 15,000 people at a discounted price.

"In addition to those 15,000 people on ARV treatment, there are now another 50,000 thanks to funds allocated by PEPFAR," Lambo was quoted as saying in the Nigerian daily, The Guardian, on Monday. "We think we will be able to treat 100,000 people by December."

However, despite these aggressive expansion plans, government officials said the country was unlikely to meet its World Health Organisation (WHO) target of putting 400,000 people on ARV treatment by the end of the year.

"This initiative seems very ambitious," NACA's Osotimehin told IRIN. Health Minister Lambo was equally cautious, telling The Guardian: "I'm not sure that we'll make it."

This 400,000 target is part of WHO's "Three by Five" initiative which aims to put three million people in the developing world on anti-AIDS treatment by the end of 2005.

According to Pierre Mpele, the UNAIDS coordinator in Nigeria, the country's programmes to fight AIDS and malaria are way behind schedule.

"The latest loans were only signed in 2004. There's been a big delay in getting the programmes going, which is the collective responsibility of the donors and the recipients," Mpele told IRIN.

"We're in the acceleration phase," he added. "After a period of uncertainty, the authorities have taken several decisions that makes us think the acceleration is in progress."

"Nigeria is a miniature Africa. There are 36 states, some of whom have prevalence rates touching 10 percent. And the country is ethnically and religiously complex," Mpele went on. "It's an immense task."

Posted by Publisher at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2005

NIGERIA: Surgeons launch drive to cure incontinence caused by difficult pregnancies

"Fistula Fortnight", a campaign to end the painful and embarrassing childbirth injury that leaves women incontinent, has kicked off in northern Nigeria this week.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said on Wednesday that 94 women had undergone surgery in the first two days of the drive.

典here痴 no nice way to talk about it. They (the mothers) leak urine or faeces, or both,・and that results in their being ostracized by their families and the rest of society," said spokeswoman Kristen Hetle. 擢istula is unpleasant to talk about, but easy to cure.・

Although fistula was wiped out 100 years ago in Europe and the United States, the World Health Organisation estimates that more than two million people are living with the condition in developing countries, with up to 100,000 new cases being added each year.

"These figures are based on the number of women seeking treatment and are likely to be gross underestimates," UNFPA says.

Fistula is a condition is often associated with child brides, whose birth canal is not yet fully developed to cope with the pregnancies that usually follow soon after marriage.

The end result is several days of obstructed labour. The baby dies in about 95 percent of cases, and the lack of blood flow to the mother's pelvic tissues causes holes in her internal organs, allowing urine and faeces to seep out.

Nigeria has one of the highest rates of fistula in the world, with an estimated 800,000 women living with the condition and 20,000 developing it each year, according to UNFPA figures.

The condition can be cured by reconstructive surgery that is relatively straightforward. But in the operation costs about US$300 on average and that is well beyond the means of most women who suffer from fistula.

Fistula is most common in the mainly Muslim north of the country, where girls as young as 12 years are married off. They often become pregnant before their body has fully developed and this frequently leads to complications at childbirth. Fistula is less common in the south, where women tend to marry at a much later age.

Fatima, who comes from the northern state of Kano, was 14 when she married and she fell pregnant soon afterwards.

的 was in labour for six days. For six days I did not pass stool or urine," Fatima, who eventually gave birth to a stillborn baby, told experts at UNFPA. "When the urine finally came, it came non-stop. That's when I knew I had a problem.・

"Urine, the oppressor of the world"

Even though sufferers try to keep clean, the smell of urine or faeces is hard to eliminate and many are stigmatised by the community and ostracised by their family members.

"The whole community rejected me,・Fatima recalled. 的 didn稚 go out at all. Anywhere I went, they laughed at me.・BR>
In Jos in Plateau state, fistula victims from the Hausa ethnic group have composed a song to deal with the problems they suffer, entitled 'Urine, the oppressor of the world', according to Leonard Wall, a professor at the Washington University in St Louis.

"My husband threw me out because I was leaking. If this sickness 'catches you' they'll carry you out and throw you away too," is how the song ends.

It is in northern Nigeria that the latest UNFPA campaign is focused.

Four volunteer doctors from the United States and Britain have teamed up with 24 Nigerian counterparts to treat hundreds of women at four hospitals in northern Nigeria over the two weeks.

All those who are treated have access to specialist nurses after the operation, as well as social workers on hand for counselling.

展e hope that the 詮istula Fortnight・will help to heal wounds and renew hope for hundreds of women suffering from fistula in Nigeria,・Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the head of UNFPA, said in a statement. 的t is one step to help address the tremendous backlog of patients and get care to those in need.・

Reconstructive surgery, even years after the pregnancy, can cure the condition and treating sufferers is crucial, campaigners say.

But so too is preventing women developing the condition in the first place and that means improving maternal care and allowing women with complicated labours the possibility of a Caesarean section.

UNFPA launched a campaign to end fistula in 30 endemic countries in Africa, the Arab states and South Asia in 2003. The Nigerian drive started on 21 February and runs to 6 March.

Posted by Publisher at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Obasanjo opens constitutional debate, rules out secession

President Olusegun Obasanjo opened a conference to draft changes to the constitution on Monday with a warning that delegates should not question the fundamental unity of Nigeria.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

The National Political and Reform Conference is not designed to dismember or disintegrate Nigeria,・Obasanjo told the 400 delegates assembled in the federal capital Abuja.

典he conference is about designing the most appropriate and relevant institutional mechanisms for managing our diversity and differences,・he added.

Obasanjo is a retired army general who fought as a military officer against the attempt by the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria to form the breakaway state of Biafra in the 1967-1970 civil war.

He said in his opening speech that the main aim of the present conference on constitutional reform was 鍍o strengthen the oneness and unity of Nigeria・

The delegates have all been appointed by Obasanjo or nominated by Nigeria痴 36 state governors - 28 of whom belong to the president's ruling People痴 Democratic Party (PDP).

They have been given three months to produce a new draft constitution.

Nigeria is Africa痴 most populous country, with more than 126 million people.

The large Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo tribes dominate the political scene. However, Nigerians are split into more than 250 ethnic and language groups.

Overlying this diversity is a deep political fault line that runs through the country, dividing the largely Muslim north from the predominantly Christian and Animist south.

For much of its history since independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has been rocked by ethnic, religious and political upheavals, including the civil war that prevented the oil-producing southeast from seceding as an independent state of Biafra.

In recent years there have been strident calls from different regions of the country for political reforms.

The inhabitants of the oil-rich Niger Delta are demanding more access to oil revenues controlled by the federal government. Meanwhile, other ethnic and interest groups have demanded the devolution of more powers from central government to the regions.

Many critics of Obasanjo have boycotted the present constitutional conference, protesting that it is stuffed with the government's own nominees and has been barred from discussing certain contentious issues such as secession.

A coalition of opposition and pro-democracy groups have vowed to hold a parallel conference later this year to which delegates will be elected rather than nominated.

Obasanjo, whose party was widely accused of rigging the 2003 general elections to secure a second term in office, dismissed the initiative as 砥npatriotic strategies for precipitating crises.

Posted by Publisher at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: Plateau state IDPs face daunting obstacles to return to "home of peace and tourism"

Throughout Plateau state in central Nigeria, colorful billboards urge people to "give peace a chance", to "stand united" and to "restore Plateau the beautiful".

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

However, almost one year after spiraling violence between Christians and Muslims left more than 1,000 people dead and over 200,000 others displaced, many of those who fled are still too scared to return to the "home of peace and tourism", as this picturesque hilly state is officially known.

A six-month, state of emergency was imposed in Plateau by President Olusegun Obasanjo in May 2004 to stop the indiscriminate slaughter of mainly Muslim cattle herders by Christian farmers and retaliatory attacks by the Muslims, which were equally bloody and horrific.

Yet the state of emergency was lifted in mid-November. Many fear the lifting of exceptional security measures could presage a slide back into the bloody cycle of revenge attacks. Worse still, people fear that such killings could spread to other parts of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 126 million inhabitants.

It would not be the first time.

The massacre of several hundred Muslims in the small town of Yelwa in southern Plateau state last May, sparked deadly reprisals in Kano, Nigeria's second largest city, 350 km to the north. Yelwa's Muslim majority went on the rampage against Christians from the south of the country.

The destruction wrought in last year's clashes is still plain to see in a string of towns and villages in and around Yelwa, where the violence reached its climax.

In Yelwa itself, life remains grim. The Nigerian Red Cross reported at least 600 Muslims were killed in the town during one particularly bad fight in May 2004. This incident finally triggered the imposition of a state of emergency.

Several mass graves in both the Muslim and Christian areas of the town attest to heavy losses on both sides over a period of intermittent skirmishing during the preceding four months.

According to an assessment mission led by the European Commission's Humanitarian Office in July 2004, up to 80 percent of houses in Yelwa were destroyed, decimating the population of about 26,000.

The Plateau state government calculated the total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) within the state at almost 220,000 in September 2004, representing a cumulative total since ethnic and religious violence erupted in the state capital, Jos, in September 2001.

Some of those who fled Yelwa have returned and are trying to pick up the pieces among the rubble and charred remains of their homes. Still, few have the means to start rebuilding.

Esther Joseph and her nine children, who live in the one small part of her compound that remains relatively intact, are among these impoverished returnees.

Joseph witnessed her husband being hacked to death when gangs of Muslim Hausa-Fulani attackers killed some 70 people from her own, predominantly Christian, Tarok tribe, as they hid in a church in February 2004. Her house overlooks both the church, which was burned to the ground, and the mass grave where her husband and scores of others are buried.

"I never know what tomorrow will bring," Joseph said. "But I am not afraid because I have faith in God's protection."

The church is slowly being rebuilt, as are several mosques that were destroyed in the violence. Pastor Sunday Wuyep described the reconstruction of these places of worship as a "confidence-building measure" to help heal wounds and encourage the community to return.

Some of the wounds run deep, though, and will not heal easily.

Since news of the crisis in Plateau disappeared from the headlines within Nigeria and further, humanitarian assistance has been virtually non-existent.

The only relief agency present in the area, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Holland), is treating around 150 people a day, mostly for malaria and diarrhea, but also for trauma.

Many people witnessed their own relatives being mutilated and killed, and hundreds of women and girls were abducted. Some were raped.

Six-year-old Abdul Majid haltingly described how his Christian captors forced him to do domestic work and to drink alcohol. Relatives managed to trace him after he had spent seven months in captivity.

Although some of those who fled their homes at the height of the violence have returned, many others are too afraid to come back. These include several thousand displaced people who remain stuck in camps in neighboring Bauchi and Nassarawa states. Many others have been taken in by friends and relatives and are effectively hidden within their host communities.

As a result, there is no reliable data about the overall number of displaced people. Zanna Muhammed, the deputy director of Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency, said there had been no registration or verification of numbers of IDPs and many of the estimates in circulation were "grossly misleading".

In Nassarawa state, to the south of Plateau, only 250 people remain in the Shinge IDP camp near the town of Lafia.

Some of the camp's former residents have integrated into the local community; some have joined relatives in other states, while others have returned to the Yelwa area to try and salvage what they can of their homes.

Many of those who remain cite a lack of shelter as the main obstacle to their return.

In Bauchi state - which is predominantly Hausa-Fulani and administered under Islamic Sharia law - about 3,000 IDPs from Plateau are living in a variety of public buildings in and around Bauchi city. They have even occupied two primary schools.

In the Muazu House camp, 32-year-old Maimuna Adamu, who lost her husband and five of her seven children in the May 2004 attack on Yelwa, spoke for many of those who fled.

"I definitely don't want to return there - ever," she said. "This will be my home now. But I need help to get shelter."

In the nearby Women's Centre, camp leader Husain Mohamed echoed the same sentiment.

"The great majority of people here will never return," he said. "In this place our own brethren welcome us. As long as Yelwa is under Shendam [the Christian-dominated local government authority] it won't be safe for us to live there."

Conditions in the IDP camps are generally good, with the Bauchi state government providing food and other relief items, as well as allocating some land for resettlement.

"It is not our policy to encourage resettlement in Bauchi," said Mohamed Babayo, director of the Bauchi state Task Force Committee set up to look after the people displaced from Plateau. "But with an estimated total of 24,000 internally displaced people still staying here, who may never return to their homes, we have to do something about it. Of course we have to be careful that we're not inundated with bogus IDPs trying to claim land, so we're proceeding very slowly and waiting for IDPs themselves to show genuine commitment to staying here and trying to rebuild by themselves."

More than 2,000 plots of land have so far been allocated to displaced families near Bauchi city, but conditions vary greatly.

At Baram there is electricity, there is a newly built primary school and a few new houses are going up.

Meanwhile, at Marrabaran, a handful of people have started trying to clear the rocky land to put up new houses, but there is no infrastructure for them. There has been some ad hoc assistance with building materials, but nothing at all in terms of income-generation projects.

Babayo blamed this on financial constraints and a lack of donor interest. He acknowledged that it could take "a very long time" for people to rebuild their homes and livelihoods.

"But people are extremely enterprising," he added. "Host communities have also been extraordinarily generous and accommodating, so ultimately, people will succeed in resettling here."

Despite the high levels of fear and animosity, the majority of Muslims and Christians in Plateau state agree that land disputes and a long history of ethnic rivalry are the underlying cause of the simmering conflict between them - not religious differences.

Hausa-Fulani Muslims in Plateau have long complained that predominantly Christian farmers steal their cattle and prevent them from grazing, whilst the farmers counter that the Hausa-Fulani cattle encroach on their land.

"The crux of the problem is that a lot of people are coming to this part of the country and trying to stake a claim to land that is not rightfully theirs," said Sheikh Yusuf Gomwalk, an Islamic scholar of the Jama'atu Nasril Islam organisation in Jos.

He was referring to the entrenched divisions throughout Nigeria between people who are considered indigenous to an area, and those regarded as settlers. Even though settlers may have lived in an area for hundreds of years, they are consistently discriminated against in terms of land ownership, control of commerce, jobs and education.

In predominantly Christian Plateau state, the majority of "settlers" belong to the Hausa-Fulani ethnic group, who have gradually trekked south from northern Nigeria and even Niger as the expanding Sahara desert has dried up their traditional grazing lands.

"It is only the politicians who play the religious card," Gomwalk said. "This whole crisis is part of a larger scheme by the northern power base to dominate the country's Middle Belt. But there is particularly intense resistance to this in Plateau."

Some Plateau residents, including prominent community leaders, remain convinced that the state government initiated the recent crisis in order to rid the area of Muslim settlers. To them, the state of emergency was a blessing, which helped to restore confidence.

Others are adamant that the recently re-instated state governor, Joshua Dariye, was made a scapegoat for the crisis. He was ejected from power six months ago, while Chris Ali, a former army general, handpicked by Obasanjo, was put in charge of Plateau.

Nigeria has experienced numerous outbreaks of serious violence since the end of military rule in 1999, yet such emergency powers had not previously been invoked.

Obasanjo will be forced by the constitution to retire after serving two consecutive, four-year terms as Nigeria's elected president, but there are already two main candidates limbering up for the presidential nomination of his People's Democratic Party (PDP).

One is Vice President Atiku Abubakar. The other is former military head of state, Ibrahim Babangida, who like Obasanjo, is a former army general.

Both these contenders are powerful northerners. However, Obasanjo, a Christian from the Yoruba southwest of Nigeria, is widely regarded to favor Babangida, who supported his own bid for power.

Yet one of Abubakar's key supporters is the disgraced Plateau state governor, who lost his power.

Against this background of Machiavellian politics at a national level, there are many who fear that the federal government's attempts to bring peace to Plateau state are largely empty gestures.

One set event that formed part of this process was a Plateau state peace conference in September 2004, which President Obasanjo personally attended.

This event was described by Yelwa councilor Abullahi D. Abdullahi II as "superficially good, but definitely not truly representative of the Plateau state residents and if anything, entrenching divisions even more deeply".

Questions are also being asked about a proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

"This may be just a cover to avoid the issue of prosecuting and bringing to justice the perpetrators of the violence - including the security forces," said one Yelwa resident. "Until this happens there can be no forgiveness and no chance of peace."

Further violence could trigger potentially massive population movements with a destabilising effect on the entire country. Ordinary Nigerians can only hope that the politicians will see this as a risk too far.

Posted by Publisher at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: National conference on constitutional change meets with scepticism

A national conference to debate constitutional reform opens in Nigeria on Monday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

But many are sceptical that the forum, dominated by nominees of President Olusegun Obasanjo痴 ruling party, will suggest radical initiatives to ease the tensions that threaten to pull apart Africa痴 most populous nation.

Although many political leaders have been calling for constitutional change for years to give Nigeria痴 250 different ethnic groups a greater say in their own affairs and adjust the balance of power between the federal government and the country痴 36 member states, Obasanjo himself is a last-minute convert to the cause.

The former military head of state who returned to power through the ballot box in 1999, had until recently vehemently opposed all suggestions that the constitution be reviewed from top to bottom.

However, constitutional reform has been a burning topic in Nigeria since independence from Britain in 1960 and Obasanjo has finally decided to face it.

Over the past 45 years, the controversy has led to civil war, popular unrest and a deepening of religious and ethnic divides, especially between the staunchly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south.

More recently arguments over constitutional reform have also threatened to disrupt the production of oil, the lifeblood of Nigeria痴 economy.

Obasanjo finally agreed at the end of last year that the issue should be formally debated with a view to amending the rule book that governs the way in which Nigeria痴 126 million people live together.

展e should not be afraid to meet and discuss our problems, challenges, fears, aspirations, and prospects as a people,・the president said in a national broadcast to announce the 21 February start date of the National Political Reform Conference.

展e should not discuss in fear and we should never fear to discuss,・he added.

Yet Obasanjo was quick to make clear that Nigeria痴 existence as a nation must not be called into question at the conference.

徹ur disagreement must not lead to disintegration,・he warned.

Four decades of controversy

Secession is an issue that has been discussed over the years by several ethnic groups, especially the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria.

They fought and lost a 1967-1970 civil war to try and create the breakaway state of Biafra, a state, which if created, would have taken nearly all of Nigeria痴 vital oil revenues with it.

Many political analysts doubt how representative of public opinion the constitutional conference will be, since the 400 delegates meeting in the capital Abuja have been handpicked by Obasanjo himself and Nigeria痴 36 state governors.

Three quarters of these governors belong to Obasanjo痴 ruling People痴 Democratic Party (PDP).

And, at the end of the three-month discussion period, Obasanjo will have the final say on whether the conference recommendations will actually be implemented.

典he President appears to have decided to do the popular thing and let Nigerians talk without giving up control,・said political analyst Ike Onyekwere who writes as a columnist for several Nigerian newspapers.

Onyekewere told IRIN that he believed Obasanjo had weakened the credibility of the project and had failed to appease those most aggrieved by their lot in Nigeria who have been calling for constitutional reform for decades.

Already there is a parallel conference planned.

A coalition of groups opposed to Obasanjo痴 conference will meet in June under the banner of Pro-National Conference Organisations (PRONACO). In this planned forum, elected delegates will be free to discuss everything, including the right by various communities to secede from the federation.

The organisers have challenged Obasanjo to allow the election of conference delegates and subject any draft constitution devised to be put to national referendum.

Recent unrest in the Oil States

Nigeria is the biggest oil producer in Africa. Its output of up to 2.5 million barrels per day provides 90 percent of the country痴 foreign exchange earnings and drives the economy.

Obasanjo痴 sudden conversion to the idea of constitutional reform followed threats by an Ijaw ethnic militia group last September to shut down oil production in the Niger delta ・a move that would have been tantamount to flicking the switch on Nigeria痴 life support machine.

These threats were taken very seriously by the global oil industry.

When the Niger Delta People痴 Volunteer Force (NDPVF), led by Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, declared all-out war against the government and threatened to blow up oil installations in the Niger delta, world oil prices shot to record highs of more than US$50 per barrel.

The impoverished residents of the Niger delta have been complaining for years that the federal government takes all the oil money generated on their doorstep and has left their region poor, undeveloped and polluted by oil spills.

The oil companies have become used to activists briefly occupying their installations and taking oil workers hostage to demand the redress of local grievances.

But suddenly, last year, they found themselves taking on a 3,000-strong Ijaw ethnic militia group prepared to simply shoot their employees on sight in order to shut down production.

They had good reason to be worried.

Political analysts say the NDPVF has long connived with corrupt government officials and senior military commanders to steal oil from pipelines in the delta and sell it to tankers waiting offshore. Its fighters belong to the Ijaw tribe, the largest ethnic group in the delta, and know its labyrinthine waterways like the back of their hand. Tackling them head on would be a dangerous and costly operation.

Obasanjo responded by dispatching a presidential jet to fetch Dokubo-Asari for talks in Abuja. His initiative managed to quickly calm the situation.

One of the militia leader痴 key demands was for Obasanjo to call a sovereign national conference to devise a new federal structure that would give the impoverished people of the oil region greater control over its wealth.

However, Dokubo-Asari has refused to take part in the government-organised conference opening in Abuja on Monday. Instead, he has chosen to back the rival constitutional conference proposed by PRONACO.

的 have rejected them, we池e part of PRONACO,・he told reporters in Lagos last week.

The oil producing southeast has a long history of dissent.

In 1967, only seven years after independence, the southeast attempted to secede, leading to a bloody three-year civil war.

Many of the Igbo people who dominate the region still resent the fact that they remain part of the federation. They feel they have suffered deep neglect under successive Nigerian civilian and military regimes and are once more demanding the right to secede.

This secession drive is spearheaded by the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, which appers to attracting increasing popular support among the Igbo.

The red, black and green flag of Biafra, with a rising sun at its centre, flies from many a lamp post and tree top across towns and villages in the southeast ・a quiet mark of protest that lingers on.

There is also a rising clamour for more autonomy and a looser form of national federation among Obasanjo痴 own Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria.

The most radical expression of this the O壇ua People痴 Congress (OPC), a separatist militia group, which has combined vigilante duties with fighting for the interests of the Yoruba in ethnic violence in which many have died.

Dissatisfaction in the Muslim dominated north

Even in the Muslim north, whose leaders once feared that secession by the south would deprive them of access to the nation痴 wealth and an outlet to the sea, Islamic radicals are now pushing for a national conference to loosen the federal ties and give individual states more scope to implement Islamic Sharia檀 law.

Many moderate Muslims and Christians, who regard Sharia檀 punishments such as cutting off hands and feet for theft and stoning women to death for adultery as a violation of human rights enshrined in the constitution, view such moves with trepidation.

But in the wake of renewed fighting between Muslims and Christians in the northern city of Kano last year, Datti Ahmed, who leads the Supreme Council for Sharia檀 in Nigeria, declared there would be war unless the government called a sovereign national conference to decide the country future.

"It is either a sovereign national conference now or we go to war because the federal government has failed and the system has collapsed," Ahmed said.

In the past five years 12 states in the predominantly Muslim north have adopted the strict Islamic legal code or Sharia檀, prescribing death by stoning for adultery, amputation of limbs for stealing and public flogging for drinking alcohol.

This has caused deep apprehension among Christians, who form large minorities in several of these states.

Meanwhile conflicts between farmers and cattle herdsmen in Nigeria痴 Middle Belt, have taken on an ethnic and religious mantle, further deepening the Muslim-Christian divide.

Embarrassing blunder

Embarrassingly for Obasanjo, two of Nigeria痴 most eminent campaigners for constitutional reform have distanced themselves from his conference initiative.

Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize winning novelist and playwright and Anthony Enahoro, a prominent campaigner against British colonial rule in the 1950s, were both listed among government nominees to the conference.

But at a joint news conference on Thursday, Soyinka and Enahoro said they had never received formal invitations. They said they had only heard about their nomination as delegates appointed by the president in the news.

Soyinka went on to denounce the constitutional conference as 殿 distraction.・

But Enahoro said he would let his Movement for National Reformation decide whether or not he should take part once his formal invitation arrived.

Both men pledged to continue working for a sovereign national conference on constitutional reform.

Some suspect that Obasanjo痴 ultimate objective in calling the present conference is to amend the constitution so that he can serve a third four-year term once his current mandate runs out in 2007.

This was a fear voiced by Yusuf Bala Usman, a respected university teacher and political activist.

的 believe Obasanjo's strategy is very simple. He wants the conference to hold so that people ・ould fight themselves there so that he can declare himself as the only person capable of saving the country,・Usman told reporters in the northern city of Kaduna on Thursday.

典hen he may change the constitution and make himself a president like (Jacques) Chirac and appoint a prime minister,・he added.

Obasanjo would not be the first African head of state to tamper with the constitution in order to stip out a two-term limit on presidential tenure.

President Idriss Deby in neighbouring Chad is going through the process of doing this at present.

Obasanjo has so far remained silent about what will happen in two years time. However, he is widely believed to favour the nomination of former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida, as the PDP flag-bearer in the next presidential election.

Posted by Publisher at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA-TOGO: Nigerian president tells Togolese counterpart to embrace democratic rule

President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria told Faure Gnassingbe, the army-appointed president of Togo, that he should hold democratic elections and return to the constitution as it existed before he seized power at a meeting in the Nigerian capital on Monday.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

The President asked them to retrace their steps and return to the position of constitutionality and organise a true, free and transparent election,・Obasanjo spokeswoman, Remi Oyo, told reporters.

The Togolese delegation left the meeting without comment and flew home.

Oyo said Obasanjo had received the Togolese visitors at the instance of Gnassingbe who wanted to explain why he took office arbitrarily in defiance of the constitution.

This stipulated that in the event of the death of the president, the president of the national assembly should take over as interim head of state and organise fresh presidential elections with 60 days.

But hours after Eyadema died on 5 February, after ruling his small West African country with a rod of iron for 38 years, the army imposed his son, who was Minister of Public Works, Mines and Telecommunications, as president.

A day later parliament was hastily summoned to rubber stamp Gnassingbe's appointment and change the constitution to allow him to rule without holding presidential elections until 2008.

Gnassingbe's seizure of power was widely condemned in Africa and further afield as a military coup d'etat.

His trip to Nigeria, the regional superpower, was his first since he succeeded his father 12 days ago. The Togolese leader was accompanied by a large entourage of ministers and parliamentarians.

Oyo quoted the Togolese delegation as telling Obasanjo that Gnassingbe was chosen as president 鍍o prevent a descent to anarchy・in the country.

Togolese government officials said privately in Lome on Wednesday that Gnassingbe was prepared to bow to strong pressure from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU) to return to the constitution as it existed before he seized power and hold elections within 60 days.

But they declined to say whether or not Gnassingbe was prepared to step down as president in the meantime. Diplomats in Lome told IRIN he was unlikely to do so.

Togo's five million people gathered round radios and television sets on Wednesday night to hear Gnassingbe make a promised address to the nation, but he failed to speak and his broadcast has now been postponed indefinitely.

Obasanjo, the current chairman of the AU and a fierce critic of the way the transition of power was handled in Togo, did not bestow on Gnassingbe any of the special honours usually reserved for visiting heads of state.

The Togolese leader was met at the airport by Nigeria痴 Foreign Minister Oluyemi Adeniji.

Posted by Publisher at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

NIGERIA: 30 killed in clashes between farmers and herdsmen in Adamawa state

At least 30 people have been killed in a week of clashes between farming communities and nomadic cattle herdsmen in Adamawa state, near the eastern frontier with Cameroon, local officials and residents said on Tuesday.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

ABUJA, 8 Feb 2005 (IRIN)

The deadliest fighting took place last Thursday when ethnic Fulani herdsmen attacked the farming village of Bali, killing 28, said Saidu Adamu, a local government official.

擢armers in the area have been complaining that cattle have been grazing on their land, and on Tuesday last week killed two Fulani herdsman over the dispute,・Adamu told IRIN. 典his latest incident was obviously a reprisal,・he added.

One Bali resident, Kwanga Dogo, told IRIN that the attackers had been armed with assault rifles, machetes and bows and arrows and had stormed the village in the early hours of the morning.

Dogo said the dialects spoken by some of the assailants suggested they hailed from nearby Chad and Niger, but police and local officials would not confirm the claims.

Dogo said he had escaped from the village and had fled to the state capital, Yola.

Adamawa state police chief, Hafiz Ringim said police reinforcements were being sent to the affected area to stop the violence from escalating.

Over the last decade, clashes between indigenous farming communities and nomadic herdsmen have increased in several parts of central Nigeria, including the country痴 eastern flank.

Increasing desertification in northern Nigeria has been forcing herders further south into the central region in search of pasture, raising the ire of farmers that work the land.

Remnants of former rebel forces in Chad and Niger have moved into Nigeria during this period, engaging in banditry.

Residents and police have in the past blamed these armed gangs for some of the violence, alleging that they often hire themselves out as mercenaries.

Posted by Publisher at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Soldiers kill four protesters at oil terminal, activists say

WARRI, 4 Feb 2005 (IRIN) - Nigerian troops on Friday shot and killed four villagers who were protesting at the main export terminal run by ChevronTexaco in the Niger Delta, one of the demonstration's organisers said.

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

More than 200 protesters from the village of Ugborodo near Warri stormed the Escravos plant just before dawn to demand a fairer share of the 300,000 barrels of crude oil that are pumped out every day.

"Soldiers shot at them, killing four and injuring three others," Helen Joe, one of the activists' leaders, told IRIN by phone.

ChevronTexaco's Nigerian subsidiary said in a statement that its Escravos facilities had been "forcibly entered" and they had reported the incident to the security forces "who have since contained it."

The company declined to give further details and did not confirm the deaths or the injuries.

The ethnic Itsekiri villagers from Ugborodo accuse ChevronTexaco of reneging on promises of amenities and jobs that were made in the wake of a similar protest in July 2002. During that protest, disgruntled locals camped out at the terminal, stopping oil exports for 10 days.

"Whatever they promised they never fulfilled, that's why the community is very angry," said Helen Joe.

Oil operations in the 70,000 sq km Niger Delta, which accounts for nearly all of Nigeria's daily oil exports of 2.5 million barrels, have increasingly become the target of attacks.

Since the July 2002 protest, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has deployed thousands of troops to guard vital oil facilities, which are classed as assets vital to economic security.

More than 90 percent of oil production in Nigeria is generated by joint ventures with international oil companies in which the government has the majority stake.

The government has a 60 percent stake in ChevronTexaco holdings in Nigeria, the third biggest operator in the country. Similar joint ventures are run with Royal Dutch/Shell, ExxonMobil, Total and Agip.

Since 1970, the country has earned US$320 billion from oil sucked out of the Niger Delta, but its seven million residents are among the poorest in Nigeria.

In the face of mismanagement of oil wealth by a succession of Nigerian regimes, restive inhabitants have tended to target the oil companies as the only visible face of government in their remote districts.

In 1998, two unarmed protestors were shot and killed by soldiers at another ChevronTexaco oil platform. A lawsuit has been filed in the US charging ChevronTexaco with responsibility for the deaths because they had invited the troops onto the site to quell the disturbance.

Posted by Publisher at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2005

NIGERIA: Chloroquine malaria treatments to be phased out - health minister

ABUJA, 25 Jan 2005 (IRIN) - Nigeria is to phase out malaria-resistant drugs such as chloroquine immediately and switch to the more effective but more expensive artemisinin-based drugs, Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo said on Tuesday.

With the mosquito-borne disease responsible for 30 percent of all childhood deaths, Nigeria has adopted a World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation to use artemisinin-based combination therapy.

Artemisinin is an anti-malarial agent extracted from the dry leaves of a Chinese herb, Artemsisia annua, also known as qinghaosu or sweet wormwood.

A health ministry statement said there was evidence of widespread drug resistance to the most common treatments - chloroquine, used in Africa since the 1950s and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (better known as Fansidar), introduced to Africa in the early 1990s.

"Evidence has shown that these drugs have lost their efficacy due to the emergence of resistant strains of plasmodium falciparum (the malaria parasite)," Lambo was quoted as saying in the statement.

Artemisinin-based drugs on the other hand, had proved "highly efficacious” in treating malaria, which is responsible for more than 60 percent of visits in Nigeria’s outpatient hospital services, and 11 percent of pregnancy-related deaths.

Lambo said the problem of drug-resistant malaria was compounded by a wide circulation of fake, adulterated or substandard drugs in Nigeria, often leading to wrong diagnosis of the disease and associated drug failures.

Nigeria's food and drug administration agency estimates that more than 60 percent of pharmaceuticals on sale in the country are fake, substandard or adulterated due to the presence of powerful criminal gangs trading in counterfeit drugs.

Artemisinin-based drugs currently in use in Nigeria are imported, but the health ministry said it was attempting to get pharmaceutical firms to produce them locally. Lambo on Monday met representatives of pharmaceutical firms and promised help in producing the new drugs in Nigeria.

Meanwhile, the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Development in the capital Abuja has launched a project for large-scale growing of the plant, Artemsisia annua, said the institute's director, Uford Inyang. Plant nurseries have been developed and plants can be obtained from the institute by farmers or firms, he added.

But representatives of drug companies who met the minister expressed some misgivings about the new policy. Emmanual Ebere, chairman of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Group of the Manufacturers Association, asked that the effective implementation of the policy be postponed to January 2007.

Sam Ohuabunwa, head of Neimeth Pharamceuticals, agreed and said efforts should be made to ensure the new drugs were cheaply and widely available before the new policy was implemented.

"An essential drug is one that is used for a greater number of people, is available at all times in the right quantity and is affordable to a greater number of people," said Ohuabunwa. "The drug we are talking about is neither available nor affordable."

Artemisinin-based drugs typically cost US$ 1.30 to treat a single case of malaria in West Africa, compared to 10 cents for the chloroquine treatment.

Posted by Publisher at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)