Traditional institutions are increasingly becoming tools of political power in the country
Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, the director general of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, is up for the challenge
Kano’s mud walls date back to the 11th century and have come to define it as an ancient city state, attracting archaeologists’ attention
Numerous men suspected of being homosexual were arrested and have not yet had a court hearing.
At least 41 people have died in a suicide car bomb attack in Kano, northern Nigeria’s busiest commercial centre.
Attackers armed with bombs and guns have opened fire at outdoor church services at a Nigerian university on Sunday, killing around 20 people.
The Islamist group may have jihadist overtones, but its rise and power lies in Nigeria’s failure to deliver to its citizens adequately.
Islamist group Boko Haram have been accused of being suspects in the latest attacks on government buildings in the north of Nigeria.
The kidnapped father of Chelsea midfielder John Obi Mikel was freed after detectives traced him to a city in north Nigeria and arrested his abductors.
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/ 21 October 2007
Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, a 24-year-old physics undergraduate in northern Nigeria, takes old cars and motorbikes to pieces in the back yard at home and builds his own helicopters from the parts. ”It took me eight months to build this one,” he said, sweat pouring from his forehead.
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/ 30 September 2007
A court case brought by Nigeria against Pfizer resumes on Tuesday with the United States drug maker saying it answered a call for help to save the lives of African children during a meningitis epidemic. Nigeria alleges Pfizer deceived patients and caused the death of 11 children in 1996 when it performed clinical trials for a new drug.
Nigerian troops killed many Islamic militants in a three-hour battle in the northern city of Kano on Wednesday, an army commander said. Troops surrounded the militants in the Panshekara district of the city early on Wednesday after they had burned a police station and killed 13 officers.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed on Monday on Muslim-dominated northern Nigeria’s largest state of Kano as protests greeted a delay in the results of weekend polls. Meanwhile, the Nigerian Supreme Court on Monday reversed an Inec ruling that disqualified a top opposition politician from the weekend’s presidential poll.
Gunmen shot dead a radical Muslim cleric in his mosque and fired on the congregation, killing two more people, in the northern Nigerian city of Kano on Friday, witnesses said. Followers of Jaafar Adam, a Wahhabi cleric, said the attack was political, ahead of the weekend elections for governors and legislators for the country’s 36 states.
An angry mob of Muslim students in northern Nigeria beat their teacher to death on Wednesday for allegedly desecrating the Qur’an, police and witnesses said. Her attackers accused her of tearing a portion of the Qur’an she seized from a female student during an examination.
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/ 10 February 2007
Bird flu has reappeared, after an eight-month lull, on poultry farms in a fourth state in northern Nigeria, officials said on Friday. ”In the past one week we culled 5 000 chickens following laboratory confirmation of the existence of the avian flu virus in samples of dead chickens,” said a state agriculture commissioner.
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/ 12 January 2007
A suspected fresh outbreak of avian influenza has been reported in northern Nigeria’s Katsina State with more than 5Â 000 birds infected, the agriculture commissioner said on Friday. ”We have detected an outbreak in three poultry farms in and around the state capital in the past week. We strongly suspect it to be bird flu,” Ali Hussein Dutsin-Ma said.
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/ 11 October 2006
A high court in northern Nigeria’s Adamawa state on Tuesday sentenced the leader of an unorthodox and militant Islamic sect on the run for 22 years to death by hanging, state-run Radio Nigeria Kaduna reported. Musa Ali Suleiman (51) was found guilty of three charges of murder, conspiracy and incitement of public disturbance.
All but one of 40 people feared to have drowned in torrential flooding in northern Nigeria’s Zamfara state have been found alive and well, officials said on Monday. The local residents were declared missing presumed dead after torrential rains caused a dam to burst on Saturday on the outskirts of the state capital Gusau, sweeping away 500 houses.
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/ 15 September 2006
Locusts have invaded farms in Nigeria, destroying crops as farmers prepare for harvest, officials said on Friday. Diyos Auta, state agriculture commissioner for Taraba, in the centre of the country, said the locusts had destroyed 50 000ha of crops in the past week.
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/ 17 February 2006
Nigerian officials on Friday pressed on with mass poultry culling in the ravaged north to prevent bird flu from claiming human lives amid fears that the virus could have spread to yet another farm. Ali Hussani Dutsin-Ma, the top health official in the northern state of Katsina, said that the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus that can kill humans may have surfaced in a second farm near the state capital.
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/ 11 February 2006
Nigerian officials battled to contain an outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu on Saturday amid reports that it is spreading rapidly through poultry flocks and approaching the Niger border. Agricultural officials were preparing to quarantine and disinfect two farms where tens of thousands of birds have died on the outskirts of Kano
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/ 7 February 2006
Nigerian state lawmakers burned Danish and Norwegian flags on Tuesday and cancelled a €23-million (-million) contract to import buses in protest at cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. A rowdy session of the Kano House of Assembly also voted unanimously to ban the sale of all Danish and Norwegian products in the state.
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/ 7 February 2006
An epidemic has killed 60 000 chickens in northern Nigeria, officials said on Monday, while attempting to calm fears that the deadly bird-flu virus had spread to the country. Salihu Jibrin, director of veterinary services in Kano state’s agriculture ministry, said initial evidence suggests that the devastating outbreak was fowl cholera.
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/ 19 September 2005
Nigerian Islamic judges have ordered that a teenager from Niger have his hand cut off after he confessed to stealing a motorbike, court officials said on Monday. This is thought to be the first time that a foreign national has been sentenced to amputation since northern Nigeria began to reintroduce sharia in 1999.
Moped-taxi drivers in the mainly Muslim northern Nigerian city of Kano carried leafy branches on their bikes on Tuesday in a symbol of protest at an imminent ban on carrying female passengers. Kano’s governor postponed a ceremony at which he was to impose the ban, in line with his administration’s interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.
About 200 deaf people staged a protest on Tuesday in the northern Nigerian city of Kano against what they called government neglect of their plight. Under the banner of their organisation, the Deaf Youth Association, they called for special sign language interpreters for news and other programmes broadcast on state-run television.
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/ 10 December 2004
Nigerian authorities said on Friday they have shuttered two universities after the latest outbreak of Christian-Muslim fighting in restive northern Nigeria, hoping to calm tensions after a student religious debate turned violent. Fighting flared anew on Thursday when a student shared Christian texts downloaded from the internet with Muslim pupils.
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/ 18 October 2004
A Nigerian police officer on Friday fired into a group of youths that had descended on government offices to demand Ramadan presents, killing two and injuring three more, a government spokesperson said on Monday. The clash erupted on the second day of the annual Muslim month of prayer and fasting.
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/ 14 October 2004
An Islamic court in northern Nigeria has sentenced a 29-year-old divorcee to be stoned to death for falling pregnant outside wedlock, a state government spokesperson said on Wednesday.
A teenage Nigerian transvestite and seller of love potions who lived undetected for seven years among the married women of his conservative Islamic community has been caught and now faces jail. Abubakar Hamza said this week that he disguised himself as a girl and ran away from his home in a farming village of Ajingi aged only 12.
A renewed drive to immunise Nigerian children living amid the world’s worst outbreak of polio has run into fierce opposition from parents and Islamic teachers. As the five-day campaign approached its end, officials in the northern city of Kano admitted they would not hit its target of vaccinating four million under-fives against the crippling disease.