Two plane crashes which killed more than 200 people, including schoolchildren, and a clampdown on opposition figures were the striking events that blighted Nigeria’s social and political landscape in 2005.
”2005 is a year that is ending on a catastrophic note and I do not expect any radical change from our leaders in 2006 because they are bereft of good leadership. They like to maintain the status quo,” bemoaned reverend father Gabriel Osu, spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lagos.
”The lack of respect for human lives is manifested in the two fatal plane crashes which claimed over 200 lives in the last quarter of this year,” he added in a telephone interview.
At least 224 people, including more than 50 schoolchildren, were killed when two aircraft belonging to Bellview and Sosoliso airlines crashed respectively in October near Lagos and in December in southern oil city of Port Harcourt.
Other air crashes and near misses also blighted the outgoing year although most of them did not claim lives.
The death of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s wife, Stella, last October in a Spanish hospital, also added to the woes that hit Nigeria in the year.
”Outside the country, Nigeria has made some positive achievements in 2005. But locally, it is the worst year,” a commentator on Lagos-based Channel Television said on Saturday.
”A lot of people have made money from oil and the government privatisation policy, but the common man in Nigeria has been worse-off in 2005,” the secretary general of the Catholic Church in Nigeria, the reverend father George Ehusani, said in a television interview on Saturday.
Last week vandals attacked a crude oil pipeline belonging to Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell near Port Harcourt, forcing the company to declare ”a force majeur”, which means that it is unable to meet its contractual commitment.
Shell, which was losing 180 000 barrels per day following the attack, before managing to reduce the daily loss to 15 000 barrels a couple of days later, has yet to lift the force majeur.
On Tuesday fire engulfed another petrol pipeline in Adeje in southern Delta State belonging to an affiliate of the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation after it was attacked by unknown persons.
A hirtherto unknown group has claimed responsibity for the attack on the Shell pipeline.
In the last quarter of the year, the government launched a massive clampdown on some prominent members of the opposition whose activities it has denounced, including people claiming minority rights.
The leaders of the two factions of an ethnic militia group in the southwest, the Odua People’s Congress, Frederic Fasheun and Ganiyu Adams, were arrested and charged with conspiracy, murder and belonging to banned association.
The leaders of two separatist groups respectively in the southeast and oil-rich Niger-Delta, Ralph Uwazuruike and Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, are also facing treason charges in Abuja courts.
Uwazuruike is the founder and leader of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MSSOB), while Dokubo-Asari is the leader of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF).
The organisers of the so-called proposed ”Sovereign National Conference”, including the 1986 Nobel prize winner for literature Wole Soyinka, said the clampdown on the activists and ethnic leaders was aimed at aborting the conference.
The conference, planned to counter the government-sponsored political reform conference staged earlier in the year, has been unable to get off the ground due to internal bickering by its organisers. – Sapa-AFP